Second Adulthood
Sunday, November 7, 2010
![“The middle is where you have to be good. You don’t have the brio of the beginning, or the sense that you’re getting it all together, so you need to be really on for the middle part…” -- Richard Ford
Many of us have the good fortune of benefitting from longer live expectancies. The possibility of a longer adulthood spent in good health also poses questions about how we maintain a sense of meaning and engagement in the face of changing life circumstances. Contemporary authors such as Mary Catherine Bateson write about a “second adulthood” that challenges us, in her words, to further compose a life in our late thirties (I’ll add this age group), forties, fifties, sixties, and older years. Think: the ending of relationships or the beginnings of new ones, redirecting our careers, living with the uncertainty of a serious medical condition, or fulfilling the hope that “it gets better”.
At the same time, the current generation of middle-aged Americans has the highest rates of lifetime depression of any age group, raising the possibility that there is something about the experiences of this generation that places middle-aged adults at heightened risk for depression*. And the age around midlife may be the time of life associated with the lowest sense of well-being compared to younger or older ages** [although some reports suggest otherwise, for instance, midlife may be a time of greater autonomy and better decision making (see: “Get a Midlife” by Patricia Cohen, NYTimes, Jan 5, 2012)].
Perhaps, then, these findings suggest that the task of figuring life out is a never-ending one, contradicting the misconception of “having arrived” as an adult in midlife. This, of course, is what makes life interesting and what makes us most fully human. Crises occur, but, as Ford adds, “It’s after the climactic has happened that you have to be pretty determined. Most of life is spent in the after part. That’s when we have to be good humans. Where there’s no great drama is where we have to live.” But we have to be “on”, thinking of new ways to engage the world as we approach and traverse the second half of adulthood.
* Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005
** www.nd.edu/~adutt/activities/documents/BlanchOsUshapeCohorts14Aug2006.pdf](7_Second_Adulthood_files/shapeimage_1.png)
