Nappies, hefty mortgages, little job security: What being 40 means today

Along with Cluedo, my favourite board game as a child was an incongruous choice called Life Begins At 40. Players competed to dispatch their children from home, pay off a mortgage and climb to the top of the corporate ladder. The goal was to attain the carefree demeanour of the characters on the box, who toted brick-sized phones and zoomed off in a red sports car from a house with a PAID sign on it.

Rather than preparing to become empty nesters, many of today’s 40-year-olds will be having their first child.Credit: iStock

Naturally, the titular notion of life beginning at 40 was beside the point for 15-year-old me; 40 was, for all intents and purposes, as old as the old lady at the end of Titanic. The fact the Beatles were done before any of them turned 30 did not strike me at the time as preposterous. (It now strikes me as obscene.) Adulthood was just one large blob of boringness, whereas the difference between 9th and 10th grade was immense.

Approaching my 40th birthday this year, I see how defensive “life begins at 40” sounds – as cringey as a needlepoint throw pillow reading “Desserts is ‘stressed’ backwards” or Madonna, at 64, still thinking fishnet stockings are inherently shocking.

Soon a lot of us will be 40. I don’t just mean us elder Millennials. By 2032-33, thanks to a combination of longer lives and fewer births, the median Australian age will reach a high of 40.1. (It’s about 38 right now.) And how different midlife will look for that generation than what was depicted in the ’90s board game!

The 2021 census revealed the lowest home-ownership rate for young people since the postwar period.

For a start: far from waving farewell to fully fledged adult children, many of those 40-year-olds will be changing nappies. Since 1999, the rate of women aged 40-44 giving birth has almost doubled.

Rare will be the 40-year-old in the 2030s who has a mortgage paid off; house ownership itself may be going the way of the dinosaurs. The 2021 census revealed the lowest home-ownership rate for young people since the postwar period; the proportion of 25- to 29-year-olds with mortgages has dropped from half in the late ’90s to below 40 per cent today. Even the idea of a career may be evaporating.

A majority of young Australians in a recent survey believed job prospects in their field were not very strong. The ladder – and the security and stability that represents – has been replaced by a lattice, where any professional move is considered alongside quality-of-life concerns.

The board game Life Begins At 40.

In my own cohort of peers, born in the early- to mid-1980s, there’s a common theme that COVID has killed our ambition. One friend is leaving law to become a social worker; another is eschewing a glitzy PR job to work on a goat farm. A number of friends are having their first child shortly after they turn 40 and declaring themselves “one and done” because their two-bedroom apartment is at capacity.

I can’t help but feel a frisson of excitement about the decade I’m about to enter. Maybe it’s naive, but I look forward to caring less about things that are not important, spending more time with people who are and stepping off the roller-coaster of anxiety and elation that defines youth. The mortgage remains a work in progress.

Life may or may not begin at 40, but Foreign Correspondence – this column – is coming to an end this week. I’ve been grateful for your companionship these past six years. Thank you for spending your Saturday mornings with me.

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