Let’s talk middle-age: What the research says about being 47.2
In January 2019, my dad Scotty and I set out on a month-long road trip. We’d been planning it for months to coincide with a series of author talks I’d organised for A Hole in My Genes. In the beginning, we’d hoped to cross the famous Nullarbor Plain, driving from our hometown on the southwest coast of Victoria on the east coast of Australia, all the way over to Western Australia on the west coast. Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-eight miles or four thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine kilometers, either way, it’s a bloody long drive, you do the maths.
I call my dad Scotty, it’s his nickname. His real name is John, but in Scotland where he grew up he’s called Ian, go figure, and in Australia where he’s lived since he was sixteen-years old, he’s called Scotty. What can I say, Aussies aren’t very imaginative with their nicknames so, to me, he’s Scotty, except he says, when I want something then, he’s Dad. What you need to understand about Scotty is that he’s a retired long-haul truck driver who still acts as though any vehicle he’s driving is an eighteen-wheeler semi-trailer, driving slow and taking corners extra wide. He used to be gone for weeks on end in the truck until one day he walked up the driveway and my three-year-old sister announced, here comes that man again.
The most frustrating part of travelling with Scotty, is his belief that road trips are for driving and unless you’re getting maximum kilometers out of your day, you’re not doing it right. According to Scotty, sightseeing is a waste of valuable driving time and he has driven across the country in two days when it should take four at least, only to turn straight around and come back. Nothing to see here. It seems you can’t take the truckdriver out of the man.
We first became travel buddies during my early twenties when I decided to visit Scotland for the first time and considered how much more meaningful it would be if my dad were there to share it with me, to teach me about his, our, home. It would be his first and only trip back to his homeland since he’d left on a six-week sailing trip on the SS Oriana as a ‘Ten Bob Pom’ with his forty-year-old parents and little sister. They berthed in Fremantle, Western Australia, where my dad lost the lighter his grandfather had gifted him before they set sail for their new life. Later arriving in Melbourne with a phone number for a man with a job for my grandfather Jock in Warrnambool, the place my parents still live today. As far as I’ve always been concerned, my dad is a pioneer and I have always wanted to be just like him.
Our plans for the Western Australian road trip were thwarted by the fires that ravaged our country that summer and the Nullarbor became blocked, wreaking havoc on the transport of food and supplies into the state. Not to be put off, we merely altered our plans and flew to Perth instead, hiring a car once we arrived and instead of a cross-country road trip, we adapted and followed a wonderful loop of the spectacular pristine southwest coast of WA. Australia is a country of massive proportions that is impossible to comprehend until you need to drive from point A to point B and even though our tour now included a relatively small portion of the state, we were still in the car for nine hours on the first day. In the middle of nowhere and without internet access, we became accustomed to listening to the local ABC radio stations in the towns that we passed through and learned a lot, like how lobsters mate and how to check your dairy cattle for ticks, but the most interesting topic of all came on January 15th on our drive from Albany to Margaret River.
In the October before the January, I’d fallen into a funk. My first book had come out in the February but by October, the sense of accomplishment, the reward of feeling as though she was out in the world helping others as I’d intended, were overtaken by the constant overhanging pressure to market and publicise both it and myself. The spaces I found myself having to prioritise my time and energy within had nothing to do with the purpose of writing the book in the first place and in fact, were preventing me from writing full stop. The map out of the rut of busyness and meaningless, endless, joyless tasks, had somehow gotten buried with the treasures that were my golden compass. In short, I’d gotten lost. You absolutely know when that happens because you feel meh. Sleep evades you, you never feel refreshed, your body craves sugar, your body and brain are sluggish, and you may begin to question is this as good as it gets. If it is, then what’s the actual purpose of that. What’s my actual purpose? I’d lost sight of it again and in response, decided a road trip would be just the panacea, as travel always seemed to be.
That day, James Valentine, a bespectacled radio announcer had his talk back radio show on just as we hopped in the car after stopping for lunch.
‘Research has shown that we reach the lowest, most unhappiest point in our lives at the age of forty-seven point two. David G. Blanchflower studied over four hundred and thirty countries, developing and advanced and found that human happiness is u-shaped and the bottom of the curve hits at 47.2 in advanced countries and a year later at 48.2 in developing countries.
Woah. Totally absorbed, we then listened to listener after listener as they called into the radio show and shared their stories of how they’d hit their lowest point at exactly 47.2. Some had marriages fall apart, some were diagnosed with an illness, many had a crisis of some description occur, but the common experience sounded much more mundane. By the time people were reaching their mid to late forties with their careers usually well established, having had their children, sitting around with their friends in their beautiful, excessive homes, drinking expensive wine that they could now afford, driving their much-desired cars to the job they’d worked their lives for, pondering why they all felt so miserable, wondering whether they’d already reached and surpassed the best times of their lives. It kind of makes sense when you give it some thought because at around middle age most people also find themselves pulled in at least two major directions, caring for young children and caring for ageing parents. Maybe we all used to call it a mid-life crisis and then laugh it off, hoping we’d never actually go through one? I don’t know, but when I did the maths, I calculated that in the October of the funk, I was exactly 47.2.
By that afternoon I owned a copy of that study which doesn’t really offer an explanation of why, more just a lot of evidence of the existence of the U-shape regardless of country, culture, socioeconomic status, religion or anything else you’d imagine could make a difference. I’d probably started out in life with an expectation that happiness would be a much more linear affair, peaking really early and steadily heading down as ageing impeded quality of life. What I hadn’t expected was to hear that 47.2 was the low point and then you experience a resurgence in your happiness and well-being with another peak or peaks to look forward to. A lot of fifty-seven and sixty-seven year olds also called into the radio show to share that yes, 47.2 had been the lowest points of their lives, but that the happiest and most satisfying times in their lives had all come long after that, not before. Wow. Maybe the best was still ahead.
