Nobody Warned Us That Midlife Would Feel Like This

I recently wrote a piece about how so many women my age are secretly (or not so secretly, in some cases) fantasizing about blowing up our lives and starting over. Finally going all in on that bookstore we’re always joking with our friends about opening. But the longer I sat with that itch, the more I realized the bookstore is just a symptom. The actual thing underneath it is something even more mysterious: I’m standing here, in the literal middle of my own life, wondering why it doesn’t feel anything like I thought it would.

I know I’m not alone in this.

So, I asked some experts whether it’s normal to feel this blindsided by a time in your life you can see coming from a mile away, and the resounding answer was yeah, actually — and there are some pretty specific reasons why. Here’s what they had to share.

This Wasn’t In The Brochure

When I started really picking apart my expectations for midlife, I realized something: I didn’t actually know what to expect. People talk about midlife, but only in the vaguest sense. It’s this big amorphous thing looming on the horizon that seems to get further away the closer we get… until, one day, it’s right there.

"One of the factors in midlife feeling different than expected is that we didn't have enough lived experience to accurately anticipate it," says Meredith Sjoberg, a psychologist with a PhD in counseling psychology and a perimenopause certification, who works full-time with women in midlife. "And another main factor is that those older than us didn't really talk to us about it."

Think of it this way, she says: "Adolescents can often pretty accurately imagine what college is going to feel like because so many people talk about it, relive it, etc. But very few people talk to their younger counterparts about what midlife feels like."

And she’s right. We get such a detailed rundown on pretty much every other season. People narrate the hell out of adolescence, weddings, having a baby, the first trimester, the fourth trimester, the toddler and threenage and teenage years. By the time you reach each of those destinations, you kind of have a rough map to guide you.

But midlife? We’re walking in cold. Which is why, I think, we get to this stage and speak of it in terms of surprise.

Licensed mental health counselor Dr. Evelyn Pavlova, who's navigating her own midlife (she'll be 45 this year), told me she can't even call it "different than expected" because she had no expectations to measure it against. "I'd never been here before. Over the years, I'd heard all kinds of stories about midlife, some of them pretty scary, and now that I'm here, some have turned out to be true and others haven't. I'm still figuring out my own version."

In other words, we're all just out here winging it.

Our Parents Made Midlife Look Like a Pottery Barn Catalog

On the other side of the vagueness surrounding midlife is something even more frustrating: the fact that midlife for our parents looked very different than midlife does for us. And that’s not on us; that’s on the way society has shifted.

The actual lives of the adults I grew up watching appeared, for the most part, handled. They lived the white-picket-fence midlife fantasy we were sold our whole lives. The house (affordable, owned, sometimes on one income). The cars in the driveway with payments that didn’t look like a mortgage bill. Not having to worry about paying for their kids’ college because tuition wouldn’t put you in debt for decades (and when it did, we were the ones taking out the loans).

It was the whole casserole-in-the-oven stability of it all. That was the impression we absorbed: That by 40-something, you’ve arrived. You’re settled. And then a lot of us got to our 40s and realized that just isn’t necessarily the case anymore.

As Sjoberg points out, "The societal changes, particularly the economic ones, have made it harder for those currently in midlife to enjoy the same aspects of life their parents may have."

Meaning, this disorientation we’re feeling is not a personal failing. We’re not worse at adulting than the adults before us were (no matter what Fox News or your boomer parents would have you believe). Rather, the same milestones — the house, the breathing room, the sense of making it — cost a different number now, against wages that did not rise to reflect the change.

So, we hit the age where we’re supposed to reach the promised land, only to discover those promises actually never landed.

Comparison Used to Stay in the Neighborhood

As if constantly measuring ourselves (and being measured by others) against our parents’ version of midlife weren’t enough, there’s an added layer of measuring ourselves against… well, everyone else. In real time.

Sjoberg alluded to this. "Back in the day, people would basically be surrounded by people who were in a similar socioeconomic category, and had less exposure to the 'Joneses,’” she says. “So they would be less prone to feel the same discontent that many may feel today."

Keeping up with the Joneses used to mean one family, one cul-de-sac, one slightly nicer car in the driveway perhaps. Now the Joneses are influencers doing shopping hauls and house tours of their 7,000-square-foot McMansion or “bringing you along” on their branded family beach vacation.

The comparison is no longer simply down the street. It’s in your hand, staring you in the face at 11 p.m. while you doomscroll with a bowl of cereal.

What does that mean? Oh, you know, we’re getting a double dose of “you’re behind” — once from the generation ahead of us, who had it easier in measurable ways, and once from a scrolling highlight reel of everyone else’s lives.

No wonder we feel so f*cking lost.

You're Not Imagining the Mental Load, Either

We’re truly also carrying more than ever. Pew Research found that 54% of Americans in their 40s have both a living parent age 65 or older and at least one child they’re raising or financially supporting. We’re holding up two generations at the precise moment when we were told we’d finally get to exhale.

And the strain of that is showing. APA's 2023 Stress in America survey found that women reported higher average stress than men (5.3 vs. 4.8 out of 10) and were more likely to rate their stress between 8 and 10 (27% vs. 21%). That same survey showed that adults ages 35 to 44 had the steepest rise in mental health diagnoses of any group, jumping from 31% in 2019 to 45% in 2023.

The Haven Detox’s Chief Clinical Officer, Dr. Sal Raichbach, a licensed clinical social worker and certified forensic social worker with more than 30 years in behavioral health, says the trick is to stop interpreting this as a dead end of some sort.

"Midlife can feel surprising because many women arrive there with a life that looks functional on the outside but no longer feels aligned on the inside," he told me. "Clinically, I don't view that as failure. I often see it as a period of psychological reassessment — where a person starts asking, 'Is this still the life I want, or just the life I built while meeting everyone else's expectations?'"

The Grief We Didn’t See Coming

The part of midlife that snuck up on me the most was how midlife requires you to say goodbye. To the me who could run on three hours of sleep. To the me who could go a million miles an hour without having to check the tank.

Pavlova described coming to terms with this, sharing, “It has felt like coming face-to-face with the fact that I can no longer hold on to old versions of myself. I tried for a while. I kept holding on physically, emotionally, mentally, socially. But eventually it became exhausting. What used to work wasn't working anymore."

However, Pavlova is also quick to point out that this doesn’t mean midlife is bad. It’s just… not the same. The truth is, even the good changes in life ask something of you, although that doesn’t make rolling with them any easier. “There’s a grieving process when you realize a chapter of your life is ending," she says, "even if the next chapter may ultimately be better suited for who you're becoming."

Where Does That Leave Us?

I’m not sure where that leaves us, but it’s not behind, no matter how inclined we are to believe that.

The bottom line is the brochure for midlife was always going to be wrong, because it was drawn from a different perspective. A different economy, a different time, a different generation. And that generation didn’t think to narrate the hard parts to us. We’re out here living a completely different midlife than they did. It’s more expensive, more sandwiched, more pressurized, and a lot less secure.

My biggest takeaway? We should be talking about all of this more. Out loud, to each other, to whoever’s coming up behind us.

A recent Reel I came across scrolling one night really stuck with me. It said, “The goal at 40 isn’t to look 25 but to make 25-year-olds excited to be 40.” So, I think the move here is to try to show the next batch of women the messy, beautiful reality of midlife as much as possible.

It’s different, and it’s definitely hard, but all the best things usually are.