You’re Just Standing in the Midlife Dip

I fell down a research rabbit hole this weekend on midlife and happiness/satisfaction, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what I came across.

My brain doesn't usually work in graphs, but I kept scrolling back to this series. It's called “the U-shaped happiness-age curve.”

Economist David Blanchflower tracked life satisfaction against age in a pattern that's shown up time and again across very different countries—different cultures, different economies, different people—and the same shape kept appearing.

Happiness starts high in your twenties, drops through your thirties and forties, bottoms out around 47, then climbs again past its baseline. In fact, people in their late sixties and seventies report higher satisfaction than people in their thirties.

Read that again. The dip isn't a detour off the path, it's the actual path. It's THE arc.

For context: this isn't one guy's pet theory. Blanchflower has now traced the pattern across 600+ peer-reviewed studies, and when critics have challenged it, he's gone back and re-checked their own numbers—more than once finding the U-shape was actually there in the data critics said didn't have it.

If you're the woman I usually write to—did what you were supposed to do, maybe built the career, kept it together for everyone who needed you to—you've probably had this thought at a given moment: I have no reason to feel like this.

Nothing's on fire. And yet you keep wondering, "Is this it?”.

Now this is commonly approached as a crisis. Fix it, meditate it away, feel guilty about it, because, again, nothing’s flagrantly wrong.

According to this research, it’s because you're circling 47. It's happening in Norway and in Nigeria, to people with mortgages and without, to people who did everything "right" and people who didn't. The dip doesn't check your self-care practices first.

This matters because the exhaustion is real from thinking that your unsettledness means you're failing at a good life. The curve, though, begs to differ. You're standing in a well-documented, cross-culturally replicated dip that most people move through.

However, what the graph doesn't show you is the part where not everyone climbs out at the same pace.

The researchers point to reassessment.

The people who actually look at what they built, what they wanted, and what has stopped fitting? They move through the dip differently than people white-knuckling it, waiting to feel better on their own, because these are the questions the dip is handing you.

That's the essence of my A.I.M.S. Method™. Before Momentum, before Stride, there's an honest look at where you actually are, not where you're supposed to be. Acknowledgment first.

The women who come out of this phase more successfully aren't more talented. They just stop ignoring the fact that they're in it and start focusing on next steps.

So if you've had a low hum of "something needs to change" with no proof that anything's palpably wrong, stop looking for proof. You don't need a crisis to justify reassessing your life. You just need to be honest that you're in a curve that's asking you to.

Aline.

¹ Blanchflower, D.G. (2020). Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries. Journal of Population Economics, 34, 575–624.