Clare M. Mehta, an Emmanuel College psychology professor, was livid. She was on a committee for hearing graduate students defend their dissertations, and she had planned meticulously to accommodate their next Zoom. She had a two-month-old daughter, no child care, a working husband, and just enough time between his meetings to attend her own. Then, the day of, another professor dashed off a casual note: Could they start the meeting 15 minutes early?
When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She’d just read Mehta’s 2020 paper on the life phase from age 30 to 45, which described it as a hurricane of major changes and responsibilities. Career advances, marriage, parenthood, homeownership, care for aging parents—for many people these days, the paper had argued, all of those milestones fall in a short and furious chunk of time. And here Mehta was, embodying that point.
The connection between Mehta’s circumstances and her academic focus wasn’t a coincidence. Mehta was in her 30s when she started noticing that no one seemed to be studying her own age group. Her colleague Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties, had become an expert in ages 18 to 29. Psychologists of middle age, meanwhile, were usually observing those in their 50s and early 60s. She’d reached a part of life that was anything but quiet, yet when she looked to her field for answers, she heard relative silence.
Now, at 45, she has interviewed many, many people in this stage, which she named “established adulthood.” She believes that life for the youngish—especially for women—is getting only more hectic. The average man is parenting (a little) more than he used to, and the average woman is working outside the home (a lot) more than she used to. And compared with eras past, people today tend to be older when they begin hitting the classic landmarks of adulthood. A typical young person might once have, say, met a partner in their teens, married and started a family at 20-something, then taken on more career responsibility or begun caring for an ailing parent while in their 30s. Now all of these formative experiences are getting compressed. Many people do cherish this time, Mehta told me. But the fact remains that they’re in the “rush hour of life”—and they may be dealing with a milestone pileup.
To understand what’s changing about established adulthood, you first have to consider the 18-to-29 phase that Arnett calls “emerging” adulthood: “the most tumultuous decade of life,” he told me, when people change residences, jobs, and partners the most often. The average 20-something has habits and rhythms that are “very much in flux,” he said, “because they’re still in the process of deciding what kind of adult life they want”—and what kind they can realistically have.
Recently, this period of uncertainty has been getting longer: Many young people are saddled with debt, searching for work in a brutal job market, unable to afford buying a house. Building a career, a home, or lasting relationships—all things that can help shape a person’s sense of self—have become more difficult. And as emerging adulthood expands, it eats into the next stage of life.
That phase, established adulthood, is typically when heady young-adulthood questions begin to be answered. Perhaps after a bunch of short stints in different jobs, someone figures out what field of work really excites them. Or each breakup over the course of years grants them a little more clarity on what they’re looking for in a relationship, and eventually that leads to a great match. You might lose a sense of wide-open possibility, but the prize is an increase in “ontological security”: the sense that your life is predictable—and that, knowing better what to expect, you’re able to meaningfully use your time, Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication-studies professor at the University of Kansas, told me.
Yet now, when established adulthood does arrive, the truncated timeline can make it more chaotic. Some of those traditional milestones can be pushed back only so far. Mehta had delayed having a child for years, wanting to focus on all the other demands of her bustling life. But once she became a mom, at 43, everything seemed to be happening at once. When I spoke with her, she mentioned as politely as possible that even finding time for our conversation hadn’t been easy: She was in between child-care solutions and trying to cram all of her job-related work into three days a week so that she could watch her daughter the other days. “I’m trying to keep my career going up,” she said. “I feel like I’m too young to be plateauing. And I’m definitely too young to be slowing down.”
Across the globe, average happiness has for many years looked U-shaped: People have tended to be least happy around their 40s. But that doesn’t necessarily reveal some hardwired, inevitable midlife crisis that each of us must pass through. Many researchers believe, rather, that it indicates a time period when people need more help than they’re getting. Mehta mentioned a 2016 study that analyzed many different industrialized nations and documented a happiness gap between parents and nonparents—but found that it was substantially smaller in countries with more generous paid time off and child-care-subsidy policies. (The United States had the largest difference between parent and nonparent happiness.) One can imagine that with more government support—federally mandated parental leave; paid family leave for people taking care of sick parents or other loved ones—established adulthood would be a lot less stressful.
