Review of middle age: 3.5 / 4 stars

I’m 41, which is the statistical midpoint of an American woman’s life. I’ve been thinking about how my life is going: pretty well!

In seventh grade, on my science teacher’s birthday, one of my classmates asked if she was sad to be getting older. She smiled and said, “No, I like myself better as I get older.” I found that reassuring, and I’m writing this partly to give a picture of what a happy life can look like.

In my dorky mom hat era

I got lucky in my life structure

The older I get, the more I favor a pretty conventional lifestyle: Find a stable partner, Invest in a life together long term, and probably have children. I think this is good for society and usually good for individuals. 

I got lucky: both to be a person that this default pattern works well for, and to have good outcomes in my marriage and parenting. 

Finding and proposing to Jeff in my early 20s was the best thing that ever happened to me. We’ve changed significantly since then, but we’ve had a very good base from which to approach different life projects over time (parenting, career changes).

My (biased) perception is that my peers

• Underprioritize the questions “Should we get married?” and “Do we want to have kids together?” and drift along in relationships for a long time without evaluating if actually should be on the relationship escalator.
• Over-prioritize flexibility. Getting married younger is statistically better for your happiness. Know thyself: if you know you’re not ready for marriage or your partner won’t be a good spouse, don’t do it. But if you’re in a great relationship, don’t postpone marriage because you think 24 is too young. 
• Dabble too much in polyamory. Aella’s large survey finding that couples committed to monogamy and couples committed to polyamory are similarly happy, but there’s a valley of unhappiness among couples who aren’t committed to either pattern.

If you’re into this kind of thing, consider these pieces by Aria Schrecker, Bryan Caplan, Paul Graham, and Ajeya Cotra.

Our kids turned out on the easier end to parent, which I attribute to

• Luck of the draw, especially avoiding major health problems
• Genetics (including Jeff and me being conscientious people)
• Consistency by parents (environmental, but correlated with the genetics of having parents who are good at providing consistency)

My mental health improved

As one of my social work professors said, “Everybody’s a little bit borderline.” In my twenties, I was more emotionally volatile, and at times I was pretty unreasonable to Jeff. I’ve mellowed with time; some of it is feeling things less sharply and some is having more experience at putting things in perspective.

This isn’t the most common pattern. Statistically, middle age is usually the bottom of the life satisfaction curve. 

Source

(More recent data indicates that millennials and Gen Z don’t even have the more-satisfied period earlier in life! If you’re young, maybe touch grass and generally have fun in ways your grandparents would have recognized?)

After having periods of depression several times in my twenties and thirties, I’ve stayed on an antidepressant for the last 7 years and am pretty satisfied with it. 

I learn less

From age 13 to 23, I learned at least some of Spanish, French, Russian, Danish, and Esperanto. I learned Morris dance, rapper sword dance, English country dance, Scottish country dance, East coast swing, and the ability to fake some ballroom.

I rarely try to learn chunky new things anymore. The key one is how to use AI, and it’s noticeable to me that I’m a slower adopter than my younger coworkers.

I had a goal of learning to play the accordion at some point when I was less busy with children. Two years ago, I realized: “I might not live to be an empty nester. AI might end everything before I learn to play the accordion.” I bought an accordion and I play it badly.

The rest of my family is gracious about this, except my cat who bites my leg when I play high notes.

I have more institutional knowledge

In part because of trying out a bunch of things earlier in my life, I have experience that’s useful to a lot of projects and situations. Psychology would call this crystalized intelligence, as opposed to fluid intelligence where I’m past my peak.

I have fewer new experiences

I’m in more of a bubble than I once was. My social brain feels full, and I don’t seek novelty here. Compared to before I had kids, I don’t go to activities like social dances where I meet a lot of new people. Social work used to expose me to people with very different life experiences and world views.

This is a disadvantage for my job because I don’t have an up-to-date sense of what it’s like to be, say, a college student. It’s good that there are younger people on my team who have different experiences than mine.

My schedule has long-term relationships built in

• Jeff and I don’t have a lot of one-on-one time, but we have some time to talk most days.
• Our family goes to my father-in-law’s house each week for dinner with twelve kids and grownups from Jeff’s extended family.
• I have weekly friend calls with 3 friends from the effective altruism space.
• My extended household has dinner together 4 times a week (with Jeff, me, our kids, housemate, neighbor and her kid).
• Folk dance practice is most weeks, and we go to the bar afterwards for social catching up and gossip.
• Jeff and I host monthly effective altruism dinners.

My social energy is pretty full with my family, and I don’t make time to develop new friendships. Having these times built into my week is really helpful.

I’m less hardcore about everything

Predictably, I got less radical. A lot of my time and effort goes to projects aimed at impact, but I don’t feel it emotionally in the way I did in my teens and twenties.

Adapted from my post “Still donating half”:
If Jeff and I were just now discovering the idea of effective giving, we wouldn’t likely end up in a place of donating half, or taking a huge salary cut — and even less likely both.

Because we started early with “make the world better” as a goal of our life together,

• Donating is default / automatic for us; we put some attention each year toward whether to change the amount, but typically more attention toward where to donate. It’s part of our identity, partly because of taking the Giving What We Can pledge and through being public about our decisions.
• We’ve both encouraged each other to consider and take jobs that would increase our impact, even if the pay is lower.

I baked in a life with more stability and less impact

If Jeff and I weren’t married to each other and hadn’t put down roots in Boston, we both would have moved to the Bay for work at some point. We likely would have had a higher impact there in many ways. But I also haven’t burnt out and quit my job, so ::shrug::

The kids take less of my attention

The hardest period of parenting for me was when we had a baby and a toddler. After each baby, the first year of sleep deprivation was always hard for me cognitively. I’m glad that I did the physically hardest years of parenting while I was younger.

I found it got easier each time the youngest child got to about 18 or 24 months, and they could be unsupervised in a room without me feeling they might swallow an object and die. Now my youngest child is five and needs less supervision each year.

Each of the children have had health or mental health situations that have been a medium project for me. (Eating disorder, orthodontics, food allergy, toilet training problems.) But none of them have needed the kind of serious ongoing care that some of my friend’s children need. 

Health: still good so far

I think about how to preserve my health and mobility as I age.

• Getting down on the floor with my kids, and doing physical play like running around the playground with them
• Movement breaks during my workday
• Getting in steps / physical activity even though I’m not be a gym person
• In the type of folk dance I do, knee injuries are a common reason people can’t dance anymore. I’m trying to do exercises that keep my knees stabilized.
• I love sugar, but I try to budget it and spread it out. Dark chocolate with nuts is the best ratio of enjoyment to sugar for me.
• I don’t like most produce that much, but I’m more consistent about eating it if it’s frozen spinach/frozen fruit than if I need to eat it before it goes bad. 

Menopause will be a whole thing, but I’m not there yet. 

My biggest uncertainty about the future: AI

I think we’re probably living in a period of normalcy before things get very strange. The first half of my (statistical) life has gone pretty predictably, but I expect the second half to get weird.

When I blow out my birthday candles, I wish for a good future for my kids. I’m glad Jeff is working to reduce one type of catastrophic outcome. My work is aimed at supporting a community that’s working toward better outcomes. If you’re not already working on something related, consider it.