Midlife Isn’t a Crisis – It’s a Second Adolescence

Allison Aubrey is an award-winning health and science journalist whose work appears on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her new book Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love explores the surprising research on reinvention, resilience, and what it actually takes to flourish in the third turn of life as we expand our focus beyond parenting and the paycheck.

Aging requires us to constantly ask, “What’s next?” Through her NPR series How to Thrive as You Age, Aubrey explored that question with longevity experts, researchers, and individuals navigating the midlife transition. While her series redefined aging as an exciting opportunity rather than a steep decline, she has now shifted her focus to redefining midlife, sharing stories of being open to joy, passion, and finding your purpose.

We recently sat down with Aubrey to discuss shifting cultural norms, rethinking midlife, and a powerful exercise that could help guide your next chapter.

Blue Zones: What have we gotten wrong about midlife? And is the cultural conversation shifting to a new (and better) understanding?

Allison Aubrey: The societal expectation is that midlife is the beginning of a slow fade and that the best chapters are behind you. I’d like to see a cultural shift where people think of midlife as a crossfade to your most joyful and meaningful stretch yet.

But this crossfade doesn’t happen automatically. It takes intention, and it takes role models- people who’ve actually done it- so you can see it’s possible. That’s exactly why I wrote this book. When I feared my best years were behind me, I took a gap year from the newsroom, which I called my ‘curiosity tour,’ and set out to find people making bold, heartfelt pivots after 50.

What I found reframed everything for me. I talked to more than 150 people ages 45 to 105, who’d ripped up the script they were handed. A physician assistant who is singing lead vocals in her 60s. A magazine editor who took up improv in her late 50s and now performs in two troupes. A lawyer who opened a bookstore. Many of them have swapped a performance mindset for one built on play and curiosity, and, surprisingly, that shift toward joy often deepens their impact rather than shrinking it. They’re not coasting. They’re thinking hard about legacy, about how to take the skills they spent decades building and point them somewhere new.

If there is a cultural shift happening right now, is it influenced by Gen X to redefine aging, or are these universal themes/struggles?

I do believe there’s a cultural shift underway, and I don’t think it’s necessarily Gen X-specific. These are universal questions, landing at a moment when more of us are living long enough to ask them.  I think there’s a dawning, as people realize that this stretch of life offers so much opportunity. The challenge is to overcome the voice in your head that keeps you in the comfort zone, clinging to the status quo, fearful of making a change.

What I’ve realized is that to surge ahead, we must leave something behind, and this takes courage. In the book, I write about my ropeswing moment, like when you’re a kid and you swing out over the water, and you know it’s time to let go, but it’s scary because you don’t know what you’re plunging into. Letting go into that uncertainty takes courage, and I’ve found that the people who do let go are the very ones who find joy and momentum in this stretch of life.

The argument I make in Your Turn is that midlife can feel like a second adolescence, because we’re asking the same questions our teenagers are forced to ask: Who am I? What is happening to my body? What is my purpose? We give teens a wide berth for this. We accept their angsty moods; we recognize hormones are driving some of it. But when my daughter started puberty right as I started the transition to menopause, I realized I was asking the same questions. Who am I now? What is happening to my body? What is my purpose now, as I look beyond parenting and the paycheck?

One of my intellectual inspirations here is Mary Catherine Bateson, Margaret Mead’s daughter, who wrote about a “second adulthood.” I adapted that to second adolescence, because that’s what it feels like to me.

What I found in reporting the book is that the people who make bold midlife pivots are usually the ones who face these questions head-on, instead of burying the ennui under more things, like a new car, a younger lover, fancier wine, the hedonic treadmill that papers over the deeper signal that you’re searching for something. The pivot happens when people stop long enough to listen to their heart, their intuition, again.

None of this is new, exactly. Shakespeare wrote about a second childhood. But at a moment when a hundred-year life is actually possible, there’s so much more runway. Fifty could be just the start of midlife.

What is the Third Turn Pivot?

