Middle Age: It's not what is was!

Nowadays it's about adjusting and resetting not a segway to being old and retired.

When we tell people “I’m in my “fifties” these days, we no longer mean “I’m getting old” in the way our parents or grandparents would have understood it. Middle age now carries a different shape, a different texture, than it did for them. Our parents’ mid-life might have involved manual labour, rigid routines or the certainty of a retiring mindset. Ours, by contrast, is more brain-work, more service, more juggling. Yet, paradoxically, the demands on us are also more complicated: longer dependences, dual care, shifting expectations. In short: middle age is not what it was.

Work: from spade to spreadsheet
If our parents had said “I’m knackered” at fifty, they probably meant they had manually laboured, or undertaken physically demanding activities and their bodies were fatigued. These days? My weariness comes from five hours of Zoom calls, strategy meetings, paperwork, service metrics, or thinking through customer journeys. The nature of work has shifted: far fewer of us are in purely manual or primarily physically intensive roles, and far more are in knowledge, customer service, healthcare, education, administration, support or creative sectors.
The “hard graft” is often mental and emotional now. Yet it is still hard graft. As organisations manage five generations in the workplace simultaneously, the need for intergenerational empathy has increased—each cohort approaches work differently. Older workers are often valued for their experience and institutional memory, but also sometimes caricatured as “not tech-savvy” or “slow to change.” Meanwhile younger people may be stereotyped as restless or entitled. Those stereotypes, though, no longer hold cleanly—as one People Management article put it, we may now be seeing a “generational war” over how we communicate, what we expect of work, and whose styles dominate.
Because our bodies are generally healthier, thanks to better medicine, nutrition and preventive care, many of us can continue working longer. In the UK today, there are a growing number of people working past the age of 65 -11.5 % apparently do so, double the proportion compared with two decades ago. The default retirement age was removed in 2011, and fewer of us are leaving in a neat “clock-off” moment.

Health, longevity and improved expectations

We also benefit from a healthier baseline. Our grandparents might have wrestled with worse dental health, less effective treatments for heart disease or fewer preventative screenings. By contrast, we have better early diagnosis, better chronic disease management, and greater public health expectations. While it’s certainly not perfect, our generation has better odds of living active, engaged lives well into later decades.
So when someone over fifty complains of creaky knees or slower recovery, it’s not the same as what our grandparents would have accepted as “normal.” Expectations have changed. And that is part of how middle age has changed: I expect more of my body, and health care gives me more back than their era did.

Dependence extended: children, education and delay

Yet while our health and careers may be “better,” the dependences on us stretch longer than ever.
Our parents’ generation would have expected her children to be financially independent by sixteen or eighteen. Many in their generation left school at 16, entered an apprenticeship or trade, and began earning. Today, however, young people often stay in full-time education until 18 (or beyond), and many proceed to university—some doing postgraduate study. That pushes the age of financial independence further and further out.
In fact, recent surveys suggest that many parents expect their children to remain reliant well into their twenties—or even later. One report claimed that about 1 % of parents believe their children might never truly become financially independent. Meanwhile, rising tuition, rent, living costs and job competition mean that “bank of Mum and Dad” is more active than ever—even after our children graduate.
This extension of dependency puts extra strain on the middle-aged. Many of us continue to assist our children’s housing, further education, or career starts well past what might have been our parents’ midlife. Some, I confess, have delayed their own retirement plans or pulled funds from pensions to help. Indeed, research by Rathbones suggests that one in three parents in the UK now postpone retirement to support children through university.

The sandwich squeezes: caring up and down

And as our children need longer support, so too do our parents. We are caught in the classic “sandwich generation” squeeze, receiving care from neither side. Yes, life expectancy is higher, so many parents live into a greater span of frailty or health needs. But because social care systems are pressured, more of the responsibility falls to us: personal visits, transport, medical appointments, household maintenance, or emotional support.
Charities have warned that millions worry they will be unable to afford to care for ageing parents. Over 60 % of those aged 40–60 consider care a financial burden, and many fear they don’t even know how to start. In short: care is not merely a matter of time, but of capacity, knowledge, and money.
Between the children, the career, and the parents, some of us feel under siege by responsibility. The emotional guilt—am I doing enough for my mum? Am I giving my daughter fair support?—can weigh heavily.

