Is "Midlife Crisis" Cross-Cultural?

Is midlife crisis a worldwide problem?

Probably not, although little work has been done in this area.

We've written elsewhere in "Twenty Questions About Midlife Crisis" about how the notion of "midlife crisis" seems to cover several different issues: setbacks or crises that happen to occur in midlife, midlife reassessment, and depression or other mental health issues.

The conventional wisdom in the English-speaking West is that these issues, collectively called "midlife crisis," are an inevitable part of middle age.

(We've discussed elsewhere why that isn't necessarily so).

Gail Sheehy's book "Passages" and other popular titles did much to imprint the notion of a one-size-fits-all, inevitable midlife crisis in the English-speaking world. Two professors at UC Davis noted that participants in a long-term study used the notion for just about any problem: "middle-aged Baby Boomers ... quite freely used the term “mid-life crisis” to describe nearly any setback, either in their career or family life, which they experienced."

Other cultures wouldn't recognize the concept. Robert Atkinson, a professor at the University of Southern Maine, writes "Anthropologists have found that in many cultures, reaching middle age does not produce psychological stress and turmoil. The so-called midlife crisis, rather, is a culture-specific phenomenon, found primarily among people in today's technologically advanced Western societies."

A research team in Hong Kong surveyed 1500 Hong Kong Chinese and found some dissatisfaction with work and personal achievement but not at a "crisis" level. They hypothesized that "... Chinese people's emphasis on family, interpersonal harmony, and fatalism might make the occurrence of midlife crisis less prominent in Chinese societies."

A study of midlife in Hindu and Japanese cultures found that, while there were sometimes-difficult transitions in both, neither has an equivalent of a Western-style midlife crisis.

Arnold Kruger of the University of British Columbia writes that belief in midlife crisis seems to be prevelant only in prosperous North American and Western European societies (of course, those are precisely where the idea has been popularized by bestselling books and reinforced by other media). Kruger holds that only in those societies does the relatively recent focus on self-fulfillment as a goal of life mix with the resources to make self-fulfillment possible. You need both; if you had no notion of trying to make your life as fulfilling as possible -- say, because it's completely outside your cultural tradition -- you would never feel regret for not achieving it. Similarly, having the resources (mostly monetary) to do fulfilling things increases regret for not doing them; if every bit of money you earn goes to feeding your family, you're not likely to wish you had done things differently. When you have desire for self-fulfillment plus resources, as with many in the West, you may not find a "crisis" but you could find reassessment of choices made in the past and in the future.

If we come across new research in this area we will update this section.

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A 2004 study seemed to find midlife crisis in 27 of 104 men in Poland, but the authors only cite the very early works that found it in 80% of U.S. men, and don't refer to the numerous more recent studies that found that only about 10% of midlife adults have a psychological crisis caused by middle age alone. This raises questions about the validity of their sample and of their survey questions -- weaknesses of the early studies in the U.S.

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Other Sources:

Midlife Crisis in Chinese Men and Women. Daniel Shek. The Journal of Psychology 130.1 (Jan 1996)

"Stress, Coping, and Health at Mid-Life: A Developmental Perspective." Carolyn Aldwin and Michael Levenson, in "The Handbook of Midlife Development," M.E. Lachman (ed), John WIley & Sons, 2001.

"Middle Adulthood in Cultural Perspective," Usha Menon, in "The Handbook of Midlife Development," ibid.

Kruger, A. (1994). The Mid-life Transition: Crisis or Chimera? Psychological Reports, 75, 1299-1305.

Mid-life Crisis: Fact or Myth?, a research roundup from a 300-level psych class at Hope College