Psychology says people who reach midlife and wonder “Is this it?” aren't necessarily having a crisis — they may be realizing that the life they keep meaning to live someday has quietly become the life they're living now

A friend rang me at two in the morning, Bangkok time, which meant it was a civilised hour wherever he was and a criminal one where I was. He was forty-six. He had the job, the flat, the marriage, the second car he didn’t need. He asked me, in the flat voice of a man reporting a gas leak, “Is this it?”

I didn’t have an answer. I’m not there yet myself, though I can see it from where I’m standing. So I went and read what the research says, mostly to work out whether he was cracking up or just paying attention.

He was paying attention.

The crisis you were promised

A psychoanalyst called Elliott Jaques coined the phrase “midlife crisis” in a paper in 1965, and the culture has been dining out on it ever since. The convertible. The affair. The leather jacket that suits nobody.

The data is less cinematic. Margie Lachman has spent three decades on the Midlife in the United States study, and when her team asked people over forty whether they’d had a midlife crisis, about a quarter said yes. Then came the awkward follow-up question. When researchers asked what had actually happened, people described divorces, redundancies, health scares, dying parents. A good number of those events fell before forty or after fifty.

So the crisis is real enough. It just isn’t a stage you queue up for at a set age. It’s ordinary bad luck that keeps no fixed schedule, labelled afterwards because the label was lying around.

The curve moved while everyone was arguing about it

For years the comforting reply was the happiness curve: life satisfaction sags through your thirties and forties, bottoms out around fifty, then climbs back. The economist David Blanchflower found that shape across 145 countries, with the low point in midlife. Hundreds of papers found something similar. Sit tight, the story went. The graph turns.

Here’s what doesn’t come up at dinner parties. That curve is coming apart. Blanchflower and colleagues reported in 2025 that in the US and UK, the U-shape has flattened into a simple upward slope. The cause is a collapse in young people’s wellbeing, not an improvement in midlife’s. Why is still contested: smartphones, the job market, and less stigma about admitting to feeling bad.

The old promise was only ever that midlife is the bottom and bottoms end, which is a much smaller promise than “midlife gets better.” If that shape can shift in twenty years, waiting for the graph to rescue you is a poor plan.

Someday is a storage unit

My grandfather kept a boat brochure in a drawer. Not a boat. A brochure. Soft from creasing, folded and refolded, moved between three houses over thirty years. He’d take it out occasionally and talk about the engine like a man discussing an old friend who had moved abroad.

He never bought the boat, and never seemed unhappy about it either. But I think about that drawer more than is healthy, because I have one too. Mine is a list in my phone, and it has been there since London. Learn to swim properly. Read the Russians. Call people instead of messaging them.

That’s what my friend had noticed at two in the morning: the life he kept meaning to get around to had quietly stopped being a plan and become a filing system.

Nothing dramatic happens on the day someday becomes storage. That’s exactly the problem. There’s no alarm.

What actually stays with people

Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec published a well-known finding in 1994: in the short run we regret the things we did, and in the long run we regret the things we didn’t. The bad decision stings now. The thing you never tried keeps its shine forever, because you never got to find out it was mediocre.

Later attempts to replicate that pattern have been mixed, so treat it as a strong hunch rather than settled law. A follow-up sharpens it, though. Gilovich and Shai Davidai asked hundreds of people to name their single biggest regret, and roughly three quarters named something connected to the person they’d hoped to become rather than the duties they felt they’d shirked. One set of studies, so hold it lightly. It still rings true.

Make someday smaller

The useless advice here is “follow your dreams,” which has never once helped anybody with a mortgage. Take one item off your list and shrink it until it fits inside an ordinary Tuesday.

You wanted to write. Fine. Not a book. Four hundred words, once, badly. You wanted to live somewhere else. Don’t sell the house. Spend a fortnight there in the worst month of the year, doing laundry and buying milk, and see if you still want it.

It gets you moving. It also lets a few items die honestly. I discovered I don’t want to learn the guitar. I want to have learned the guitar, which is a completely different desire and much cheaper to abandon once you’ve named it.

What I told my friend

I told him he was doing an audit. The timing was arbitrary. The finding was fine.

Then I asked which thing on his list he’d pick if he had to choose one this month. He went quiet for a while, which I took as a good sign, then named something small and slightly embarrassing.

He’s doing it now. Badly, by his own account. That’s the whole of it.