Life begins at 40: the biological and cultural roots of the midlife crisis | The Royal Society

thank you John for those very kind words it's an absolute pleasure to be here tonight it's an honor to be speaking at the Royal Society so thank you very much for inviting me I have to say that I had not expected so many people to be here so thank you very much for coming as well we know particularly at the Royal Society that in terms of knowledge production we always stand on the shoulders of giants there are always people who have gone before us but there are people who walk beside us on whom we depend as well and before I start I want to thank three institutions the first is the Wellcome Trust the Wellcome Trust has funded a large proportion of my research and my research career from the very early stages converting from a doctor into a an early career researcher throughout various larger program grant strategic awards and more recently the trust has supported the creation of the Welcome Center for cultures and environments of Health in many ways for me this was the fulfillment of a dream although at times the responsibilities and demands seemed more like a nightmare but it's a fantastic opportunity and I'm deeply grateful for the trust for the funding and it's nice that Simon Chaplin is here as well so thank you for coming I'm also a deeply fortunate that I have worked at the University of Exeter for over 20 years we know from the tag line the Dexter is probably the best university in the world and for me it has been fantastic a place to grow as an academic a place to develop to try out new ideas the senior management at the University Steve Smith the vice chancellor Janice Kay the Provost Nick told that before he left and now Neil gal that senior group leading the University have been fantastic they have supported and encouraged me and been prepared to take a risk or two to support one or two of my more grandiose ideas I also want to thank Andrew Thorp who is the Dean of the College of Humanities has been fantastic a scholar and friend for many many years the final institution but I want to thank is the institution that is my family I didn't get where I am today without my wife Siobhan wonderfully loyal faithful tolerant of my own crises throughout our marriage our three children Kiera rhythm and Connell the best children these together are the why and the how of my life so thank you it may seem strange to be standing in the Royal Society giving a lecture about a subject like the midlife crisis this is an institution renowned for its world leading scientific research but I hope that what I have to say will do justice to the three figures after whom this lecture is named John Wilkins of course a natural philosopher a polymath one of the founders of the society John Desmond Bernal an Irish scientist renowned for his work in x-ray crystallographer crystallography in molecular biology but also a very committed and prolific historian of science interested in the relationship between science and society Peter Medawar really most famous for his work on immunological tolerance for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1960 what is less well known about Medawar work he was also interested in aging aging as an unsolved biological problem as he put it in his inaugural lecture in 1951 and one of the terms that Medawar used to describe the aging process was senescence and that concept of senescence had been popularized by an American psychologist Grandville Stanley Hall in the early 20th century and it came to be one of the key ways in which midlife and middle-age was defined during the early 20th century middle-age came to represent the period between adolescence and senescence and that's why many people refer to it as middle essence middle-aged as middle essence so although it's a strange subject to be talking about at the Royal Society I hope that it will do justice to these three figures here after whom the lecture is named let me take you back and some of you will remember this let me take you back to the late 1970s so an iconic sitcom television series on BBC the fallen rise of Reginald Perrin starring Leonard Rossiter and the television series was based on a novel by the English comic writer David nobs Reggie Perrin Reginald Isle Anthony Perrin our IP was 46 years old married to his wife Elizabeth living in a near Georgian house in the Surrey suburbs they had two children both growing up leaving their parents living in a house that was perhaps not quite well no longer a home Reggie commuted every weekday up to Waterloo station walked across the bridge went to work at sunshine deserts as a middle manager as a bureaucrat and at the start of the novel Reggie is depressed he's disillusioned and distressed disaffected disillusioned with his life disillusioned with his wife disillusioned with his work and he begins to behave rather randomly he starts sending off aggressive memos to his colleagues he tries to have an affair with his secretary he begins to get more irascible and one day while his his wife is out he decides that he's going to collect all his childhood mementos the memories of his youth and burn them as if he's trying to eradicate his past eradicate his identity Reggie decides that he can no longer live like this he decides there's only two ways he can either disappear in some way or he can kill himself so he drives a van down to a Dorset Beach takes off his clothes leaves them on the beach and walks out into the sea naked he doesn't drown himself he walks back up puts another set of clothes on so that he leaves his old clothes on the beach so people