January 21, 2026

Rethink...middle age

27 minutes

People are living longer and delaying life's milestone moments. How does this affect our middle years and should we be paying more attention to people in this phase of their lives?

For some, middle age can be a very challenging period in their lives. Today, people are postponing the milestones in life that traditionally signified a change in priorities. People are having children later in life meaning parents in their 40s or even 50s are looking after small children. Jobs for life no longer exist and housing is so expensive that many have no choice but to pay costly rents.

All of these phenomena have given rise to the so called “sandwich Generation” – simultaneously looking after children but also elderly parents. Many experience multiple roles- worker, parent, carer, spouse and friend – and juggling the demands of all of those roles can lead to burnout.

Academic literature on happiness has until recently suggested that our satisfaction with life as we age is hump shaped. When we're young, we're happy — and then that declines, bottoming out in middle age. As we pass middle age and get older, we get happier again. But is that still the case? Is mid-life a uniquely unhappy place to be?

Presenter: Ben Ansell

Producer: Tom Gillett

Editor: Lisa Baxter

Contributors:

Ben Akers - Co-founder and co-CEO of Talk Club

David Blanchflower - Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

Jane Green - Professor of Political Science and British Politics at the University of Oxford

Andrew G Marshall - Marital therapist, communications trainer and author

Les Mayhew - Professor of statistics at Bayes Business School, City University, London

Kate Muir - Journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker

Rethink is a BBC co-production with the Open University.

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