Midlife Needs A Rebrand

And I have a few ideas ….

Let’s play a word association game.

Tell me the first word that pops into you head when I say “MIDLIFE”.  

Go.

Let me guess.

Was it crisis?

Uh huh…thought so.

Midlife has a really bad rap and is urgently in need of a rebrand. I mean, if Crocs can do it, how hard can it be?

‘Midlife crisis’ was a turn of phrase coined by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965 to describe the ‘trauma’ that many people feel when faced with the dawning recognition of their own mortality. And the slogan has stuck, despite the fact that a LOT has changed in the last 60 years.

If you were turning 50 back in 1965, (when Mr Jacques coined midlife as a crisis), then you were born in 1915 … and your life expectancy was around 60 years of age. So, his catchphrase was probs on the money. BUT, if you’re turning 50 in 2024, when life expectancy is around 85, you’ve still got thirty plus years of living ahead of you. In fact … statistically you’re only HALF WAY through your adult life.

Thanks to our improved longevity, the lifespan goal posts have moved considerably, and yet here we are, still touting the passe narrative that depicts midlife as a crisis.

A clichéd and anachronistic stereotype most often associated with infidelity, sports cars and plastic surgery.

It might make good fodder for movies and naff greeting cards… but for me (and most of my midlife mates), it’s actually a pretty awesome stage of life and we need to collectively rebrand midlife as a milestone that is celebrated not scoffed…. Starting with a new turn of phrase to replace ‘crisis’ as its go to descriptor.

The way I see it, being in your 50’s is less of a crisis and more of a chrysalis. It’s like we’re undergoing a midlife metamorphosis …. Or a midamorphosis.

While it might seem like an unflattering comparison to draw, there are a number of parallels that can be drawn between humans around midlife, and caterpillars. Both have a longing to shed an old skin and to transform into who or what they were born to be. Both require time to undergo this transformation. And for both, this process is not as seamless as it might appear.

Caterpillars, as it turns out, do not just spin a chrysalis, and magically start growing pretty wings. Nope. They basically meltdown into soupy moosh first, after which their ‘imaginal cells’ take over and organise the other cells to reform into the butterfly they were born to be.

It takes time and effort to become a butterfly. And so it is with midlife, as we retreat into our own midlife chrysalises, to strip back all the layers and allow our own ‘imaginal cells’ to get to work to reimagine the shape of who we might become. As the proverb goes...

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”

Ang x