think that he's drowned himself puts on a new set of clothes puts on a week and takes on a new identity and he becomes eventually Martin well born now I don't want to tell you for those of you I mean some of you will remember the television series the book is fantastic in many many ways it takes place only over a week or two I don't want to give away the ending what I want to say is that what Reggie Peron was suffering from at the age of forty something was what we would now call and was indeed called then a midlife crisis a man usually a man not exclusively and in this period largely understood to be a male problem a man between the age of about 35 and 45 in that deadline decade realizing that his life was going nowhere disaffected and disillusioned would go off the rails the midlife crisis now the term had been first introduced about a decade earlier by a Canadian social scientists and psychoanalyst Elliot Jax Jax had come over from Toronto in the second world war had stayed he was one of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute for human relations he was social scientists but also psychoanalyst he'd been analyzed himself by Melanie Klein and had a practice as a psychoanalyst and what she described was pretty much what Reggie parind experienced and his point in death in the midlife crisis a short article published in 1965 he pointed out that the paradox is that of entering the prime of life the stage of fulfillment but at the same time the prime and fulfillment are dated death lies beyond so the picture that Jack's created was off this this man usually at the peak of a binomial curve of life and when you get to that peak all you can see is the downward curve to death and that's the moment when anxiety a depressive crisis was triggered he then went on to explain what happened to middle-aged men or what kind of behavior they began to exhibit and what he said was that in order to cover up this crisis they developed a set of manic behaviors to try and convince themselves that they were still young so the compulsive attempts to remain young the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency the hollowness lack of genuine enjoyment of life these he said are familiar patterns and they are all attempts at a race against time so the midlife man the man in the deadline decade sees death accelerating towards him and he tries to deny that or cover it up by claiming or pretending that he's younger than he is leading to these kinds of behaviors at the time both in the 60s and when Reggie Peron was having his crisis in the 70s there were two principal explanations for the midlife crisis the first was psychological the kind of analysis an explanation that Eliot Jack's put forward and that is that the midlife crisis was an identity crisis a crisis a depressive identity crisis very similar to the adolescent crisis the adolescent crisis he thought was a schizoid crisis the midlife crisis a depressive crisis hey axe was not the only person or certainly not the first person to think about the stages the critical phases of life in this way Carl Jung in the 1930s had written about his own crisis at the age of 37 and particularly Eric Erickson an American developmental psychologist had talked about life particularly in terms of the ages or the stages of he described life in terms of eight stages each of which had its own particular conflict the stage that correlated with the period that Jax was talking about he thought was focused on a conflict between creativity on the one hand and stagnation on the other and it was that that created the crisis so there were others as well thinking largely from a psycho analytical point of view about how we understood middle-age and midlife one of the important points to make about this kind of approach to middle age and midlife was that it was not just theoretical this wasn't just a theory of how we developed eating it was also incorporated into practice and psychoanalytical models of Aging became absolutely key to the work of marriage guidance counselors for example working for the national marriage guidance council or couples therapist working at the Tavistock clinic for example most of that was built on an understanding of individual development across the life course through the stages through middle age and through the various crisis points that they could produce so the first explanation for regi parents crisis is that he was suffering from some identity crisis around the age of forty forty-five but there were another set of explanations and these were biological the first biological explanation really revolved around some of the work that Peter Medawar was interested in old age natural death from the unsolved problem of biology he was interested particularly in the evolutionary and biological dimensions of Aging and in in that sense the downward curve of life was not necessarily only an awareness of approaching death it was something else it was an awareness that as we get older we get grayer or Balder all we develop middle-age spread or our muscle mass declines our vigor our vitality deteriorates and it was that sense of deteriorating vigor that fueled the cry in some kind of waste now it's not unrelated to the fear of death that Jax described but very much linked to that declining biological vitality that people wanted there was of course another way and there has been another way in which midlife crises have been linked to biology and that is particularly in women in relation to reproductive life and here the argument was and most of the literature certainly in this period was on men but there was some literature on women