Economyc :: Midlife needn't be a crisis

people may run the world, but you would hardly know it from their public image.

Film-makers and advertisers specialise in admiring portrayals of teens and twenty-somethings, but those in the middle decades of their lives are usually depicted as doing little more than serving time between the turbulence of youth and the decline of old age - and occasionally being tipped into crisis by the sheer ennui of their mundane existence.

The assumption that middle age is a pretty nondescript phase of life seems to have extended to scientists too: paediatricians and gerontologists abound, but there are few "middle-age-ologists".

But look past the spreading waistlines and the reading glasses and it becomes apparent that middle age is actually both rare and remarkable. Humans are the only animals to enjoy a lengthy post-reproductive, pre-decrepitude chapter in our lives. There's a case to be made for looking at middle age as ...