Midlife Blues?

Having just turned 50, Paul Caron wonders if this is going to be the worst year of his life?  To explain, he quotes from this Wall Street Journal article:

This week a massive American-British study of some two million souls throughout 80 countries confirms, empirically, that middle age immiserates us all without regard to income, culture, gender, marital status or previous experience. The study offers a new visual to illustrate the overarching mood swing of life: the U-Curve, in which mental stability and happiness bottoms out in our 40s and into our 50s.

We then get more cheerful as we round the curve and head into the final stretch. In the U.S., women hit bottom at 40 and men at 50, according to the study. ...

One suspects that, with women and men both, midlife is a time when the mirage of life's perfectibility and symmetry, as envisioned in one's youth, comes back to trouble you like a conscience. In plain language, one might call it a last chance at happiness, or of "getting it right."

Midlife is perhaps the last opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it; a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them; a time when you can still become what you might have been. ...

Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, wife and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realignment.

What then would be the "right" road: To keep to one's groove, or to opt for the road not taken? Luckily, the study tells us, once past 50 you won't care either way. Hang in there. It will all blow over.

I still have many, many years before I get there, but with my recent birthday, I got a reminder it will be here sooner than I'd like.  At least by that time, I will be in good company.

I'm curious if mid-life blues hit single people sooner than married people?  It seems many of my friends who are still single into their 30's often struggle with sense of meaning and purpose and with longings unfulfilled.  Since they don't have families to support, if they don't enjoy their jobs, many of them start to question why they are spending their life working at something they don't enjoy for a paycheck they don't need?  It's a challenging question to ask and one with no easy answers.