Since turning 32 last month, all I can think about is how cool middle-aged people are. No, seriously. Newspapers publish pieces titled “Middle-aged women are blowing up their lives” and op-eds about why they’re popular with younger men. Take the new series of Tina Fey’s Four Seasons (currently No 3 on Netflix), which follows three couples in their 50s. One couple is only just deciding whether to have kids (via a surrogate), another discovers the joys of smoking weed, and a recently single woman has no difficulty meeting handsome suitors.
I used to be terrified of middle age. I presumed I’d be deprived of the hedonistic pleasures of my 20s, and living too far from the friends I’d cemented during my thirties. For decades, academic papers found that wellbeing bottomed out in middle age, dubbed the “U-curve of happiness”, while the young were optimistic, the old were at peace. Middle age was where you realised life hadn’t turned out the way you planned – but hadn’t accepted it yet.
But I’m fast discovering middle age now looks different to that, in particular because there are so many ways to do the things that were once the preserve of the young. In just the last week, The Sunday Times ran a piece on countryside raves for midlifers, and the New Statesman ran one on how, for over-40s, “day clubs” are the new nightclubs. I’ve recently started attending parties which start at 7pm to accommodate parents, and can’t help but notice how free of inhibitions middle-aged attendees seem. They dance like they spent long enough caring what others thought, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