[Read: The parental-happiness fallacy]
The irony, though, is that what makes life overwhelming is often what makes it meaningful. In 2021, the market-research firm OnePoll asked 2,000 people how old they’d be if they could be one age for the rest of their life. The most common answer was 36. And recently, researchers have discovered that the U-shaped happiness curve may be changing. One 2024 study, using data from the CDC, found that since roughly 2014, happiness has been declining for the average 18-to-25-year-old—particularly for women. Emerging adulthood has become so much unhappier, on average, that now established adulthood is a time of relative contentment: one of less self-reported stress and depression.
That may go to show how glorious a bit of ontological security can be. Arnett has been interviewing emerging adults for many years, and he likes to ask: How do you see your life 10 years from now? “Almost nobody says, Well, I hope I’m still changing jobs twice a year and looking for my soulmate,” he said. “They all envisioned, in their 20s, a more stable, settled life in their 30s.”
“Settled” doesn’t always mean a house, a spouse, and kids. It means a sense of continuity in one’s routine and identity. Patrick Jefferson, a 51-year-old methodologist in Texas, told me that in established adulthood, he began volunteering—dropping off Thanksgiving meals, spending time with seniors—which left him swamped but gave him a sense of purpose. “You want to be somebody,” he said. “You want to be respected. You want to feel like you’re accomplishing something.” Lori Fisher, a 46-year-old in Colorado, told me that after trying a career path she hated, breaking up with her college boyfriend, traveling, waiting tables, and applying to graduate school, “closing off avenues” started to feel like a relief. She met her husband, and they moved to a small town to open a school together. The days were packed, she said, but “we became more comfortable steering the ship of our lives.”
Of course, 30- and 40-somethings aren’t all perfectly confident in the choices they’ve made. But Mehta has found that a lot of them give up on the idea of making perfect choices at all. She talked about Kierkegaard, a kind of patron philosopher of established adulthood, who said that you’ll essentially be unhappy no matter what you do. “If you marry, you’ll be unhappy. If you don’t marry, you’ll be unhappy,” Mehta said. “Have children—you will be miserable. Don’t have children—you’ll be miserable.” In her research interviews, a lot of people have said that life didn’t pan out the way they once imagined it would—and that they’re okay with it. One of her study participants had wanted to be a doctor, and she’d ended up in medical billing. “But you know what?” she told Mehta. “I think this suits my skills better. I don’t think I would have been a good doctor.”
As stressful as established adulthood might be, Arnett said, “it does get better.” Kids get older; jobs can get more rewarding with more authority bestowed; savings can grow. Fisher feels like she’s now in a “renaissance,” back at her theater hobby again for the first time since high school. Jefferson said that after so many years of “swimming, swimming, swimming,” he deepened his expertise and his connections enough—socially, professionally, and in his volunteer life—that things felt easier. “You can move levers for others; you have ideas; you’ve tried enough stuff and you’ve failed at enough stuff that you can kind of anticipate what will work,” he said. “You have enough of a network to pick up the phone and call people and get things moved.”
At the same time, to say that peace and rest are surely coming, just a couple of milestones away, might be overly optimistic. Fewer people can count on the classic rites of passage anymore—or assume that those rites will make the rest of life easier. The life course simply is no longer that predictable, Hall said. Somebody who lands a dream career in their 30s might still be toiling away in older adulthood, unable to afford retirement. Or a parent might expect some empty-nest freedom once their child grows up, only to find that the kid still needs to live at home or can’t get by without financial support. In some sense, all the life phases are becoming more like emerging adulthood: rocky and uncertain.
The established adults who do reach solid ground, I think, are the lucky ones—and they may find that, after all, it’s still an era of freedom and possibility. “Life is actually pretty damn long,” Fisher said she realized. She feels now that time is both precious and expansive; that she will find yet more forks in the road. “I don’t just make decisions once,” she said. “We make them over and over again.”
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