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THE DEATH OF MIDDLE AGE - TURNING 40 AIN’T NOTHING

It’s officially the halfway point, but is 40 really the beginning of the end?
Fiona Neill charts the death of middle age

BY FIONA NEILL
The London Times

This summer I headed with my husband and our three children to Suffolk to spend a weekend under canvas at the Latitude music festival. Nick Cave (then 51) was one of the headline acts, and our eight-year-old daughter in particular was very excited at the prospect of seeing him live. On Saturday night, Grace Jones (age 61) made an appearance. We camped in the family field with friends (in their forties) who knew how to do things such as put up tents in the dark and remember to bring matches.

We weren’t a novelty. Most UK festivals now have family fields and activities targeted at children. Latitude has been described as an event for Radio 4 listeners. And although it might make its organisers and participants wince, the truth is that, like its big brother, Glastonbury, and older cousin, the Big Chill, Latitude is a festival where midlifers feel at home with their young children, often because the main acts can be even older. (The average age of lead singers on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury this year was 44.)

Middle age, that nebulous period defined by academics as the years between young adulthood and old age (anything between 35 and 65) has evolved beyond recognition over the previous half-century, not least because increased life expectancy has stretched its boundaries so it has become the longest transitional period in our life cycle.

However, it is perhaps the behaviour of contemporary midlifers that has changed the most. It’s inconceivable that I would have gone to rock festivals with my parents as a child, shopped at the same shops as my mother, or admitted sharing similar taste in music (Val Doonican just never did it for me).

At my age (43), my mother, like many of her contemporaries, had moved into twinsets and sensible shoes and begun her weekly set-and-dry hair regime. Yet I am closer in age to her than I am to my children. (The average age of first-time mothers in the UK is now 29.) The age gap between generations might have widened, but, over the past couple of decades, the cultural gap has narrowed.

The original Fifties and Sixties view of middle age as a period when people slow down, become increasingly inactive and adopt more conservative attitudes and attire has been turned on its head. Consider the reaction to Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent: one of the main reasons she stood out from the crowd was that she was a throwback to an image of middle-aged women that belongs to a different era. It was her anachronistic appearance that partly excited interest.

“Middle-aged people don’t get old any more,” says Professor Simon Biggs, head of gerontology at King’s College, London. “They try to make midlife go on by expanding their lifestyle and extending their midlife values for as long as possible before a short period of incapacity and death. Consumer power has enabled the reinvention of middle age.”

Since Red magazine came up with the phrase “middle youth” when it launched in 1998, “middle age” has almost vanished from the contemporary lexicon. I might occasionally use it to refer to myself, but only ironically. It is rarely used descriptively because of its negative connotations. Dylan Williams, director of strategy at cutting-edge London advertising agency Mother, says that the term declined in the industry over the previous couple of decades, as ad agencies sought to target people through their attitudes and values rather than their life-stage. And many of these values were connected to youth culture. Products were marketed on the promise that they could make you look younger or at least feel more youthful.

“Using demographics to identify people became near extinct in advertising,” Williams explains. “You didn’t use the term ‘middle age’. You didn’t use terms like ‘double income, no kids’. It was all about ‘attitudinal cluster groups’.” So Nike sold trainers to 40-year-olds with ads featuring teenagers.

There has been a liberating aspect to this trend, particularly for women. We no longer feel obliged to conform to a homogenous image of middle age, hunkering down until menopause drags us towards elderliness. Many of my friends have taken up new careers, new hobbies and, occasionally, new husbands and families in their forties and fifties.

The prisoners of midlife

“My mother definitely felt middle-aged and trapped,” says 49-year-old Helen Townshend. “There was no sense that she had the opportunity to go and do other things. My dad worked really hard. It was all about hard graft. I don’t feel that at all. I feel stressed, but not trapped. I can wear what I want, get excited by different sorts of music…” Townshend says that in contrast to her parents, her forties have been a time of renewal and exploration: she has remarried, had two more children (the Office for National Statistics says the number of babies born to mothers over 40 has more than doubled over the past decade), launched an online clothing business, and taken up exercise for the first time since her schooldays. She is the perfect example of the positive benefits of “second life syndrome”.

“Middle age is a concept. I don’t feel old. I just feel who I am,” she says. “We are Thatcher’s children. We demand, and feel we deserve the opportunity to do what we like in our forties and fifties. It’s about the cult of the individual and the fact that you don’t have to conform to the inevitability of being a certain kind of person just because of your age.”

Her relationship with her older children, Lorna, 20, and Simon, 18, is very different to the relationship she had with her parents when she was their age. It’s not that she is trying to mimic their lifestyle – she wouldn’t dream of going clubbing with her children or wearing her daughter’s clothes. It’s more that there is a seamless cultural exchange under way. There is simply more that unites them than divides them. Townshend has consciously exposed her children to music that she loves (Motown, soul and ska), and they play her music by indie bands that otherwise might have passed her by. She introduced her children to live music by taking them in their early teens to see the Strokes. They often find themselves watching the same television programmes together (The Wire, Later with Jools Holland and The Mighty Boosh).

The big divide between Townshend and her children is technological. Her eldest son, Simon, says that the reason his mother shares iTunes with him is because she doesn’t know how to download music on to her iPod. “She doesn’t get PlayStation,” he says. “She’s never tried it. She can’t even work the television remote control that we’ve had for the past ten years. She finds it really complicated. My little sister, Isobel, can do it and she’s only 7.”

