Reframing Adulthood

5 minute read

I have a feeling you’re going to be hearing a lot about Maureen Gaffney’s new book; Your One Wild and Precious Life: An Inspiring Guide to Becoming Your Best Self At Any Age.

I’m only a day into it and I’ve already ordered it for some friends and family. It’s not a self-help book, Maureen is a world-renowned psychologist and it’s science-based, but it has already helped this self, quite a lot.

The blurb describes it as a “ground-breaking new framework for embracing middle age and beyond. Middle-age is cross-roadsy – having arrived, you’re looking back in wonder about how you got here, and also looking ahead, thinking- where to next? The realisation that neither time nor choices are limitless is both daunting and exciting – this is the moment to take stock and figure out how to make the best of every precious moment of your second act.”

It's a life-affirming read, especially if you’re in or approaching middle age with the ‘what now’ mentality that so many of us have.

Middle age, as it’s been set for years, always seemed to arrive at about 40 and you were counting down the years left from there. But when we’re all living longer lives and working for more years, why has it not been reset? Maureen believes it should be. She wrote in her column in the Irish Times recently that “Reaching adulthood takes so long that you have to negotiate a new in-between life stage, emerging adulthood, which extends from the end of adolescence to the late 20s or even early 30s. This new stage exerts upward pressure on the timing of all the rest, which now start and finish later. Young adulthood does not properly begin until your early 30s and extends well into your late 40s, which in turn means that middle-age does not begin until around the age of 50 and then lasts into your late 60s.”

As a 43-year-old woman, I am thrilled, I am still in my young adulthood. Everything seems much more possible now. On a car journey recently my husband and I were singing along to songs we were playing on Spotify. It was one of those lovely family car trip moments and it made my heart sing. “Do you feel old?” I asked him because at that moment I felt young and fun, but I was thinking of my parents at 43. They were definitely more adult than I am now. But it’s different. Their life trajectory was almost set in stone for them. Married in their 20s, a family, one good job, retirement at 60 or 65 at the latest, some cruises, and the garden.

I expect, unless there’s some Lotto win, to be working well past 65, I’ve already had seven full-time jobs and I imagine there’ll be many more and I have big plans for the years ahead. I don’t feel fully ready to be a ‘good adult’, the way that they were, but I have recently been aware of my age and responsibilities and to some extent, the creeping shadow of time left.

Maureen’s book has come then at the right time for me, some of it feels written especially for where I am now, but I suspect every reader will feel that way.

Reframing our 40s and beyond is, unsurprisingly, something I have been reading a lot about. It feels like a complete shift in the way we mark our lives. When life expectancy has risen so much there needs to be a reassessment of what is young.

Maureen also says that redefining our later years is important and that she is now calling the mid-60s, into the early 70s, late adulthood and believes that old age only truly starts much later and possibly only when prolonged periods of ill health kick in.

I can see this in my own parents who, just one year away from their 80s, are busy, vital, fit, fun people, still craving new experiences, travel and good times.

In her book, Maureen says that “you can also reset your story and direct your development on to a new course. You begin to see that your life, like every life, is not linear. Instead, it is characterised by advances and setbacks, lapses and gains, and that they are all part of the developmental process that made, and is still making, you the person that you are.”

We have been living in a world that is no longer linear. Plans have had to change, what we thought would happen was completely turned on its head. It has, of course, been devastating but now that we’re, hopefully, on our way to finding our way out of this, is it time to change the way we think about a linear life with milestones that must be reached and social norms adhered to? Packing up your laptop to do your job from a cliffside in Portugal? Great. Writing your first book at 60? Absolutely. Getting married for the first time in your 50s or happily divorced because it’s the right thing to do for both of you? Perfect.

If we’re made by our experiences, shouldn’t they be the best ones that we can imagine for ourselves? It is the time to turn everything we know about a linear life on its head and embrace what makes us happy. Bills must still be paid but there might be a better way to make that money. There might be a better country for you to live in. There might be better choices for us all to make. Because you’re on a treadmill doesn’t mean that you can’t get off it and find a new way to walk towards your future. Because, after all, if you’re in your 40s or 50s, you’re still a young adult.

Jennifer Stevens, September 2021