The central metaphor in my book for midlife transition is what I call the “Third Turn,” and it comes from my childhood. As a teenager, I went to the Kentucky Derby in my hometown of Louisville. A horse near the back of the pack suddenly surged ahead on what’s called the third turn of the race. My grandfather told me, “Allison, always watch the third turn — that’s where something exciting and unexpected happens.” When I asked why, he said, “When you can see the home stretch, a sense of urgency arises.”

As a teenager, that didn’t land as a midlife metaphor. But when I went back to the Derby at 50, his words came back to me. He’d been talking about a horse race, but there was a broader wisdom in it. There’s an if-not-now-when reality to this stretch of life. We still have time to pivot, but it takes intention. We must find that third-turn energy, that sense that it’s time to surge ahead. Not to please the fans in the stands, but to write our own script, one we lead with heart and intuition.

So a Third Turn Pivot is just that: leaning into the third-turn mindset to surge ahead on your own terms.

Did you find it freeing to write more personally after years as a journalist?

Hell, yes! Yes, yes, and yes! It was scary at first. In early drafts, my editor kept sending pages back, saying they sounded too much like an NPR story. After so many years of telling other people’s stories, I wasn’t used to writing myself into one. The book is part reportorial as  I get into a lot of the studies and the science of aging, but I also weave in personal narrative, and I divulge a lot of my own scars. At first that felt terrifying. Now it feels like I’ve taken off a hundred-pound backpack.

We all have stuff buried deep within, and it may sound clichéd, but getting it out, and realizing how it had been holding me back, keeping me in what the meditation teacher Tara Brach calls “the trance of unworthiness” was a revelation. For years, staying focused on deadlines was a convenient distraction from doing that internal work.

The surprise is that the book turned out to be more memoir than I’d expected. I didn’t think my own story would be that interesting to people, but my editors kept pulling out the bits they found illuminating and relatable. Also, writing the profiles of the people making bold midlife pivots was so much fun. I was finding my voice as a writer, using emotion and wisdom and opinion in a way I never had space for on deadline-oriented news stories.
After 25 years of reporting the news, I realized I was ready to step into a new chapter, one where I’m learning to weave wisdom and evidence together to help people find their way forward. So far, it seems to be working: I have a pilot season of a new podcast starting next month, which is very exciting!

What is something you find freeing about midlife in general?

The most freeing thing to me is learning to live by heart and intuition again.

I’ve been in the trenches for 25 years. It has felt like being in a moonbounce of controlled chaos, jumping between three kids and work deadlines. And somewhere in all that doing, I realized I’d left behind the most playful part of me. During my “gap year,” I  spent time excavating the 8-year-old version of myself, and I named her Freckles: the girl who was unguarded, blithe, and mercurial, who loved to wander the woods. She was full of joy and wonder.

I also realized my adrenaline-fueled lifestyle had taken a lot out of me, that I was burned out. I was constantly toggling between managing the home front and the anticipatory anxiety of tomorrow’s deadline. It felt like rinse and repeat, obligation on obligation. And when your body is running on a constant stress response, that stress cuts off intuition, and it becomes impossible to hear your heart.

So my big change, as I make my own Third Turn pivot, is to spend a little time each day as Freckles, and to bring more moments of calm back into my life. I feel a childlike excitement, and I’m eager to play again.  I can feel my intuition again. I can listen to my heart. It’s a gift, and it feels like freedom.

One story from my curiosity tour captures this perfectly. I met a woman named Leslie who’d trained classically as a violinist, but in midlife she swapped the violin for the fiddle. When I asked if it was really the same instrument, she looked at me like I was thick. “It’s the same instrument,” she said, “but a completely different attitude.” What she meant was that she’d traded the anxiety of hitting every note just right, of playing someone else’s composition to perfection, for the freedom of improvisation, playing by heart and intuition instead.

I think that’s a great midlife lesson. The most heartfelt Third Turn pivots often involve trading a performance mindset – where we’re being judged, graded, evaluated – for a play mindset. Same instrument, new attitude.

Is the audience very specifically for people in midlife, or can a younger and older audience find a lot of insight in the book as well?

