Middle age is having a rebirth. Rather than conceptualizing this phase of life as something to survive, a new vision is taking hold, one that views midlife as a time of renewal and opportunity.
Instead of focusing on the statistically validated dip in happiness that settles in around 40, writers and scholars are now more interested in its upward slope. Jonathan Rauch’s The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 is just the latest example of this new literature on positive ageing.
This more optimistic take on middle age coincides with the reality that we are currently living in an age of longevity. The numbers speak for themselves. The average life expectancy for women in most industrialized countries is expected to exceed 85 by 2030. Of the babies born in 2017 in the U.K., the predicted real-life expectancy was 104, while in Japan it was 107.
But while the notion that we’re all living to be 100 may have caught on in the popular imagination, there’s still a good way to go in the policy sphere. It’s true that a rapidly aging population places all kinds of strains on government resources – requiring a shift in how we think about things like pensions and housing and beyond. But it also presents an opportunity. So we need to start thinking about how these “young old” people can keep contributing actively to their own – and society’s – well-being.
Motivating politicians to do something constructive and imaginative about engaging this older cohort begins by building awareness on a mass level. To my mind, there are three ways to improve public understanding of the particular characteristics and needs of this “older” demographic.
Read the rest of this blog over at The Oxford Institute for Population Ageing…
Image: VW Daimler Dart Midlife Crisis by Cracknell123 via Pixabay
