MIDDLE-AGED people may run the world, but you would hardly know it from their public image.
Film-makers and advertisers specialise in admiring portrayals of teens and twenty-somethings, but those in the middle decades of their lives are usually depicted as doing little more than serving time between the turbulence of youth and the decline of old age – and occasionally being tipped into crisis by the sheer ennui of their mundane existence.
The assumption that middle age is a pretty nondescript phase of life seems to have extended to scientists too: paediatricians and gerontologists abound, but there are few “middle-age-ologists”.
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But look past the spreading waistlines and the reading glasses and it becomes apparent that middle age is actually both rare and remarkable. Humans are the only animals to enjoy a lengthy post-reproductive, pre-decrepitude chapter in our lives. There’s a case to be made for looking at middle age as a developmental phase that is just as remarkable as the teenage years (see “Middle age: a cause for celebration not regret”). Appreciating that can only promote harmony – both for the middle-aged and for those who live with them.