Midlife crisis: Generation X turns to health retreats and hikes
Forget the sports car and trophy spouse, Generation Xers celebrate 50 and beyond with a health retreat or a wilderness hike.
Tom Finn, a 57-year-old baby boomer, celebrated his 50th birthday with a raucous trip to Las Vegas.
He and his friends went ziplining, nightclubbing and played blackjack at swim-up tables in a pool at Caesars Palace.
“I was a frat boy wanting to relive my college youth,” he says.
But when his wife, Debbie Finn, a 50-year-old Generation Xer, hit the milestone birthday, she marked it by hiking four to six hours a day in Portugal and Spain.
“I knew I wanted to be hiking and to be outside,” she says. “I’m much more aware of my health now.”
Generation Xers, who now range in age from about 40 to 55, are redefining the rules of the midlife reinvention. Forget the trappings of the stereotypical midlife crisis: the sports car, the trophy spouse and general bad behaviour. Now it’s more likely to be yoga, meditation retreats and keto diets.
Welcome to the virtuous midlife crisis.
Many people facing midlife now don’t want to blow up their lives, just upgrade them. They tended to marry and have children later.
Compared with earlier generations, people at midlife today are less likely to feel as if they missed out on having fun.
Instead, often they are more worried about staying healthy enough to see their children graduate high school.
Travel boom
Doctors, health resorts, meditation teachers and adventure travel companies say they are seeing growing numbers of people in their 40s and early 50s seeking to change their lives after having a midlife epiphany.
The Virtuoso network of travel agencies has seen an uptick in people marking midlife with “carpe diem” trips to remote or physically challenging destinations such as Antarctica or Machu Picchu, Virtuoso spokeswoman Misty Belles says.
Butterfield & Robinson, an operator of high-end biking and hiking trips, says that in the past five years it has had a 20 per cent increase in bookings by Gen Xers celebrating milestone birthdays or other special events.
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And 60 per cent of Gen Xers who said they made new year’s resolutions this year plan to focus on “being more physically active”, according to a recent survey commissioned by Planet Fitness, a chain of gyms.
Of course, behaviours don’t always follow rigid generational divisions. Plenty of midlifers now still act out in rebellious ways, and there have always been people who adopted healthier habits as they aged.
But there is a growing awareness of how lifestyle influences health that is shaping many mid-lifers’ decisions, doctors say.
More research has shown how diet and exercise can play a role in the prevention of diseases such as cancer, heart disease and even dementia, information that may be spurring middle-aged patients to turbocharge efforts to improve their health, says Robert McLean, an internal medicine physician and rheumatologist at Northeast Medical Group of Yale New Haven Health and president of the American College of Physicians.
Ageing gets harder
Many people in their 40s and early 50s simply can’t afford an old-school midlife crisis. Their early working lives were defined by the recession of the early 1990s. Many were starting families and trying to buy homes when the 2008 economic downturn hit. Only about one-third of Gen Xers have greater wealth than their parents did at the same age, according to a 2014 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. And the typical Gen Xer has six times more debt.
“The midlife journey will be more difficult for a good chunk of them because of heightened problems of inequality,” says Carol Ryff, director of the Institute on Ageing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator of a large study on midlife in the US. She points to a recent rise in “deaths of despair” among middle-aged adults driven in part by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicide.
Wellness industry
At the same time, Gen X’s move into middle age dovetails with the growth of the wellness industry that encompasses everything from Botox and snack food to sleep apps
“Almost every woman I know is in the middle of trying something, a cleanse or a new mindfulness app on their phone or yoga or Pilates,” says Ada Calhoun, 43, author of the new book Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Calhoun argues that today’s middle-aged women are exhausted and overwhelmed largely because of job insecurity, debt and unrealistic expectations around work and family life.
Finn, whose 50th birthday hiking trip was organised by the travel company Backroads, says her own parents’ struggle with health problems as they age has pushed her to be more proactive with her own health. “I’ve watched how some of the choices they make impacts their mobility and their quality of life,” she says.
Canyon Ranch, which operates destination spas that offer preventive healthcare services, says it is seeing more midlife clients who are beginning to feel the signs of ageing. “There’s the general sense that I can’t get away with what I used to get away with. Or it’s the personal wake-up call. The cholesterol reading, the high blood pressure, the being overweight,” says Jim Eastburn, Canyon Ranch’s corporate director for transformational wellness.
Middle-aged guests also have a “greater sense of urgency around mindfulness”, he says.
AJ Schneider can pinpoint the exact moment his virtuous midlife crisis began. It was two years ago, when he was 46, and he was attending the funeral of a high school classmate in his home town, Buffalo, New York.
“When somebody you know so well who is your age passes away, you get pretty introspective,” says Schneider, an executive vice-president at Wheaton Van Lines in Indianapolis.
He considered his long-time diet of pizza and chicken wings — and the Lipitor he had already been taking for high cholesterol for a decade. He thought of his two daughters, then aged 12 and 15. “The last thing you want to imagine is them left without a parent,” he says.
Schneider stopped eating most carbohydrates and refined sugar. He practised intermittent fasting, eating for only a limited number of hours each day, and took up running. He has lost 19kg and no longer has to take Lipitor, he says.
Now, Schneider looks forward to celebrating his daughters’ high school graduations by “climbing a mountain or going skiing or something like that”.
People begin to rack up losses — of their parents, professional dreams, the ability to fit into their skinny jeans. Health problems can emerge and you become more aware that time is limited. This midlife re-evaluation is healthy and normal, Shapiro says. It becomes a full-on crisis when people “don’t deal with the rebalancing very well”, he says.
Midlife myth
The stereotypical midlife crisis may be more of a pop culture myth anyway, says Ryff. She says there’s not much scientific evidence that an actual midlife crisis, where you “change the basic structure of your life and the people in it is to be an expected thing”. That was true even when baby boomers were in their 40s and early 50s, she says.
On her 50th birthday, Kye Jackson started a life bucket list: take a woodworking class, learn a good joke, read every book that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and run marathons in all 50 states are among the entries. (She already has logged races in 32 states.) She keeps the list on her phone and checks it regularly.
“I try to really stay focused” on the goals, says Jackson, now 51 and a stay-at-home mother in Austin, Texas.
Her middle-aged list is markedly different from the one she wrote in high school and found recently titled “Things I want to do before I die”. That one included learn Spanish (check) and meet Duran Duran lead singer Simon Le Bon (“I never did,” she says).
And her midlife goals have to fit into her life as a busy married mother of two children aged 13 and 14, she says. “I can’t leave my husband, not logistically,” she jokes. “I can’t go out and buy a two-seater car. I have to drive kids around.”
The biggest goal on Jackson’s list is to hike the entire 3500km Appalachian Trail, something she plans to do when her younger child graduates high school. She already has picked out her trail name, the monikers hikers choose for themselves: Sweetwater.
The Wall Street Journal
Read an extract from Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun in The Weekend Australian Magazine