in these cases women were understood to go through a crisis act through during after menopause as their reproductive functions supposedly disappeared or in some ways through the emptiness process so the a woman's midlife crisis which had tied very very clearly to her reproductive capacity the term biological clock or the talkee the clock is ticking in fact was used by an American journalist Richard Cohen in 1978 but the notion that in women their transitions and their crises might be governed by their biology or reduced to their biology was very commonplace the bats weren't surprised you to know that some men blamed their own midlife crises on the menopause their wife's menopause as well so let me go back to Reginald Perrin and reflect for a moment Reggie parry in the late 70s having a crisis trying to change his life in key ways recognizing that he perhaps hadn't achieved what he wanted and that he was disaffected and disillusioned we can see that pairing we could explain that in terms of his own psychological angst he's got to a stage an age in his life where everything looks as if it's going downhill and only death awaits we can also get a sense from his book that physically he's declining physically he no he no longer feels to be himself to be the man that he was so we could see it very much as an individual story of a man with psychological and biological problems what I want to suggest for the rest of the talk is that this is not the only way in which we can understand the midlife crisis in fact I want to zoom out to take it away from the individual and think about the social and cultural conditions that make the midlife crisis possible not only as a concept in the 60s 70s and 80s but also as a set of experience what happened to enable the midlife crisis to emerge not in an individual case but much more widely in terms of the socio-economic and the cultural conditions and I want to do that in two ways in the first instance I want to think about the standardized life course that emerged in the middle decades of the 20th century that created particular stresses on people at middle-age secondly I want to reflect on the meaning and the history of the phrase life begins at 40 and at the end I want to argue that it's those two components that k2 played a key role in the emergence of the midlife crisis not just Reggie parens but ours as well so let me start reflecting for a moment on the standardized life course there's no doubt of course that our life cycles individually and collectively are governed by our biology but Bernice no Garson was a very prominent psychologist in America who wrote extensively on middle-aged and midlife and the transitions between very life stages are various life stages and she pointed out of course that the timetable the milestones of life were not merely biological they were also also socially prescribed so there was a socially prescribed timetable she said for the ordering of major life events a time in the life span when men and women are expected to marry a time to raise children a time to retire so the rhythm of our life the stages of a laugh the ages of our life the transitions of our life was socially prescribed not just biological and of course if they're socially prescribed it means that they can change our understandings and experience can change our expectations can change our expectations of the life course the life course the life cycle did change dramatically across the early decades of the twenty century by the 1950s and 1960s couples were living longer if you were born at the end of 19th century early 20th century in this country we might expect to live until we were 14 50 60 by the 1950s 40s 50s we might expect to live until well into our 70s or perhaps eighties so life expectancy had increased giving us that longer life cycle and in principle also a longer period of adulthood or middle age at the same time we were marrying earlier by 19 in 1911 only about 24% of women were married by the age of 24 by the early 50s that had risen to 52% and in fact if you look at some of the surveys of men and women's attitudes about marriage during this period most women would say that the ideal age to marry is between 20 and 24 men ideal age slightly later but not that much different at the same time during the early decades of the 20th century it became more commonplace to have fewer children and to cluster them together earlier in the marriage so let's say a couple were married at the age of 20 or 21 by 24 or 25 they would have had their two or three children and they would be then bringing up those children the children would leave home so there was a much longer period of life after the childbearing period in a sense in this period still that was more important for women who tended to be in the workplace less by and large and looking after the children more men's rhythm the rhythm of men's life was slightly different dictated not so much by the rhythms of the family but by the rhythms of occupational patterns by the 1950s and 60s men tended to work for a fixed number of years often in the same job until retirement so you can see the male life course in some ways also socially prescribed from the moment of starting work to the moment of retirement set by the government by the state or by private industries one of the consequences of this this teasing out of the life course the the clustering of major life events in very similar ways across populations meant that people began to experience much more clearly defined stages and transitions in the life course so you could begin to identify a period of middle age between 30 and 50 40 and 