Generally, by the time people reach their 40s, they may feel like things are falling apart. They experience what is often termed a ‘midlife crisis’. It is not always easy to say what really is falling apart, and there may be no single reason. This period can be accompanied by a strange sense of unhappiness: a feeling of missed opportunities, of a life unlived, and of an uncertain future.
Several things may be true at once. There may be ennui with a familiar role or relationship. Often, a career that felt promising may suddenly begin to feel like a dead-end. Responsibilities tend to add up, as both older and younger people increasingly depend on middle-aged people. Then, there is also the shock of staring into the mirror and seeing more grey hairs, a visible paunch, wrinkles on the face - all reminders of a youth gone by.
But what feels like one big crisis may actually be an accumulation of smaller doubts that have been building over the years and have simply not been acknowledged.
An opportunity
In her recent book, Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife (Simon and Schuster), however, lifespan developmental psychologist Margie Lachman tries to change the way we look at midlife. First, she refutes the stigma attached to age. She says there are many types of age - biological, social, and psychological. Biological age refers to our physical health and the ageing process of our bodies. Social age refers to the roles we take on, such as being a parent, caregiver, partner, or professional. Psychological age is arguably the most personal - it’s about how old we perceive ourselves to be. As she writes, “Individual markers of midlife can fluctuate over time.”
Second, far from a crisis, Lachman, who has said in interviews that she “loved midlife”, believes that this time of life can in fact be a blessing in disguise. She writes that it is a period for us to learn from older people’s mistakes and help the younger people avoid the same mistakes. She stresses the point that midlife is actually our “primetime” and regards the concept of age as subjective.
Middle age in literature
The phenomenon of the midlife crisis is not just a modern shorthand for the stress of adulthood. Many works of fiction have captured the restlessness associated with this stage of life. Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973; Vintage) is one such book. A 40-year-old mother of four, Kate Brown finds herself strangely unmoored when her family goes away for the summer and the roles that had defined her begin to loosen. Her encounter with the much younger Maureen further places two stages of womanhood side by side. Kate’s crisis, then, is not simply about how old she is, but about how old she feels and who she is when the familiar roles of wife, mother, and caregiver begin to shift. In many ways, Kate embodies what Lachman calls social and psychological age in Primetime: chronological age alone cannot explain the midlife experience. Perhaps midlife becomes a crisis not when life changes, but when the identities that once made sense of it no longer do.
The midlife crisis is often seen as a gendered idea and is mostly associated with women. But men, too, find themselves caught in the same uncertainties: about ageing, relationships, work, identity, and the lives they have built. Benjamin Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives (2025; Faber and Faber), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, gives the male midlife crisis both a literal and metaphorical U-turn. At 55, Tom Layward experiences emotional turmoil: a strained marriage haunted by his wife’s betrayal 12 years earlier, and a controversy over pronoun use at his university that unsettles his career. His health, too, poses concerns, with unexplained symptoms such as palpitations, fatigue, and facial swelling. For Tom, the crisis involves several problems unfolding at once. And what does he do to deal with all these problems? He takes to the road.
Room for experimentation
Each of the three titles has a common running theme: the lack of fulfilment, but also rays of hope.
The Summer Before the Dark uses summer as a motif for the period before the darkness sets in - it is a space of transition and possibility. The title of Markovits’s book - The Rest of Our Lives - itself carries the feeling of possibility: there is still a ‘rest’ of our lives, and perhaps still time to decide what kind of life we want to live.
Primetime, of course, completes the circle. Lachman asks us to embrace midlife not as the beginning of a crisis, but as an opportunity to begin again. She emphasises that there are nonnormative influences - experiences that affect an individual but are not common to everyone - and contextual influences, such as one’s environment and culture. Midlife, she says, can be a stage when we are relieved of certain responsibilities and find room for experimentation - in a relationship, a career, a new hobby, and new friendships. It could be the period when our lives take a turn for the better - and hence, midlife can simply be our primetime.
(Pragya Mittal is a Delhi-based editor and writer)