Our middle-aged years, according to this defiantly optimistic book, are our glory years. Yes, we get softer and slower, greyer and wrinklier, as we pass between 40 and 60. But we are cleverer, happier, more mentally stable, emotionally balanced and distinctively ourselves than at any other time in our lives.
Bainbridge is a Cambridge University veterinary researcher, and his zoological examination of the human animal results in a study that is full of surprises. His big, provocative idea is that middle age is more than a culturally defined stretch along the slowly declining road that leads from youth to age. It is, he argues, a distinctive, biological phenomenon: one that’s shaped by our genes and driven by natural selection. He attacks the obvious objection that middle age never existed until modern times, arguing that before we brutalised ourselves with the pernicious inventions of agriculture and city life, we were happy, long-lived hunter-gatherers. It is time, he trumpets, to reclaim the “healthy, productive middle age that was our ancient birthright before drudgery, contagion and filth stole it from us”.
The reclamation process starts with challenging received wisdom about middle age. We do not, for instance, get stupider as we age. We may lose grey matter in our brains (a quarter of it between 20 and 80), but this may be because we efficiently prune away what we do not need, Bainbridge explains. Forty- and 50-year-olds might think slower, but they think better.
The middle-aged are happier, too. They may appear “cranky and inflexible” to the young, but they suffer less from depression and anxiety, notwithstanding being triply sandwiched between the demands of teenage children, ageing parents and work. Bainbridge describes the middle-aged as evolutionarily adapted to be “phenomenally energy-efficient” and “inherently resilient”. Emotionally stable, analytical and organised, they temper their emotional reactions and see the wood, in general, not the trees. While the young flash and fizzle, and the old flounder and fail, the middle-aged cope.
The menopause gets a whole, fascinating chapter. So it should, as the standout example — along with the almost universal onset of long-sightedness — of a biological shift that fits Bainbridge’s criteria of being “abrupt, distinctive and unique”. (He dismisses the “andropause”, or male midlife crisis, as a cultural myth born chiefly of the fact that “in our politically correct, post-feminist, non-ageist world, there is one group of people who may be mercilessly lampooned without fear of reprisal, and that is middle-aged men”. Now there’s a middle-aged man talking.)
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Menopause turns out to be not unique to the human species: female killer whales and pilot whales undergo it, too. But it is a natural, evolutionarily driven part of human life. To trigger the menopause, the body orchestrates the extraordinary feat of paring down its egg stocks in order to arrive at an unworkably low level “on time”. To explain this feat, evolutionary biologists have advanced the grandmother hypothesis. Human infants are so demanding, it is argued, that their parents need help. This is where the middle-aged step in. It is our “allotted time to stop breeding and start caring”.
Except, of course, we’re still breeding. In the UK, the number of women over 40 having children tripled between 1989 and 2009. Bainbridge tries to get to grips with cultural trends such as this, and the current sexual antics of forty- and fiftysomethings (“middle-aged sexual ferment” apparently “leads people into behaviours they might have frowned upon 20 years earlier”), but his “zoological, evolution-based approach” proves limiting. Vets are perhaps not best placed to analyse human culture.
More worrying still, Bainbridge never quite wins the key argument that middle age is a biological rather than a cultural phenomenon. As a man of 42, he seems, by his own admission, chiefly interested in the onset of middle age, and he does find a few marked changes there. But where is the “abrupt, distinctive and unique” shift at the back end of these years, at around 60? What is the difference between the late-middle-aged and the elderly? If middle age is a peak, when do we start going downhill? There are no answers to these questions. Perhaps, in peddling his upbeat message, Bainbridge prefers not to think about it.
Portobello £14.99/ ebook £14.99 pp317, ST Bookshop price £12.99