Why Millennials Are in for a Worse Midlife Crisis than their Parents
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I'm a happily married 28-year-old with a beautiful wife and son. My life is good.
But if research is correct, I will grow increasingly more dissatisfied with my life over the next 20 years. Which is terrifying.
The midlife crisis is very real.
Studies show that people are pretty happy when they're young and when they're older—thank youthful exuberance and not having to work, respectively. But between 46 and 55, folks endure peak ennui.
That happiness ebbs as one ages is not particularly surprising. Careers plateau, dreams are deferred and bills increase in quantity and frequency.
This U-shaped happiness curve has been the focus of a lot of research recently and many nations (from Britain to Bhutan) have shown interest in augmenting citizens well-being with the intent that gross happiness is just as important to the economy as the gross domestic product.
One recent study on the topic—published in the National Bureau of Economic Research—has me feeling just a little bit less sad about my upcoming depression. It found that married folks like myself will experience a less dramatic midlife crisis than their non-married peers.
Authors Shawn Grover and John Helliwell used data from two U.K. surveys and found that while life-satisfaction levels declined for those who married and those who didn't, the middle-age drop was much less severe for the betrothed, even when controlling for premarital happiness.
Having a dedicated partner, it seems, eases the burden of watching your youth pass slowly through your fingers. Tying the knot can soften the blow, in the other words.
Moreover, people who consider their partner a friend enjoy the most happiness.
"We explore friendship as a mechanism which could help explain a casual relationship between marriage and life satisfaction, and find that well-being effects of marriage are about twice as large for those whose spouse is also their best friend," the authors wrote.
These findings could leave many of my peers in an emotional nadir: According to data from the Pew Research Center, millennials just aren't terribly interested in the institution of marriage. Only 26% of people aged 18 to 32 were married in 2013—10 points lower than Gen X when they were of a similar age in 1997, and 22 points below boomers' marriage patterns in 1960.
My generation still has a few years before they hit the bottom of the U curve. And perhaps an improving economy will make the prospect of marriage more attractive to those in my cohort. Here's hoping.
I didn't plan to marry when I did—like most of my generation the thought really didn't occur to me. But my longtime girlfriend and I walked down the aisle after we found out she was pregnant. And from my current pre-midlife-crisis vantage point, I can see why marrying someone I love and with whom I share a common worldview will make the process of aging slightly less pale and ugly.
Life's hard, but it turns out that it's nice to have someone you love to complain about it with.
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