The concept of middle age is a relatively new one. In the Thirties, an American, Walter B. Pitkin, wrote a bestselling self-help book with tips on how to stay young. He criticised “the cynical youth who looks upon 40 as living death” and coined the phrase “Life begins at 40” with the book’s title. However, given that the average life expectancy in Thirties Britain was less than 60, and a third of children in that pre-antibiotics era didn’t make it to adolescence, 40 back then was but a short step from the foothills of old age.

According to Professor Biggs, the term “middle age” was first used in the United States in the Sixties to describe the phenomenon of older workers losing their jobs to a younger generation. During the same period, Canadian psychologist Elliott Jaques published a paper entitled Death and the Mid-Life Crisis. Within a decade, the concept of middle age as a period of gloom and upheaval had passed into popular western culture.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung was the first to divide life into transitional phases. In his 1935 book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung argued that if the first half of life is devoted to forming the ego and establishing oneself in the world, the second is focused on a search for meaning in all that effort. For Jung, middle age didn’t hold negative connotations.

Jung felt that if people treated the natural loss of physical prowess as a signal that it was time to develop new dimensions, then this transitional period could become truly transformational. But if the loss of youth was met with denial, fear or negativity, then decay and possibly breakdown was in store. “The task of midlife is not to look into the light, but to bring light into the darkness,” he wrote.

Over the past two decades, the idea that middle age could be an important period of insight and personal growth has been almost forgotten. Instead, it has been reduced to a single issue: maintaining the illusion of youth. Jung might say we have become obsessed with the light. And if midlife crisis is an inability to grow up and accept the terms of adulthood by obsessively adopting the trappings of youth, then many of us have perhaps been living in a perpetual state of midlife crisis.

Biggs says that the cult of youth has been with us since the ancient Greeks, but what has marked our recent obsession is its blinkered emphasis on beauty and brawn. The ancient Greeks respected the wisdom and knowledge that came with old age. Old people didn’t become invisible; they were venerated, as they still are in many non-Western cultures.

Improvements in anything from health care to diet and dentistry have allowed us all to slow down the ageing process. Scientific innovations – contraception, mammograms, smears and HRT – have enabled women to banish many of the ills that besieged our mothers’ generation, and few of us would argue against these benefits. We are no longer ravaged by decades of childbearing. According to the Office for National Statistics, a fifth of British women born in 1960 are now childless.

However, the corollary to these positive developments has been a growing obsession with not just holding back the passage of time, but reversing the ageing process, as embodied by celebrities such as Madonna. Extolled for rebranding the image of 50-year-old women, Madonna reflects a new kind of tyranny. There is overwhelming pressure to look young, because it’s important for your job, or because being old is held in such low esteem. No one is allowed to look their age any more.

The huge growth in cosmetic surgery has added new procedures that are arguably less about long-term health and more about the quest for eternal youth. There is a burden on women, and increasingly on men, to have the kind of face and body in their fifties that they would have liked to have had in their twenties. According to research company Mintel, the cosmetic surgery market in Britain was worth £143 million in 2002 and this year will be close to £1.2 billion. Botox has become mainstream.

“Why does a 50-year-old woman want to look 20?” asks Biggs. “It is a form of social ageism in a culture where negative attitudes towards old people prevail and people are no longer allowed to mature. And there is a lot of money to be made in making people anxious about these things.” Biggs believes our obsession with looking young coincided with a period of economic growth that enabled middle-aged people to pay for a lifestyle that maintains what he calls “the masquerade of youth”. However, he says this recession could see a dramatic change in some of the attitudes towards ageing that have become prevalent.

The backlash against youth

According to Dylan Williams, even before the banking crisis, a backlash against youth culture could be sensed. Research from G7 countries suggested dwindling enthusiasm among opinion makers for what he calls “the modernist dream”, with its emphasis on individualism, consumerism and selfishness (all traits he associates with adolescence). “The idea that happiness and satisfaction are a function of income was beginning to shift prior to the economic collapse,” he says. “The modernist dream was already a nightmare.”

There is an even more significant factor at work, believes Williams. This year, for the first time in history, the majority of people living in the UK are over 40, last year the median age in the G7 democracies passed 40, and for the first time, the UK has more pensioners than children. “There is a gravitational pull towards this demographic bulge,” Williams says.

In response to this, Mother has brought back demographic research, dividing groups by age again, and has run highly successful ad campaigns featuring older people. “We’re not going to suggest to clients that they treat 40 and 50-year-olds like 19-year-olds,” Williams says. “We’re emphasising what’s good about being 40 in a way that will make young people aspire upwards.” Mother’s clients no longer reject using older people. Nike’s ads used to focus on youth values, but now show collective endeavours such as urban fun runs, and silver-haired men are used to sell Levi’s. Retail guru Mary Portas says, “Our cultural G-spot has moved. It used to be greed. Now it’s giving.”

This shift is typified by Helen Townshend. Her older children are more interested in having balanced lives than she was at their age. “They want long-term relationships; they reject plastic surgery; they don’t want jobs that dominate their lives,” she says. “For them, growing old gracefully might be desirable.”

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