The Wall Street Journal-20080202-The Midlife Blues

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The Midlife Blues

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Dante felt it long ago on the Tuscan plain, the turbid ebb and flow of midlife misery. In his opening to the "Inferno," he furnished probably the most celebrated lines in the Western canon on the subject:

"In the middle of the road of my life/I recovered myself in a dark wood/ The right road being lost. It's so hard to describe/ That wood so savage, dense, harsh/Just thinking of it renews my fear."

It turns out he wasn't alone. This week a massive American-British study of some two million souls throughout 80 countries confirms, empirically, that middle age immiserates us all without regard to income, culture, gender, marital status or previous experience. The study offers a new visual to illustrate the overarching mood swing of life: the U-Curve, in which mental stability and happiness bottoms out in our 40s and into our 50s.

We then get more cheerful as we round the curve and head into the final stretch. In the U.S., women hit bottom at 40 and men at 50, according to the study.

The study's authors have speculated rather clunkily on why this should be. One of their theories: People who are happier live longer. Then the sad sacks having died out, the ones who keep going are bound to be the happier ones. Well, yes, but does that mean that life is made of people who live the first L-shape only, and the rest who continue on up the reverse L?

They also speculate that "we learn to count our blessings when we get older. We see friends and family die and we see bad things happen and are just happy to be alive."

But, one is tempted to say, that is equally an argument for why, as friends and family die off, old age might progressively induce even worse depression than before. You'd suspect a touch of midlife mental cloudiness in the authors at this point, if it weren't for the self- evident truth of their findings. Perhaps this is a case of leaving the data collection to the scientists and the theorizing to the poets.

The study does not tell us how to recognize those middle-age blues, or how to alleviate them. One is grateful for this restraint. But the researchers believe, and they are surely right, that in identifying the shape of the phenomenon, they have begun the treatment.

As with priests before them, most psychiatrists will tell you that identifying demons helps you to exorcise them. Give it a name, categorize it, and already you have made it more commonplace. As the study's authors say, "Perhaps realizing that such feelings are normal might help individuals survive this phase better." The looming, amorphous presence in Dante's famous lines -- so terrifying to contemplate, let alone identify -- gets named, objectified, along with the feeling it induced.

One thinks of midlife turbulence as a time when people change, jobs, careers, partners. In Dante's case, the upheaval had occurred already. He'd lost the once-straight road. His moral universe upended, he had to reimagine its symmetry and begin the machete work of ordering and naming his way through the confusion of the Inferno and its nine circles, and then on to Purgatorio, Paradiso.

One suspects that, with women and men both, midlife is a time when the mirage of life's perfectibility and symmetry, as envisioned in one's youth, comes back to trouble you like a conscience. In plain language, one might call it a last chance at happiness, or of "getting it right."

Midlife is perhaps the last opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it; a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them; a time when you can still become what you might have been. Equally, it's the last time when you are troubled by a pretty face -- another path not taken -- before you can look on pretty faces with equanimity, not as bearing a direct message to you, but to other, younger folk.

Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, wife and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realignment.

What then would be the "right" road: To keep to one's groove, or to opt for the road not taken? Luckily, the study tells us, once past 50 you won't care either way. Hang in there. It will all blow over. If Dante had only known. He may never have troubled us with The Divine Comedy.

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Mr. Kaylan is a New York-based writer.