The new midlife crisis is hot, feminine and covered in tattoos – where can I sign? | Emma Beddington
II’m not having a midlife crisis. Any actuary would tell you I’m well over half way through, plus the 30’s-40’s were one long, undignified, somewhat premature MLC (I won’t apologize for shortening it; time is short – see the first point) where I refuse to go back on it. But I’m interested in that moment when mortality is no longer a vague, polite murmur, but a screaming alarm. My cohort is now traveling Dante’s dark woodso I feel surrounded, if not by midlife crises (I experience disappointingly few vicarious crises), then by the culture she explores.
Of course, every generation rediscovers universal experiences and makes a fuss about them, but it feels like the MLC is in the middle of a makeover. First of all, it is feminine. The new MLC queen is Miranda July, whose new novel All Fours reframes perimenopausal turmoil as urgent, sensual and even “hot.” July has succeeded in reviving midlife angst, but positioning All Fours as a particularly belated exploration of the crystallizing, life-changing effect of the end of fertility is a bit unfair to many who came before. How about starting with Bridget Christie’s brilliant menopause sitcom The Change? I also think that you don’t have to explicitly articulate the physical and emotional aspects of perimenopause to create art informed by it. Rachel Cusk has been dissecting aspects of women’s midlife turmoil since her divorce memoir Aftermath, Certainly; Fleishman is in trouble is largely a female MLC novel, and Deborah Levy’s extraordinary Living trilogy became a guiding light for a generation of women navigating the shifting sands of middle age (I solemnly gave it to my sister for her 39th birthday, as if delivering a sacred text).
Either way, women’s midlife crises are having a moment. The intersection between menopause and MLC has recently been extensively memeified (at least according to my algorithm), and new online magazine Jenny launched in January, offering a buffet of compellingly messy midlife content (dating younger men, Get 10 tattoos, Take Ozempic and more). The sports car and the affair with a personal trainer are over; creative blossoming, new ways of living and sexual rumspringa are in. That’s welcome and yes, too late. But there are other MLC 2024 elements that are generational and situational, and not gendered.
Like New York magazine recently explored (perfectly illustrated with a piece of avocado toast lying upright in a crate), millennials are reaching their forties and their experience is definitely not your mother’s middle age. Traditionally, “a midlife crisis was born from a complacent sense of security”; now many midlifers have failed to acquire the hallmarks of stability of the previous generation: home, job security, retirement, possibly children. On the contrary, they are confronted with “a clear lack of comfort, of resources”. A midlife crisis? In this economy?
Then there are the existential challenges of life in 2024. Every day I read at least one headline that scares me a little, and I don’t need to list them to any Guardian reader. Are we even going to get the lifespan we thought we could expect? When you experience one attack after another from a polycrisis, indulging in the midlife variety can seem a bit redundant. Who on earth in 2024 feels like the rest of their life has been mapped out so comfortably and predictably that they have to resist it?
That suggests the MLC may be becoming irrelevant, but actually I think it’s becoming more radical. A generation reaching middle age without the promised security is questioning the systems and structures that have failed to deliver, and even wondering how to dismantle them. I don’t hear old-fashioned midlife dramas from friends, but I do hear a lot from people sickened by unfulfilling and unstable work, deep inequality, and inaccessible housing, child care, and health care. They don’t question their individual life choices so much as the way they have been restricted and threatened, the scarcity of political alternatives on offer and how all that could – and should – change.
Normally, midlife crises ended in a sheepish realization of how much you could lose by setting your life on fire, a newfound appreciation for comfort, possibly a tendency toward caution and conservatism. In a world already on fire, that’s unlikely to happen.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist