When Midlife Questions Feel Like a Crisis
A friend called me at two in the morning, Bangkok time—an hour that was civilized where he was, but criminally late where I lived. He was forty-six, with the job, the flat, the marriage, and a second car he didn’t really need. In a flat voice, like someone reporting a gas leak, he asked, “Is this it?”
I didn’t have an answer. I’m still figuring it out myself, though from where I’m standing I can see the question clearly. So I turned to the research to understand whether he was cracking up or simply paying attention to something important.
It turns out, he was paying attention.
The Crisis You Were Promised
The term “midlife crisis” was coined by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965, and since then, popular culture has feasted on the image: the flashy convertible, the sudden affair, the ill-fitting leather jacket. But the reality painted by research is less dramatic.
Margie Lachman, who has studied the Midlife in the United States project for over three decades, found that when people over forty were asked if they’d experienced a midlife crisis, about a quarter said yes (APA Podcast).
However, when researchers dug deeper, the “crises” people described were often life events like divorces, job losses, health scares, or the death of parents—events that didn’t neatly fit into a midlife timeline, occurring before forty or after fifty as often as during.
So, the crisis is real but it’s not a predictable midlife stage. Instead, it’s ordinary bad luck or major life changes that don’t obey our cultural expectations, retroactively labeled “midlife crisis” because the term was handy.
The Curve Moved While Everyone Was Arguing About It
The classic comfort story is the happiness curve: life satisfaction dips in your thirties and forties, bottoms out around fifty, then rises again. Economist David Blanchflower identified this U-shaped pattern in data from 145 countries (Springer Link), a finding replicated by numerous studies.
The reassuring message was: “Sit tight, it gets better.” But what often goes unmentioned at social gatherings is that this curve is unraveling. In 2025, Blanchflower and colleagues reported that in the US and UK, the U-shape has flattened into a steady upward slope (PLOS ONE).
Interestingly, this change wasn’t due to midlife happiness improving, but because young people’s wellbeing has plummeted. Causes remain debated—smartphones, a challenging job market, or perhaps reduced stigma about admitting unhappiness.
So the old promise—that midlife marks the bottom of life’s satisfaction and that bottoms end—was always a modest one. If this shape can shift in just two decades, waiting for a graph to “rescue” you is not a winning strategy.
Someday Is a Storage Unit
My grandfather kept a boat brochure tucked away in a drawer—not a boat, just the brochure. Over thirty years and three houses, it was folded and refolded, softened by time. He would take it out occasionally, talking about the engine as though reminiscing about an old friend who had moved abroad.
He never bought the boat, and he didn’t seem unhappy about it. But I think about that drawer more than I probably should because I have one too. Mine is a list on my phone, dating back to my days in London: learn to swim properly, read the Russians, call people instead of messaging them.
That’s what my friend was sensing at two in the morning: the life he’d been meaning to live someday had quietly stopped being a plan and had become a filing system.
Nothing dramatic marks the moment someday becomes storage. That’s the problem. There’s no alarm.
What Actually Stays With People
In 1994, psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec published a well-known finding: in the short term, we regret what we did, but in the long run, we regret what we didn’t (PubMed).
The sting of a bad decision fades, but the thing you never tried keeps its shine, because you never got to find out if it was mediocre.
Subsequent studies have had mixed success replicating this pattern (NCBI PMC), so it’s best treated as a strong hunch rather than settled fact. A follow-up study by Gilovich and Shai Davidai asked hundreds to name their biggest regret; about three-quarters pointed to things related to the person they hoped to become rather than responsibilities they neglected (Cornell University).
One study is not definitive, but this insight resonates deeply.
Make Someday Smaller
The usual advice, “follow your dreams,” is unhelpful when you have real-world concerns like a mortgage. Instead, pick one item from your someday list and shrink it until it fits into an ordinary Tuesday.
Want to write? Forget the book. Write four hundred words, once, even badly. Want to live somewhere else? Don’t sell the house. Spend a fortnight there in the worst month of the year—doing laundry, buying milk—and see if you still want it.
This approach gets you moving and lets some aspirations die honestly. I realized I don’t want to learn the guitar; I want to have learned it. That’s a very different desire, and once named, much cheaper to abandon.
What I Told My Friend
I told him he was doing a life audit. The timing was arbitrary but the finding was valid.
Then I asked which thing on his list he would choose to tackle this month. He was quiet for a while, which I took as a good sign, then named something small and slightly embarrassing.
He’s doing it now. Badly, by his own admission. And that’s the whole point.
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