2007: An Off Year For Midlife Crisis

2007 saw a drop in people searching for midlife crisis on Google. And we don't know why!

Google's little known Trends product lets us see that there was a noticeable slide between 2006 and 2007 -- continuing a decline that started in 2005.

What could be causing the decrease? Here are some ideas:

• People are reading LifeTwo and learning that midlife crisis is a not-very-useful catchall that describes a number of different issues.
• Prior to late 2007's economic storm warnings, people were feeling pretty good about themselves and their lives.
• The bulk of the baby boomers have passed through their peak midlife crisis years.
• Some odd regional issue -- midlife crisis searches are popular in the Netherlands and Belgium, but we can't identify why an English language phrase is used in Dutch and Flemish or French. It's also disproportionately popular in German.

Any other ideas? Leave a comment!

You can see the results here.

Google Trends, a service provided by Google, shows as much as four years of graphical data on search words you enter. You can compare one word or phrase to others, but Google only provides relative comparisons -- not the absolute number of searches. It also shows which regions and cities the search is unusually popular in.

Google Trends reports that searches for "midlife crisis" remain disproportionately high in the Netherlands. In the U.S., Phoenix, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles search on midlife crisis at a relatively high rate (if you try this at home, you'll see high rates for Wisconsin and Minnesota -- but that's in part due to the regional popularity of the band "Midlife Crisis").