This book is for everyone who is asking “what’s next?” The seeking process tends to heighten at times of transition or following a major life event: a death, a divorce, a job change, a health scare, or the transition to the empty-nest years. These tools are for finding your next turn, regardless of age, gender, or walk of life.

I got a reminder of just how far this reaches at a book signing, where I met two young women who’d just graduated college. When I asked why they were buying a copy, they said they were “in transition” and wanted to see around the corner, to know what to expect in midlife. It was a little surprising. I was honored! But it was also a good reminder that the only constant is change, and adaptation is the name of the game, at every age.

I use my lens as a Gen X woman to tell these stories of moving forward, but the tools apply to far more than midlife. As I interviewed dozens of people in the midst of a pivot, I was on the lookout for a formula — some throughline that held across everyone I profiled. I found it by iterating on something I’d learned from Marc Freedman, who developed a midlife learning curriculum. I think of it as a process: IN, OUT, FORWARD.

Step one is to go in. Do the self-discovery work. We’re not the same person we were at 20, or 30, or 40. How can your strengths and values combine into something new? Is there a hobby you’d like to resurrect, a cause you’d like to support, a problem you’d like to help solve, a game you loved?

Step two is to go out. Whatever bubbles up from that inward journey is a good sign of where to start your pivot. Find others drawn to the same hobby, cause, or pursuit. Just like Leslie found fiddle festivals, you can find your people once you know what lights you up.

Step three is to move forward. Once you have direction. Jump in. Take the chance. Remember, you’re on the midlife pivot bridge, and you have to leave something behind in order to move forward.

And all the evidence-backed tools in the book such as the VIA survey to assess your values and strengths, the Odyssey planning exercise, and the Nine Lives exercise,  are for anyone in transition, not just midlife.

What is a book, movie, or series that you feel does a good job portraying midlife – as more than the stereotypical crisis?

One of my favorite shows right now is Shrinking, which my husband and I watch together. I love how honestly it portrays Harrison Ford’s character, tremors from Parkinson’s and all. The writers also do a great job weaving in intergenerational relationships, including the stunning Jessica Williams as Gaby, too young to be middle-aged herself but with middle-aged friends and mentors, including Ford’s character, Dr. Paul Rhoades.

My favorite character, the one I have a huge girl crush on, is Liz Bishop, played by Christa Miller. (If you’re reading this, Christa, love you, gurl, your style, your vibe, all of it!)

Liz and her husband, Derek, played by Ted McGinley, face real-world midlife challenges head-on: kids failing to launch, health scares. Liz seeks more purpose beyond her rocks, inserting herself into others’ lives, trying on different parts of herself, including as a caregiver. That instinct clearly gave her the most purpose while raising her own kids, and it’s still central to who she is. Even when difficult, she’s smart and empathetic, and we feel her wrestling and searching.

Though Liz can be overbearing, inserting herself where she isn’t asked, it comes from wise-woman energy: a drive to build community and take care of people. It’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes she can end up feeling taken advantage of, but the writing and performance let us feel both the struggle and the triumph of a woman entering the empty-nest years.

What is one thing you hope readers do or ask themselves after reading the book?

Before you open the first page, I have an assignment for you: I’d like you to close your eyes, right now! This will only take a moment.

Picture a summer day, cutoff jean shorts, a beautiful lake. Your friends found a rope swing and they’ve already jumped in. You’re the last one left: you’ve swung out over the water, and you know it – this is the moment, it’s time to let go. So imagine yourself actually doing it. Ahh, doesn’t the water feel great? Yes. You did it.

Now, open your eyes and get out a piece of paper and a pen. Write down one thing you’d like to try in the next few months. It doesn’t need to be a big commitment. It can be something as simple as a class you’d like to take, a hobby you’d like to return to, a game you’d like to learn, a club or organization you’d like to join, a cause you’d like to volunteer for. Commit to it. This could be the first step of your own Third Turn pivot.

You can order YOUR TURN: How to Create a Midlife You Love, and subscribe to her free newsletter It’s Your Turn w/ Allison Aubrey.