Retirement Timing, Longevity, and the Modern Midlife Crisis
There’s a reason the idea of the “midlife crisis” has remained culturally recognizable for generations.
Even people who laugh at the phrase immediately understand the imagery, the cliché.
The sports car. The sudden reinvention. Or the impulsive move. The affair. It’s the realization that someone who once seemed stable and predictable suddenly wants an entirely different life.
Traditionally, we’ve treated these moments as irrational. Embarrassing. Sometimes even ridiculous. A kind of emotional malfunction that arrives somewhere around middle age and causes otherwise sensible adults to temporarily lose perspective.
But I’ve started wondering if we’ve misunderstood the midlife crisis entirely.
Not because those behaviours never happen. Clearly, they do.
But because the underlying psychology may be much more complicated — and much more human — than we typically acknowledge.
Historically, the “midlife crisis” represented something larger than impulsive behaviour. It represented confrontation. A growing awareness that time was passing. Questions about meaning, identity, fulfillment, relevance, and whether the life someone built still felt emotionally aligned with the person they had become. Their life felt uncomfortable or “itchy”.
And for previous generations, those kinds of personal existential questions often surfaced somewhere in middle adulthood.
But modern life has changed. People live longer now. Work longer. Remain professionally identified longer.
And often postpone deeper self-examination much later into life than previous generations ever did.
Which raises an interesting possibility:
Perhaps the traditional midlife crisis has not disappeared at all.
Not Gone, Just Delayed
Perhaps longevity, extended careers, and prolonged professional identity have simply shifted the existential reckoning later into life, where it now increasingly arrives during retirement itself. And perhaps the other “fly in the ointment” is that you’re not the person who “suddenly wants an entirely different life.” You’re the person who’s actively been working towards.
You literally planned, earned, anticipated, financially engineered, and actively pursued it for decades.
Oh, the irony!
We’ve gone from feeling that uncomfortable life misalignment and making a drastic life change, to engineering our own major life change, and then feeling uncomfortable and “itchy” from it.
So is it an actual full-blown existential crisis? No, it’s more like a really powerful contradiction!
The Irony of Arrival
And who exactly is the authority on contradictions anyway?
There’s no jagged little pill to fix the discomfort of your modern-day, pre-engineered, highly sought-after, post-retirement midlife crisis.
You got what you asked for.
The irony is that you may simply have to ride out the psychological awkwardness of finally arriving there.
Like a boat moving through a lock system, retirement may require a brief period of emotional recalibration before you recognize yourself again on the other side.
Maybe that’s all this is. Not a collapse, or failure, and not necessarily even a crisis.
Just the strange experience of discovering that finally getting what you wanted feels different from what you imagined it would.
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🔗 References
This article is informed by research and philosophical work related to retirement transition, meaning, identity, psychological well-being, and existential development, including:
Setiya, K. (2017). Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. Princeton University Press.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173931/midlife
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-Being.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2604993/
Keyes, C. L. M. (2002). The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12090492/
Steger, M. F. (2012). Making Meaning in Life.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2012.720832
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11392867/
Cynthia Ross Tustin is the founder of I'm Thinking of Retiring, an online publication exploring the psychology, purpose, and everyday realities of life after work. A retired Fire Chief, former ICU and Emergency Room nurse, instructor, and policy writer, she combines lived experience, research, and a lifelong curiosity about human behaviour to write thoughtful essays on retirement, identity, purpose, friendship, and the ordinary moments that quietly reveal something larger. Through her Retirement Field Notes and Ordinary Tuesday series, she encourages readers to approach this next chapter with curiosity rather than certainty.
