40 is not the sunset
It's your 40th birthday, and you've been dreading it for a while. The room is filled with black balloons, and you've been receiving "over the hill" cards for several days. Your good friends, who all love you, are both ridiculing and celebrating you. They believe that you've reached the sunset of your life and that the rest of it will be a long downhill slide into darkness as you enter old age. You might believe that yourself, so you laugh uncomfortably at the old jokes while contemplating what you're going to do with the rest of your life.
We’re all victims of ageism, both external and internal. We’ve bought into the “over the hill” mentality about age. We can’t do much about the external ageism that exists in our culture, but we can change the internal ageism that may be holding us back.
Before discussing some facts about midlife and beyond, let's send a message to those well-meaning but misguided friends who throw 40th birthday parties. As Ashton Applewhite said, "When you make fun of an older person, you're making fun of your future self." We're all going to the same place, but some just get there sooner than others.
In his book, The U-Curve of Happiness: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch argues that happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory, with a dip in the middle of life that bottoms out around age 47 and then rises in old age. Statistically, the sun is rising in midlife, not setting, and we have a lot to look forward to.
Rauch cites several studies that support this claim and attributes the dip in happiness to factors such as work and family stress, the loss of loved ones, and the onset of physical and mental health problems. However, he argues that while the dip in happiness is real, it is not inevitable.
Accordingly, Rauch offers several suggestions for increasing happiness in middle age and beyond, including focusing on relationships, finding a purpose in life, taking care of one's health, being grateful for what one has, and living in the present moment.
In other words, getting old doesn’t have to be unpleasant if we do it right.
Finally, let’s see how the math works for us. If we live to be, say, 98 (which is not out of the question these days), and our adult life begins at age 18, that means we have 80 productive years. We can still be productive into our 90s if we take care of ourselves. That means at our 40th birthday, we still have half of our adult life ahead of us.
As Mary Oliver said, “Tell me, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Let’s reimagine the 40th birthday party as a new morning in our life. This milestone marks the sun setting on one chapter of our life, but the sun rising on another chapter filled with possibilities.
"The morning is a new page in the book of life. Write something beautiful." —Rumi