60 and we could begin to identify those critical stages of transition between those life phases now the point I want to make from this is that there are a number of consequences that emerged from this modern standardized homogenized life course and they linked directly to the emergence of the midlife crisis the first impact was the growth of age anxiety or age consciousness if there were standard life courses standard milestones against which we could measure ourselves we became much more conscious or anxious about whether we succeeding or failing against those milestones so a much greater sense of where we should be at certain points in our life and of course that expectation that we would leave home get married have children get a job retire our expectations were raised but at the same time if we didn't match up to those expectations if we didn't meet those milestones follow that timetable we could be dissatisfied with our achievements and this led the notion the phrase keeping up with the Joneses started in a comic strip in America about 1913 but it became in those early decades of the 20th century through the 30s and 40s a key way of us measuring ourselves against others a driver in some ways of envy and jealousy a driver of emulation a driver to increase our consumption to keep up with the journey the Joneses we were much more aware of our place in the world and particularly where we were failing while we were becoming more aware we were also becoming subject in this period two very different stresses this is the generation in the fifties and sixties 70s Reggie parents generation that could perhaps describe themselves as the first Sandwich Generation if we think about the patterns of marriage and child rearing and aging if you imagine that we have that couple ideally marrying at twenty have their children by twenty five by the time they're 40 45 Reggie parents age their children will be going through the troubled years of adolescence their parents would be aging through retirement needing more care and you find in this period the middle aged between the age of 30 and 50 40 and 60 becoming sandwiched between the troubles of their adolescent children and the troubles of their parents so you hit the midlife crisis exactly when your children are going through an adolescent crisis middle age was also challenged for many people by financial pressures at this time and again this was a feature of the changing life cycle in 1891 we could expect to inherit at the age of about 37 now I have to say that this is a middle-class Western story this is not true of everybody although the longer history of the midlife crisis suggests that the crisis has been democratized in many ways but if you were lucky enough to inherit in the late 19th century you could expect to inherit at the age of 37 by the 1940s you would expect to inherit not until you were 56 that meant that you inherited it's always nice to get money don't get me wrong but if you inherited you inherited after you'd had children after their children have grown up and after they left home at times when you might not need it as much as you had when you were middle-aged bringing up children that created us set of financial pressures on couples trying to bring up children the final point I want to make in terms of midlife pressures and it applies you know the empty nest is is as it was first introduced the empty nest in in about 1913 it was applied largely to women in a rather derogatory way that their only function in society was to have children and once those children had left they were of no value but in some ways it describes a very key feature of the extended life course that by the 1950s given the fact that women and men are marrying earlier having their children earlier a woman could live for a further 52 years after the birth of their last child and many years after menopause one of the things that created in people's minds was the question is this all there is do I really want to live like this with this person for the next 40 or 50 years and a number of the psychologists in this period pointed out that the extended life course that continued pressures of middle age through middle age meant that many people when they got to the age of 40 45 began what Robert Lee and Marjorie Kassabian referred to in the in the spouse Kappa don't if you can see weathering the marriage crisis during middle essence is the subtitle of the book what they pointed out that the multiple stresses during middle age that sense of recognizing that you were not achieving what you should have according to the standardized timetable of the life course meant that people began to reappraise their lives to reckon the achievements against the goals the satisfactions versus values the kind of evaluation of his life that Reggie Peron went through and they began to realize of course that they hadn't achieved that they were disappointed and as a result hit crisis point and Margaret Mead I've quoted here as an anthropologist in a very interesting book male and female in 1949 published in 1949 pointed out that in a world in which people may reorient their whole lives at 40 or 50 that's a world in which marriage for life becomes much more difficult Margaret Mead solution and the solution of some science fiction writers was that we should introduce the possibility of multiple serial marriages she suggested - but many writers at the time suggested possibly three one for youthful passion one for Parenthood and one for companionship in later life that there were very different demands across that extended life course at different stages of your life there was