The notion of a midlife crisis is dead. Or maybe it was always bunk. Now some scientists want a postmortem for the theory.
The idea that happiness in the Western world plummets around midlife before rebounding has been around since the mid-1960s. In the late 1980s, after crunching data from well-being surveys around the globe, social scientists framed the phenomenon as quantifiable and global.
But a growing body of evidence now supports the theory’s demise. Most recently, researchers found several variants of how happiness unfolds among nonindustrialized communities in Asia, Latin America and Africa — places often neglected in the scientific literature (SN: 3/19/24).
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