Mid-life

I am in my early forties, as are many of my friends.  It has proved to be true that at this stage in life a number of transitions are underway, or have just happened, for all of us.  Many have moved to the suburbs after dedicated city living for 15 years or so.  Some have families, and others are expecting them.  Jobs have been reevaluated, promotions sought and financial stability has become a central topic of conversation during this recession.  In short, we are all assessing our lot and making significant decisions about how we wish to continue.

When I turned 40 a colleague hypothesized that the reason we celebrate this birthday so vigorously, and believe that life begins at this point, is because we have passed a health milestone.  There are a raft of congenital disorders that can emerge right through early life, up until the thirties.  If we make it to 40 the likelihood of dying from one of these conditions is greatly reduced, and the odds are you will live at least another few decades.  This ought to change your future facing investments.

The changes I have wrought over recent years - marriage, suburban life etc. - have all been done with enthusiasm but I would own to feeling slightly anxious when I decided to move away from the city centre.  So much of my history was tied up in those streets, and the lifestyle they allowed, that it felt a little like a betrayal of myself.  But I also began to realize that I was limiting myself in significant ways - financially I could not afford to live in the kind of accommodation I wanted, socially I had no space to entertain friends and family so no one visited.  Moreover, the neighbourhood I could afford to live in was not without its stresses - noise, litter and graffiti, street crime.  So when the opportunity arose the decision to move was sensible and I soon settled into my new suburb and found many resources and entertainments that I simply had not thought of before.

The move was helped by the self-conscious attitude I struck.  It occurred to me that the reason youth is so prized has little to do with vigour and plenty to do with the amount of time one has left to change trajectories, to explore new ideas and places, to run different lives.  Given this, I felt I owed it to my twenty-something self to make sure I enjoyed life, tried new things and moved on.  If I had remained stuck in my small studio flat in the city I would have been running an old strategy into oblivion.  There is no challenge in that, and I would miss out on other lives.  I think this notion dovetails nicely with that of my colleague.

As I survey my new life its value increases for me.  Getting older is satisfying.  Youth may present greater future opportunity, but having lived a youth I now have a baseline from which to judge my continued endeavours.  I can look back on a past, with all the mixed emotions that engenders, and calibrate a future with more precision.  Understanding that I owe my past self a debt, to get on with things in order to retain the value of my youth, gives me a proper sense of loss and momentum.  Moreover, now I have made the first transition from youth I have evidence that it can be done, and this reduces anxiety.

These reflections all indicate a propensity to account for the future, rather than discount it. But also they show how thinking about the future changes with time.  Researchers interested in changing health behaviour in young people face the problem of future discounting.  Those from the kind of urban neighbourhood I used to live in are more likely to discount the future, perhaps because there are few cues to longevity and no one changes their circumstances.  Indeed, the predominant change they see will be the ebb and flow of middle-class students and young professionals using the area as a stepping stone.  But it is also the case that middle-class children, say with Type 1 diabetes, find it hard to think of the future and do not take their medication, instead choosing to party and deal with their more immediate social concerns.  Later they pay the price in terms of amputations and other complications. As a former young middle-class person I am well aware that many of my choices about what to eat and drink, and how much exercise to take, were foolish.  But I was lucky and had nothing wrong with me; I rode out this portion of my life with minimum incident, to arrive in reflective mid-life.

Health messages directed at young people that tell them of risks and terrible outcomes do not seem to work.  The risk may be well-understood in the abstract, but will be traded off against immediate social concerns and real understanding of likely opportunity.  These trade-offs are being mapped by colleagues in my field taking a life-history approach and socio-economic differentials are clearly described.

Ultimately, the solution to economic disparity and hardship is political.  If opportunities are made real then discounting will change.  But it is not the entire story, as the middle class examples show.  Those children and young people have the best opportunities available in the modern world, and yet they still compromise their future selves.  I do not have a solution to this, but I suspect it is something to do with how we organize our intergenerational interactions.  Even though I work in a university, young people seem to be very much separated from middle aged and older folk.  There is a strong and distinct commitment to youth culture in the media, and there are defined youth ghettos in the city (if you know London, think of Hoxton, Shoreditch, Stoke Newington - all areas associated with students and young creativity - and all areas with longer term resident poor).  This separation brings benefits, and I would not want to constrain the expression of this generation - we need new ideas.  But there is no culture of interaction.  I teach my students about behavioural science, but I do not talk with them about life, I do not model future transitions.  Of course, much of this probably happens within extended families, but my suspicion is that such family structures do not really operate as they once did.  That would be worth investigating.