Good News, Tom Cruise, There's No Such Thing As A Midlife Crisis

The Media Says 'Top Gun' Is a 'Midlife Crisis' Movie. But the Idea is a Myth We Need to Debunk

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Tom Cruise, who turned 60 this week, is going through a midlife crisis. Or at least that’s how everyone’s interpreting his latest movie. “’Top Gun 2’ Is The Tom Cruise Midlife Crisis Movie We All Deserve.” And his growing obsession with doing his own stunts. Tom Cruise Going Through 'Midlife Crisis' Following 'MI:8' Gravity-Defying Stunt.

And Cruise is not alone. Jason Alexander, who’s 62, also tweeted recently that he’s going through a midlife crisis.

So, in my midlife crisis (assuming I make it to 124), I’m trying to teach myself electric bass. What’s the best online source to learn? You may ask yourself, “what’s in it for me, Alexander?”. Answer—5 years from now, I will play you the Seinfeld theme song. Serenity now.

Not to be outdone, Chris Hemsworth, who’s 38, is also said to be in a midlife crisis. Thor: Love and Thunder – Chris Hemsworth’s Midlife Crisis

So which is it? Is a midlife crisis something you go through at 62 or 38 or 54?

The answer: None of the above.

There is no such thing as a midlife crisis.

Let’s go back to the beginning and track the origin of this fascinating untruth.

The man who invented the midlife crisis had a midlife crisis of his own: His idea bombed. In 1957, a Canadian psychoanalyst named Elliott Jaques gave a speech before a distinguished audience in London in which he claimed people in their mid-thirties went through a depressive period. Reactions to this time of life included concern over health, compulsive vanity, promiscuity, and religious awakening. The audience hated the idea, so he dropped it.

photo courtesy of Mikkaphoto from Getty Images Signature via Canva

Nearly a decade later, he revisited it, this time in a paper called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” Jaques was inspired, he said, by the oversimplification of how we talked about life shape. “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view.” Now, he went on, he’d reached the crest of the hill, “and there stretching ahead is the downward slope.” It ends, inevitably, in death. The most common age for this crisis: 37

Jaques’s idea, while tantalizing, was not grounded in research. It was based on his reading of biographies of 310 famous men, from Michelangelo to Bach. He didn’t include women in his study, he said, because menopause “obscured” their midlife transition. No wonder the London audience scoffed at his theory!

But others ran with it. In the early 70s, Roger Gould of UCLA sent questionnaires on midlife to several hundred subjects. Dan Levinson of Yale interviewed forty people (also all male) and identified what he called the four seasons of a man’s life. “There is a single, most frequent age at which each period begins,” he went on: 17, 40, 60, and 80. Everyone lives through the same developmental periods at the same time. Again, the rigidity is stunning. Levinson was so precise—and doctrinaire—that he insisted the midlife crisis must start in the 40th year and will end at 45 and a half. Eighty percent of men go through one of these crises, he said.

Dr. Elliot Jaques / photo courtesy of requisite.org

Rather than question this idea, Americans embraced it, largely because of the brilliance of one woman. Gail Sheehy was a former home ec major turned freelance journalist and a divorced single mom when, in 1972, while in Northern Ireland, a young boy she was interviewing was shot in the face. The shock produced an existential crisis about how she felt on reaching her mid-30s. Sheehy picked up on the research of Gould and Levinson and used them for the basis of an article in New York magazine, which in turn became the book, Passages.

Published in 1976, Passages tapped into a moment of deep change in America, with the sexual revolution, surging divorce rates, and economic anxiety all converging. The book went on to sell 5 million copies in 28 languages. It spent three years on the bestseller list. The Library of Congress named it one of the most influential books of the century.

Subtitled Predictable Crises of Adult Life, Passages is the bible of the linear life. Using her unmatched talent in naming, Sheehy said all adults go through the same four stages: the Trying Twenties; the Catch-30 around your 30th birthday; the Deadline Decade of your 30s; and the Age 40 Crucible. (She mentioned no passage after age 40, which she admitted later was an embarrassment.) After Sheehy, the midlife crisis was no longer a theory; it was simply a fact of life.

photo courtesy of Amazon

But that doesn’t make it correct.

From the start, the midlife crisis was a dodgy concept. The idea that every person in the culture would go through the exact same crisis starting at the exact same age (40 and a half!) should have seemed, on the surface, absurd. As it happened, it took scholars no more than a few years to debunk the idea.

There are three core flaws with the idea of the midlife crisis. First, empirical data finds no evidence for it. Passages set off a wave of studies. The biggest, called “Midlife in the United States,” was conducted in 1995 and involved 13 scholars and 7,000 subject people aged 25 to 74. It concluded: “There is relatively little evidence to support the idea that most Americans experience a midlife crisis or, more generally, a universal course of life with expectable periods of crisis and stability.”

Only a quarter of participants reported experiencing challenges during this period, and those were attributed to events, not despair over mortality. By contrast, people were shown to grow happier as they move through middle age and into old age. The New York Times put it this way: “New Study Finds Middle Age Is Prime of Life.”

photo courtesy of Csondy from Getty Images Signature via Canva

Second, as the wave of recent celebrity gossip confirms, the term midlife itself has become so elastic it’s virtually meaningless. As adolescence has moved earlier and old age later, the period of midlife has grown longer. Studies show that young people view middle age as occurring between 30 and 55, while older people view it as between 40 and 70. Like being middle class, everyone is middle-aged these days!

Third, life events that were formerly experienced by broad segments of the population at a similar time—like getting married, buying a home, or having children—are now spread out over decades. Many still have children in their early 20s, for example, while others wait until their early 40s, and some have a second set of offspring even later. Meanwhile, events that used to be associated exclusively with midlife—like switching jobs or swapping mates—now happen across adulthood.

This final point is worth dwelling on, as it’s the essence of the nonlinear life. We’re all undergoing change all the time. What’s more, we’re wired to do so. The first generations of psychologists stressed that we all finish developing by age 21. That notion is now dead. A wave of recent brain research has shown that we’re capable of change at any age.

The upshot of all this is that we should finally bury the idea of the midlife crisis and replace it with an idea much closer to reality: the whenever life crisis. Just think of the pandemic. If you were between 39 and 45 and a half, you were having a “midlife” crisis, but if you were between 58 and 67, you were also having a crisis, and if you were between 14 and 23, you were also having a crisis. Your birth year had little to do with what you were experiencing because everyone was experiencing the challenge at the same time.

So, cheer up, Tom Cruise. You’re not in a midlife crisis. Crises, or what I prefer to call lifequakes because the term is less judgmental, are a fact of all decades of life and all seasons of life. They adhere to no biological clock, no social clock, and no artificial clock.

They toll on their own schedule. And sooner or later, they toll for all of us.

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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

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(Cover Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images)