The Midlife Crisis Has Gone Missing, and Nobody Fixed Midlife

For decades, one of the most repeated findings in the study of wellbeing was that life dips in the middle. Unhappiness rose through your thirties, peaked somewhere around fifty and then eased. Researchers called it the unhappiness hump. Everyone else called it the midlife crisis.

In August 2025, a paper in the journal PLOS One reported that the hump has gone.

The economist David Blanchflower and his colleagues looked at surveys of more than ten million American adults going back to 1993, tens of thousands of British households, and nearly two million people in 44 countries. In the recent data the old pattern isn’t there. Mental ill-being is now highest among the young and falls steadily with age.

You might take that as good news for anyone in their forties or fifties.

It isn’t, quite.

The authors are clear about what happened. Middle-aged people didn’t get happier. The hump disappeared because the young got so much worse that their distress now rises above everyone else’s. The middle looks better only because of what it’s being compared with.

I think there’s something in this for anyone trying to make sense of the middle years, and especially for people of faith.

We’ve been given a story about midlife that’s all drama. You’re supposed to have a crisis, buy the sports car and leave the marriage. And church has its own version, which is that by now you should have arrived and be settled and certain.

Most people in the middle of life are living neither story. They aren’t in crisis and they don’t feel they’ve arrived. They have a job, ageing parents, teenagers, a body that has started to complain, and a faith that still matters to them but doesn’t feel the way it did at twenty-five. Nothing is on fire, and nothing is finished either.

That condition doesn’t have a name, and so it doesn’t get much attention. Sermons tend to be for the seeker or the sufferer. Not many are written for someone who’s just ordinarily and persistently tired after twenty years of believing.

And yet that’s where most of an adult life is spent. If faith has nothing to say there, it has nothing to say to most people most of the time.

So I don’t think the useful question about midlife is how to avoid a crisis. It’s what a faith looks like when it’s built for the long middle and expects to still be growing at fifty.

That’s the territory Diane Cooper writes about in Faith for the Middle of Life. Her book is for people who are no longer in crisis but no longer content with easy answers either.

Here’s what I’d like to hear from those of you in the middle. Was your faith harder to hold in the dramatic years, or in the ordinary ones?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN2954Y6

#Faith, #Midlife, #ChristianLiving, #SpiritualGrowth, #Wellbeing, #MentalHealth, #Ageing, #Discipleship, #Purpose, #Grace, #DianeCooper