Three - Midlife Transitions: Body and Work

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, I consider transitions in midlife. I show how midlife has been defined in research. I also provide insights from my research with middle- aged migrants in Latvia, the UK and Nordic countries, and non-migrants in Latvia, where most of my recent research has been conducted. I draw on the Handbook of Midlife Development, edited by Lachman (2001); in its tone- setting first chapter, Staudinger and Bluck (2001) muse on reasons for the relative paucity of theoretical research on midlife at the time. They came up with two main conclusions: it is not easy to define midlife through the notion of chronological age; and the margins around people's forties and fifties are very flexible, and people can have midlife lifestyles, economics and social outlooks in their thirties and well into their sixties.

Taking the first of Staudinger and Bluck's (2001) conclusions, it is clear that definition of midlife based on age is an oversimplification. And very similar discussions take place in research on youth and older age transitions. Chronological age and lifecourse transitions are relational. In the meantime, there has been a considerable shift in the definition of midlife in statistical practice, with the age range shifting so that the period starts and ends later, and, relatedly, shifts in academic discourses and everyday affairs. Thus the young are considered young for considerably longer – at least up to age 34 according to typical Eurostat (2020) datasets, or even up to 40 according to various policies. Then comes the middle, which leads to older age beginning somewhere close to people's sixties, although recently this too has been pushed into the seventies and eighties, clearly due to increasing longevity. The solution that Staudinger and Bluck (2001) propose is helpful: to look at midlife as two related and quite distinct phases, early midlife and late midlife. In chronological terms, this would be before and after one's fifties, because around the age of 50, for biological, social and economic reasons, people in typical Western lifecourses turn their focus to health maintenance and the potential onset of chronic conditions, since children are often (but not always) grown up, and older midlifers start seriously thinking about retirement plans and investments.