Youth, for most people, ends in their mid to late 20’s. Most of them just won’t admit it.
Life expectancy in America sits around 78. Divide that in three. Youth lasts until 26, middle age until 52, and old age until you keel over. (Men, on average, only make it 73.5, so these numbers may even be skewed to the high side.)
You don’t have to believe in these divides. The question isn’t whether they’re real (they’re benchmarks), but what happens to your view of things if you accept the prerequisite that middle age starts when you’re roughly 26.
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The fact that most college-educated millennials (myself included) aren’t getting married/having kids/buying a house until their mid 30’s means you have this decade of overlap, or decade in between, when people are and are not both young and middle aged.
For most, that means a decade of still hanging out with their college friends, in whichever major city they all moved to after school. After the rush of their first few years after school, when everyone’s using their new salaries to buy real cocktails instead of endless RedBull Vodkas and Long Island iced teas, they enter that second part of their career, where they realize switching industries isn’t as easy as they once imagined, that they’re more or less locked into a track picked out for them by their 22 year old self, and whatever dreams of travel and creative expression they once harbored as a teen now have to be shoehorned into vacations and hobbies. They start buying themselves nice fleeces. They put a little (or a lot) of money in stocks.
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It’s not that major changes can’t be made. But all the founders I know made the leap in their mid-20s at the latest, whereas all the people I know who work in Big Tech have been saying for years that they’ll leave. Of course the longer they stay, the less likely they’ll ever leave.
You can replace “founders” with artists, lawyers, doctors, etc., and it still holds true. They either started before their mid-20s or they never started at all.
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There are material and mental hallmarks of being middle age. If youth is characterized by discovering (or shaping) yourself, then middle age is about simply accepting yourself. This is hard to do for people who are constantly promising themselves that ‘tomorrow’ they’ll change, whether that’s reigning in useless scrolling or quitting their job to backpack Vietnam. In youth, there is always something ‘outstanding.’ You’re never quite done growing, until the moment you realize you are.
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Having a family may lead to feeling middle aged — or feeling middle aged may lead to having a family. You begin to value yourself less as an atomized individual and more as a part of some greater continuum.
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A border is crossed in your mid-20’s, but because people today lack the traditional external sign posts (a mortgage, marriage, kids), they’re failing to notice this crossing. That doesn’t stop it from happening.
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Middle age means relieving yourself of the burden of having to be the most important thing in your life.
When I was younger, I was scared of dying because of everything I’d miss out on (even if I knew this wouldn’t be a concern when I was dead). Now that I’m middle age, I’m afraid of dying because of what it would mean to everyone else in my life (even if I know that’ll be their problem, not mine).
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Middle age means realizing there are more important things than your feelings.
Youth is obsessed with feelings, whether it’s the petty neuroticism of the Twitter-addled teen or the high-minded ecstasy of the capital-R Romantic poets. The cult of youth has always been one of feeling, with the vivid immediacy of emotions taken as proof of their ultimate authenticity.
I think of Taylor Swift, whose appeal to me (as an outsider) is her exaltation of adolescent feelings. Over and over again, her songs make the plea that her feelings are what matters most in the world. She makes heroes of the men who make her feel good and villains (and buffoons) of the men who do not. It’s her prerogative, and I don’t blame her. She isn’t the first pop-star to make a career out of claiming we never have to grow up. But as a recovering-Swiftie recently quipped, ‘I stopped being a fan once I realized she’s 34 and still acts like she’s in seventh grade.’
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Mortality, in middle age, is what unites, rather than separates. From the shadow of your ego, it becomes the wellspring in which all communal understanding arises. It’s no longer that which marks you apart, but that which allows you to see others at all.