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Turning 30, 40 And 50: The New Markers Of Success

This article is more than 8 years old.

If you’re turning 30, 40 or 50, you’re probably haunted by some outdated notions of what real progress looks like for someone at your life station. But you don’t need to be.

Let’s contrast the old and new models:

The Old 30: You partnered off almost a decade ago, and you’ve since then been building a family.

The New 30: You’re just realizing who you are as an adult, and you’re grateful that you’re not stuck with choices that you might have made a decade earlier.

The Old 40: You’ve bought a larger house in a nicer bedroom community than where you lived for the past several years.

The New 40: You’re more likely to move to the city center, where you think the action is, than to the suburbs. And you’re happy to rent.

The Old 50: You’re on cruise control toward your golden years. And you’re not far from an empty nest.

The New 50: You’re relaunching your career after a layoff and relaunching your life after a divorce.

In fact, the common theme at each of these life stages is that you’re reinventing yourself instead of just staying on a steady upward trajectory.

What you have now, at each station, is a rare opportunity to create the sort of life that’s true to your hopes, dreams and values. You have unprecedented freedom. But of course, with freedom comes anxiety. The old model got rid of the anxiety by giving you a clear, Don-and-Betty-Draper path to success.

How do we know the old model is dying, and that it no longer offers much consolation or direction to most people today? Think about a few things that have changed:

If the old goal was to own a house in the suburbs, young people are instead migrating to city centers, where they opt to rent. (As the New York Times reported last year, "The number of college-educated people age 25 to 34 living within three miles of city centers has surged, up 37% since 2000, even as the total population of these neighborhoods has slightly shrunk.") Many baby boomers are also moving to the city, while many Gen X people have tossed aside the goal of home ownership.

Expectations about relationships and parenting are also undergoing huge changes. The average age of first marriage was 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. Within traditional male-female marriages, that’s closer today to 27 and 29, and it continuously grows higher. Beyond new realities of marriage being expanded to same-sex relationships, the very notion of marriage has changed in that not many people today see it as something that’s healthy for a 20-year-old woman to enter into for a lifetime.

New economic and social independence for women also comes into play. For three-and-a-half decades, women have outnumbered men on America’s college campuses. And employment rates for women have generally been as strong or stronger than for men in recent years. As Stephanie Coontz, an Evergreen State College expert on changing gender roles, told Slate last year, “For most educated women [turning 30] really does mean that you’re just beginning to approach the markers of being grown up: completing all the education you’re going to get, settling down with a partner, having a child.”

In the past, many marriages were rushed into out of compulsion, to avoid societal stigmas. Today, some 40% of children in the United States are born out of wedlock (with even higher rates in many advanced European economies), and 61% of Americans now approve of children thus born.

The old model was about stability or conformity. Today we lack the means for stability and conformity, and there’s been enough social change that we probably don’t really want those things anymore anyway.

And for those who are turning 50, as I will this October, it’s not about consolidating our victories and polishing our trophies. It's often about radical reinvention. Words from Bruce Springsteen come to mind (sorry I don’t have anything more current, I told you, I’m almost 50): “We’ve got one last chance to make it real.” There is an urgency to make the coming years a time to find authentic new roads to success as old ones turn into dead ends.

Again, it’s anxiety-producing, but it’s liberating, especially now that the old markers of success have finally proved themselves to be obsolete or irrelevant for most of us.

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