Everybody goes through what people "the mid-life crisis," but is that really real, or is it just psychological?
A new study at the University of Melbourne explained that most people are usually unhappy/unsatisfied with how our lives turn out somewhere during our early forties. Our level of satisfaction becomes ultimately low to a point where we let ourselves think there's no more hope to how we're feeling and how our life is going, but will slowly recover from it as years pass.
The researchers said that this paper studies the lives of thousands of randomly selected people over a period of time in different countries around the world. They said they provide what seems to be the first longitudinal (fixed effects) multi-country proof that there are scientific explanations to believe that midlife "crisis" really does exist.
The concept of a midlife crisis is often times associated with Elliott Jaques, a psychoanalyst and management consultant who studied the careers of artistic geniuses. This started during his investigation about artists like Dante and Gaugin. He noticed a common pattern of struggles these artists went through during their middle years.
In 1965, he published a book entitled; "Death and the Midlife Crisis," where he sketched how men and women realize that their life may be coming to an end between the age 35 and 50. This is due to the human brain's instinct that death is not that far from happening and is growing near. These people start to feel discontented with what they have accomplished and worry about the goals they may or may not reach. This even became an issue after a soap opera adapted the theory. Unhappy and disappointed middle aged men started divorcing their wives and bought sports car, while middle aged women started affairs with pool boys.
But ever since Jaques first came up with this theory, that had been critics questioning the midlife crisis. Psychologists at the University of Zurich stated in a 2009 paper that the evidence were not enough to support Jaques' hypothesis.
