SPECIAL FEATURE

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    Midlife is placed anywhere from age thirty-three to age seventy, depending upon which social scientist or lay person is asked.
    It was not until the 20th century that many people lived through what we now call the middle years. As recently as 1900 life expectancy was about forty-eight for a man and fifty-one for a woman. In 1900 only 10 percent of the population was middle-aged. Today our average adult person in the labor force is over forty-five. Our total population has increased almost 100 percent in the last century, but midlifers have increased 200 percent.
    Midlife is one of the times in Iife when a great many events force us into a reassessment. The reevaluation isn't caused just because a person turns thirty-nine or forty-two, nor is it caused by a stale marriage or some other traumatic loss in life. The reassessment seems to happen because of a combination of several of these factors which converge at the midpoint of life.
    Some of these stresses are:

• An important birthday
• Our cultural overvaluing of youth
• An unhappy marital situation, or lack of a marriage
• A spouse's own midlife crisis
• Demands from children and their growing independence
• Career priorities
• An accumulation of traumatic losses such as death, illness, or aging
• Urgency from inner clocks to accomplish life dreams
• Imperative reevaluation of the past and the future

    The way to work through a midlife crisis is to systematically tackle each one of the troubling change events in your life to bring about a satisfactory resolution. This book was written to help you.

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