What first pops into your mind when you hear the word "midlife"? "Crisis," yes. The dreaded midlife crisis is the butt of all kinds of jokes, but it's also a serious matter. After I lost a few friends to midlife suicide, I decided to create an alternative narrative to the awful way we tend to think of our 40s, 50s and 60s, and I'm going to share that with you over the next three minutes.
Midlife is one of the three life stages that sprouted in the 20th century. Adolescence didn't even exist until 1904, when society realized that just because you hit puberty didn't mean you were an adult. Retirement was popularized nearly a century ago, with pensions and social security, and then 25 years later, with the advent of AARP -- I hope you have your card -- and retirement communities. Those two life stages got a whole lot of love, but there's a life stage in the middle that didn't get much respect.
Midlife is the natural outgrowth of the three decades of additional longevity we were granted in the 20th century. But all it got was a bad brand, the “midlife crisis,” which was coined in 1965. Yet research on how happiness evolves as we age shows that from about age 22 or 23, all the way to 45 to 50, there is a long, slow decline in life satisfaction. It bottoms out around 45 to 50, although your mileage may vary.
(Laughs)
On the other side of that, though, the good news is that, from age 50 on, we get happier and happier. It's called the U-curve of happiness. So maybe there's a new framework to think about midlife, one that we learned when we were kids. The magical metamorphosis of the caterpillar to the butterfly.
Just as a caterpillar eats incessantly just before it's about to spin its chrysalis, so do we, as young adults, madly consume and produce. And then, the caterpillar decides to take its midlife break in its chrysalis, which is dark and gooey and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. On the other side of that, there's a chrysalis that cracks open, and this beautiful winged creature emerges that delights us all: the butterfly.
So to recap, the caterpillar consumes, the chrysalis transforms and the butterfly pollinates. What if we rethought midlife, such that it's not a crisis, it's a chrysalis. The midlife chrysalis. What if we thought of midlife as the dawning of a new age? An age where much of what we accumulated dissolves? Just as we're ready to transform, spread our wings and pollinate our wisdom to the world in our 50s and beyond.
Audience: Yeah. Chip Conley: Yes, yes.
If you look at life like that, it's maybe possible that it's cool to grow old.
Are we ready for pro-aging, not anti-aging products?
Audience: Yeah.
(Cheers and applause)
CC: Can we make aging aspirational? I sure hope so.
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)