no reason why it shouldn't be the same person who fulfilled those sequentially but there was no reason why it should is what Margaret Mead was saying Margaret Mead also appeared in a lot of BBC television programs on marriage and divorce in this period now one of the consequences one of the reasons why this was important socially and culturally was because people were concerned in this period about the levels of divorce and they linked marriage midlife crisis to a marriage crisis claiming that partly it was the behavior of middle-aged men that was threatening marriages leading to family breakdown separation and divorce and this was regarded as problematic for social stability in the post-war period before the Second World War fewer than 7,000 couples were divorced there was a big boost after the Second World War during the late forties to 50 linked largely to well explained in terms of hasty marriages during the war the difficulties that soldiers had readjusting to civilian life the fact that during separation both husbands and wives for example had had affairs those challenges led to a high level of breakdown after the Second World War there was a little bit of a plateau and then arise through the late 60s 70s and 80s now I don't to say that the midlife crisis the challenges that people faced in middle age were the only reasons for that one of the reasons for the big rise after 1970 there's a change in the divorce law the divorce reform act of her was introduced in 1969 removed the marital offence and replaced it with the notion of irretrievable breakdown making it much easier for some people to get a divorce but debates about the midlife crisis in this period and still I think link it very closely to concerns about the stability of marriage which was regarded by many as essential for social stability let me pause for a moment then and think again about Reggie yes distraught yes going through a period of psychological angst yes fading biologically but also in some ways a victim of very striking demographic changes across the twentieth century or very different expectations of the milestones of life the expectations about when people would get married have children get a job retire and so forth created a set of pressures on Reggie Peron and his wife and his children that proved for him too much in some ways what I've sketched out is what Reggie Peron was escaping from the stick that pushed him to behave in these ways was the social pressures created by the extended standardized life course but what did he hope to achieve by it if that was what he wanted to escape from where was he expecting to go what were the benefits of changing his life in this kind of way and I want to reflect on that not just the push out of the mess that he felt he was in but the pull towards a better life I want to explore that just by thinking about the phrase life begins at 40 and where that came from and how that played in to the expectations and the aspirations not just of Reggie Peron but also many of us as well the phrase life begins at 40 was first used well as far as we know in 1917 by mrs. Theodore Parsons Matilda Parsons who was the widow of an army officer but had already had her career as well teaching particularly young women and girls and young women and older women how to keep fit scientific bodybuilding is what she referred to it as and partly it was keeping physically fit in order to keep the mind fit and this phrase I loved she was interviewed in 1917 for the newspaper it was four days after America entered the First World War and in the interview she said very similar set of ideas to what Eliot Jack's introduced much later in the sixties it's a paradox of life she said that we do not begin to live until we begin to die death begins at 30 that is deterioration of the muscle cells set in most old age is premature and attention to diet and exercise would enable men and women to live a great deal longer than they do today the best part of a woman's life begins at 40 that was her phrase now there's a particular context to what mrs. Parsons was saying and again this is as part of your argument unless we understand the social and cultural context we don't fully recognize the meaning of that kind of term Theodore parson mrs. Parsons directed her comments at what she referred to as the adipose woman of 40 she was addressing middle-aged women who she felt had let themselves go and the reason why this was important to mrs. Parsons was because of the war effort men were away fighting women were needed to bring up children to do the work to support the communities economically while their men were away so it became crucial to her that women retain their fitness physically and mentally as they aged that notion it's really interesting that as the notion life begins at 40 became popular the the the first part of that sentence the best part of a woman's life begins at 40 got lost in some kind of translation it became simply life begins at 40 and it was popularized in a whole variety of ways during the 1920s and 1930s the most common way or the most popular book was Walter Pickens book entitled life begins at 40 Pitkin was an American journalist working at Columbia University in the taken miss notion that life begins at 40 to write a self-help book and you can see from the cover of the book through this book's inspiring and helpful advice thousands of men and women fearful of middle age have lost their anxieties and found new ways to make life richer happier and more worth living this was the the the blurb on the book to try and sell it and the notion both Pickens book and that phrase life begins