Culture, stereotypes—and changed identities

It used to be that a fifty-year-old was “getting old.” They might expect to slow down, fade into retirement habits, take up gardening, Golf or a modest social life. But we now see fifty-somethings running marathons, pivoting careers, doing startups, writing books, or becoming influencers on social media (-yes please!). A fifty-year-old woman might not retreat to tea dresses and cardigans—she’s more likely to be in a gym, be doing a podcast, redecorating the house, or returning to work after childcare.

Take Doris Day or Barbara Cartland—names from my mother’s era. Their images projected gentility or genteel retirement. Today’s icons for older age are very different: think Joanna Lumley (still campaigning), or Sir Michael Palin (still travelling), or even later-life contestants on Strictly Come Dancing. The public image of middle age is more active, more youthful, more “not done yet.”
Stereotypes of “middle-aged crisis,” the man buying a sports car, or midlife inertia still persist in jokes—but they feel more like a caricature than truth. Many of us aren’t downsizing or retreating; we are investing in new phases of life, continuing to learn, pivoting, or reimagining second acts.
What’s next: a new midlife, new bargain
So what does it mean, “middle age is not what it was”? It means that while we might have more financial, medical and cultural resources than our parents did, we also carry more extended obligations. Our careers might last longer. Our bodies are expected to last longer. But our dependents stretch upward and downward—the children not yet fully free, the parents needing support.
We are entering into a more nuanced, more precarious, and more dynamic midlife. It’s not retirement-adjacent: it is adjacency to possibility and burden in equal measure. And with that, we may need new norms: policies that help with elder care, student debt relief, flexible working for middle age, better social care infrastructure.

Middle age now is the decade of doing, of managing, of juggling—and of redefining what “later life” might look like. It is not a burden, but it is a complex chapter, richer in both reward and demand than any that came before.

More than anything “Middle Age” is now less the segway from active life to slower retired age than an age where we should start to realise our intentions and ambitions, taking care not to get over-whelmed from life’s complexities whilst building the bridges we need to have a clear perspective on the options and possibilities for active and happy golden years when they arrive – a mid-life adjustment rather than a mid-life crisis.

We have prepared a Midlife Review Workbook

drawing on the best ideas from The Midlife Review (Butler & Watts), Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Setiya), and Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon (Jamieson), with influence from the Midlife Mentors and Magnificent Midlife podcasts (details below).

It’s structured into five sections, each with reflective prompts and short exercises you can complete privately, with a partner, or even as part of a peer group. The idea isn’t to “solve” midlife, but to re-frame it as an opportunity for design, not decline.

Books

The Midlife Review: A Guide to Work, Wealth and Wellbeing by Steve Butler & Tony Watts
This is a very practical, UK-oriented guide to doing a “midlife review” in the career, financial and wellbeing dimensions. It helps you reflect on where you are, how to realign work and life goals, and plan for the next phase. In particular it looks at how workplaces might support “second acts” and how employees (and leaders) can structure these reviews.
Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya
This is less about checklists and more about grappling with meaning, value and identity in the middle years. Setiya treats mid-life as an “existential” stage — one in which people often feel tension between past aspirations and present realities — and he draws on philosophy (Stoicism, existentialism, Buddhist thought) to offer ways to reframe this stage. Reviewers note it doesn’t descend into airy abstraction: it applies philosophical ideas to how to live well now.

Midlife: Humanity’s Secret Weapon by Andrew Jamieson
Jamieson argues that the “midlife crisis” is not a pathology but a developmental transition — a kind of rite of passage that can become a turning point if we engage it wisely. He combines psychology, cultural history and case studies to help readers see midlife as a source of creative potential, not merely risk.

Podcasts

The Midlife Mentors Podcast
Hosted by James and Claire Davis, this podcast takes a no-nonsense, grounded approach to midlife issues. It covers topics like relationships, purpose, money, transitions — useful when you want to hear how others are navigating the same dilemmas.

Magnificent Midlife Podcast
While it is oriented especially toward women, this is a rich source of stories, ideas and reflective prompts. The host (Rachel Lankester) interviews women doing interesting things in midlife, challenging cultural stereotypes (i.e. “we’re not over the hill”) and offering perspectives on growth, reinvention and acceptance.