I always thought that “middle-aged” meant of the age I am now. But here I read a post titled “Female, Fifty, and Furious” (great post, by the way, do read it) and it suggests that “middle-aged” is fifty years old. Not that I have anything against postponing middle age by a decade or a decade and a half.
What do you mean when you say “middle-aged”?
And if I’m not middle-aged, then what am I?
Biological middle age is a reality, but a psychological one has a bigger component of personal choice, so I prefer to concentrate on the latter. Look:
70 year old Briton Jeanne Socrates is the oldest woman to have sailed non-stop around the world on a yacht.
The former math teacher from the UK started sailing on the yacht “Nereid” in October 2012 from the west coast of Canada. She went around South America and moved on to the southern part of Africa, and from there to Australia, and then crossed the Pacific Ocean finally reaching the Canadian city of Victoria on Monday, from where she had started her journey. Barnett spent 259 days in the sea, covering 25000 nautical miles (46.3 thousand kilometers). Yacht “Nereid” is being examined by a group of experts, who will take the readings of measuring instruments on board of the yacht and then they will declare the record officially.
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// And if I’m not middle-aged, then what am I?
If 26 years old is “a young woman of 26”, you may be called “a woman of 36”.
I am one of those people, who may go into “each day is a day closer to death, not 20 anymore, why have I made that mistake?, etc”, but what is the point? More productive to concentrate on the present and future than on what can’t be changed (death) or past mistakes, right?
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I am 69 years old, and I suspect that I have finally become middle-aged. One author friend of mine declared herself middle-aged at 45. I think you, Clarissa, are in the final blush of youth. I will last at least another decade, probably.
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At this point I’m so sick that I feel ancient. 🙂
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I definitely think middle age begins at 50 and old age begins at 65 or 70. (Probably 70.) I think you are “young” until 29. The 30’s and 40’s are just adulthood. 😉 And, as a 38 year old, I still consider myself fairly young. So perhaps I’m just not ready to claim the term middle aged! 🙂
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Old age begins at 83, I believe. But I can’t explain the reasoning behind that. 🙂
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Wait till you are 83. 🙂
Our current president Shimon Peres will be 90 soon.
Trivia fact: recently, when “the Bolshoi Opera came from Moscow to Tel Aviv for the first time, complete with its orchestra, as a guest of the Israel opera […] staging “Eugene Onegin” […] Shimon Peres addressed the audience before the curtain first rose. “
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There’s no official designation or real consistency in usage. U.S. government regulations that I’ve seen TEND to categorize age groups as: 1-17 juveniles;18 – 29 “young adults”; 40-64 simply “adults”; 65+ “seniors,” with “elderly” reserved for seniors old enough to be considered hindered by advanced age.
I considered myself chronologically middle-aged at 40, although physically I didn’t feel much different than at 25 or 30 (never been pregnant!). Now that I’m 68, I could only call myself middle-aged if I expected to live to be 136.
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68! I love having older readers. It makes me feel more important. 🙂
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I don’t usually use “middle-aged.” Mostly my categories consist of “little kids” (kids shorter and far younger than me), “kids” (around my age), and “adults” (people of authority and people far older than me). There are also “old people,” generally people around my grandparents’ age (in their eighties and above and sometimes–but increasingly rare–lower). I mostly do this because I have a horrible time estimating ages and usually have to judge on appearance. Which is partly why “adults” also includes authority figures–it fits into my mental hierarchy better.
So I would consider you an adult.
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Well, just to tease you a little. Very soon you may become someone’s MILF. 😉
Then you definitely realize you have gotten a little older. 🙂
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As long as nobody calls me Mom, I’m fine. I hate the word. The British version Mum is so much better. Mom sounds whiny by default.
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What’s the Ukrainian word for “Mum”?
It’s interesting how one European language (German) anglicized its familiar terms for parents after World War II, switching from “Vati” and “Mutti” to “Mamma” and “Poppa.”
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I will be Mamma. 🙂
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Clarissa —
So if “Mamma” is now used in the Ukraine, is that an aglicization of the term Ukrainian children called their mothers a hundred years ago?
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“So if “Mamma” is now used in the Ukraine, is that an aglicization of the term Ukrainian children called their mothers a hundred years ago?”
– Traditionally, it’s “Mammo”, in the vocative case that Ukrainian has and Russian doesn’t. I can’t say anglicizations have reached us that profoundly.
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…”anglicization,” excuse the typo
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Mamma is a Russian word, so not anglicization. 🙂
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I agree! I hate ‘Mom’ too. Mamma is great, so is Momma which is what my Dad called his mother. My kids call me Mum, although they’re all over 30 so I wish they’d remember I have a name! I call my mother Mutti, which we all picked up when we lived in Germany during the 1960’s. Before that we called her Mummy, but we were very middle class! My grandsons call me Granny Sue… does this mean I can’t qualify for Middle Age any more?
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Well if the normal lifespan is threescore years and ten, then at 35 you’re over the hill. At least, so I told my wife on my 35th birthday.
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In my family, a normal lifespan seems to me to be more like fourscore years and ten.
I think of a middle-aged person as being in their 40s to 60s. 30 and 35 still seem somewhat young to me.
I will be 29 in a couple weeks, so this isn’t wishful thinking. 🙂
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Maturity is when I realize I was never interested in having fame or recognition but in solving problems to my own satisfaction. It means I’m more in the philosophy camp than the literature camp, after all.
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I agree completely that maturity begins when you stop caring what others might think about you.
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More than that….I never did care but I thought I had to if I was going to be something real. I actually realize, now, that I never did care, all this time I spent trying to care and coaxing myself into caring. I actually never went through that awkward stage where I had a lot of real care in that regard.
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This sounds great! I used to care a lot. Would drive myself nuts worrying that people would think something bad about me. This was very crippling.
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Well I had to try to go through it in a way, because it seemed to me at the time that I had become prematurely sealed off from the world in simply not caring enough. I had adapted sufficiently to my earlier culture but I was not emotionally open to the one I had migrated into, because my character had already formed by then.
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… and I just realized I missed a chance to start my comment with “It’s when …” and annoy you! Darn it!
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🙂 🙂 🙂
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One might consider there is a stage between youth and middle age — you could call it maturity or something like that. For women, I think middle age starts around menopause … when the hormones change … and lasts until 70 or so.
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Is it bad to be middle aged? It’s the age between the end of biological growth (at ~25) and the beginning of a body being significantly hit by aging, the latter time being quite individual depending on both lifestyle and genetics.
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Just began thinking about Z’s comment, the word “middle” in language has a meaning, thus one has to define — between what 2 things? Following my definition, what she calls “maturity” is exactly “middle age.”
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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