at 40 were used in other areas life begins at 40 was a film in 1935 starring Will Rogers that was based on the book and there were some skits there were some satires as well of this great film in the late 1930s entitled life begins at 8:30 so the idea that life could begin rather than end at midlife at middle age became a key part of self-help literature and advice to middle-aged couples during the 30s 40s and 50s so what did Pitkin advise people in order to find these new ways of being happy in fact it was pretty bland and mundane he pointed out that happiness comes most easily after 40 firstly by realizing that a great many years lie between 40 and 70 now that quite you know that might seem fairly banal and I think it probably is but it's it's a it's a twisting on its head of the concerns of midlife midlife Reggie parens looking back and saying I haven't achieved anything I've got nothing left to look forward to what Pitkin is saying is yes you have even at the age of 40 you're going to have 20 30 40 years of your life still make the most of it and the way you made the most of it according to Pitkin was that you pursue self fulfillment through material improvement leisure and what he called the art of living much less work more leisure more play this process of self-fulfillment would make those last 30 or 40 years worthwhile no longer the downward curve no longer the acceleration towards death but in fact a fulfilling middle-aged and older age and this notion became widely adopted in two particular ways one is that it was taken as a strategy for personal renewal this is a way in which we could refresh and renew ourselves when we were getting jaded and faded in middle age begin to realize that there were things to look forward to that it was possible to reshape to Ramola life in more positive ways but the key part of this and again thinking about this in social and cultural historical terms the key part of this it's this this story that Pitkin was telling was not just about individuals of discovering themselves it was also a lesson a message for populations certainly in America and Britain during a period of economic depression during a period of recession increasingly concerned about the specter of a second world war during a period of doom and gloom that if we reinvigorated ourselves there was hope for optimism and pickins argument was that if people as they got older the middle-aged and the elderly work less and had more leisure there would be more job opportunities for younger people which would boost the economy equally if people in middle age and older age spent their money buying things enjoying themselves purchasing leisure for example and pleasure that would also boost the economy so part of the appeal of pickins work was that it struck a chord in individuals like Reggie Peron who were struggling with their own problems but it also meant something to a Western world struggling with the effects of economic recession because it promised a way out of them and in some ways a pick in writing in the 30s the 1930s were a strangely paradoxical period a period of morbid gloom in some kind of ways because of the recession and because of the fear of another global war but it was also a period of incredible optimism it was the period when the American Dream was conceived and the American Dream first appeared in the work of James Truslow Adams in 1931 the year before Pitkin published life begins at 40 and it's in the epilogue to this fantastic overview the epic of America and in that epilogue he tries to sketch out the future to move away from some of the doom and gloom of the interwar period to say life globally as well as individually doesn't have to go down towards death and destruction it can go the other way and for Adams the American Dream was not a dream simply of motorcars and high wages so it's not just a material dream but a dream of a social order in which each man and woman shall be able to attain to the fullest statue of which they're innately capable and be recognized by others for what they are regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position so this was Adams dream and it was a dream in a sense that resonated very clearly with what Pitkin was saying we didn't have to be depressed at midlife and the middle of the 20th century either we could look forward with some hope for this to happen Adams argued we needed to develop a new scale and basis for values for Adams looking forward to the to achieving the American dream that meant collectivity trust love working together to make a better world so here was this period of economic recession Pitkin saying yes life can begin at 40 Adams saying in fact there is an American dream that we should work towards in some ways of course what happened was the opposite those hopes and those dreams were dashed they were dashed by the second World War they were dashed by the catastrophe of global conflict and they were dashed in many ways by what happened afterwards in terms of the Cold War that sense of optimism that could create security or the sense of security that could create optimism they were dashed during the Second World War and afterwards what was left of pickins mantra and Adams dream was simply a dream of material Plenty the values the scale the basis of values that dream of social order that was democratic and egalitarian Equal Opportunities occupationally and educationally that was shattered by experiences in the second world what was left was the dream of motorcars and high wages people were left feeling that they could not achieve those other grandiose aspirations that Pitkin and Adams had set out instead what they tended to do was search for happiness and a hurry this is a wonderful book by Edmund burglar the revolt of the middle-aged man published in in 1958 that Edmund burglar was an American psychoanalyst who had a very extensive clinic and he drew on his clinical experience to write about a whole variety of challenges relating to marriage middle age and midlife in particular in relation to men he has a lovely book published in 1948 saying divorce won't help if anybody is interested and his argument in fact in that book and in this book is that before a couple run to the divorce lawyer they should go and see a psychiatrist that this is about the challenges within themselves and their relationships so what he says is that is that during the 40s and 50s the collapse of the American Dream in many ways and you can trace it through American post-war literature as well in particular the collapse of the dream left people struggling and they translated those struggles or those aspirations into a dream of material Plenty into consumption seduced by the pleasure of consuming material goods but also the pleasure the anticipation of consuming our the people this was the emergence if you like of a form of narcissistic self fulfillment that drove some of the behavior that you see in in Reggie Peron so burglar four burglar people were looking for happiness in a hurry and he has this beautiful passage which describes very very clearly the thought processes that he attributes to people like Reggie Perry in this mindset stressed by life circumstances feeling that they had failed feeling that although they were looking down to death everybody was telling them that life begins at fourteen things should be getting better at that moment they were anxious and backed more depressed than they would have been otherwise and this is the this is the mindset if you like of a Reggie Peron I want happiness love approval admiration sex youth all this is denied me in this stale marriage to an elderly sickly complaining nagging wife let's get rid of her start Life all over again with another woman sure I'll provide for my first wife and children sure I'm sorry the first marriage didn't work out but self defense comes first I just have to save myself so what is left of those aspirations in the midst of midlife middle-age stress the argument that life should be getting better not worse that optimism that we could achieve the American dreams that was dashed what was left was a sense of selfish narcissistic belief that we would do something some happiness ourselves and this burglar suggested was why people like Reggie Peron had crises pushed from their marriages pushed from their relationships disappointed in their lives but seduced by a dream that was no longer achievable except through the selfish pursuit of pleasure let me reflect then to finish on where we've been Reggie Peron in some ways spoke for a generation he was an everyman if you like and his wife and children every day victims of the kinds of pressures that people and families were under in the 50s 60s and 70s we can certainly understand his behavior that random impulsive destructive behavior as the product of psychological despair I've hit my peak I've reached my prime but it no longer means anything because all I look forward to is the downward curve of life and death as that sense of an identity crisis that is captured very very neatly by David knobs but also you can see it in other literary and cinematic forms as well in the fifties sixties and seventies all we can read it in biological terms we can say that pairing is aging he's losing his virility he's losing his hair he's losing muscle mass and energy and that leads him into a crisis of despair as well linked to death but not entirely the same we can see this in individual terms this is a man behaving strangely what I want to suggest though is that we cannot understand Reggie unless we cast our lens wider than that unless we zoom out to see the social and the cultural conditions in which Reggie Peron was living and in which we continue to live in some ways so there are perhaps two conclusions that I want to make the first is that we are aged Reggie us we are aged not just by our minds and bodies but we are also aged by history by the cultural values the attitudes that beliefs the norms the practices that we have inherited from the past some ways Reggie Perry in the late seventies went off the rails because of what had happened in the 1950s and 60s both in terms of the life course end in terms of the seduction of materialism the second point is this that in that context when we are saying that we're aged by history and culture within that context the midlife crisis is no longer the biological the natural phenomenon the inevitable phenomenon of aging it is immediately a social and a cultural phenomenon the midlife crisis that Reggie suffered from that we perhaps continue to suffer from is a set of experiences that is generated by historical change shaped by cultural contexts and social economic conditions and determined also by political contingencies thank you [Applause]

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Keywords: royal society, science, scientists, scientific policy, scientific research, science uk, science research, international, international science, science education, science policy, midlife crisis, midlife crises, mid life crisis, mid life crises, mid-life crisis, mid-life crises, mark jackson, professor mark jackson, bernal, medawar, wilkins

Id: eSWwIQzKsbY

Length: 47min 15sec (2835 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019