What Research Reveals About America’s Midlife Crisis | Frank Infurna

**Frank Infurna** (0:00)
Try to live near family. Like, I feel like that's one of the biggest life hacks. You know, my in-laws live in the valley, and my parents come and visit three to four times a year for extended periods. And just having that extra set of hands to help and support and raise your kids is certainly, you know, just does wonders for your mental health. I know it does for my wife and I.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:39)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis. This is Chip Conley, and my guest today is one of the best known academics in the world on the topic of midlife. Now, there aren't many of them.
Midlife, there's lots of academics who study early adulthood and early childhood. There's adolescents, and then we study the gerontology of later life. But not that many have actually dedicated their life to studying midlife. Frank Infurna, a professor from Arizona State, who has a book coming out next year on the midlife crisis, knows this topic very well.
If you are in midlife and if you're listening to Midlife Chrysalis, you probably are, you're going to learn a few things about how to actually curate your life so that you don't have a crisis and that maybe you have a Chrysalis instead. So I hope you enjoy the episode. Frank Infurna, you are one of those people I've always wanted to talk to. So there's some people who come onto my podcast and I've known them forever and we get into lots of conversations, but you're somebody who I have noticed from afar, I have cited you in some of the writing I've done, including The Emergence of Long Life Learning. I think you may be the most cited person in that white paper, partly because I don't know that there's anybody or many people out there who have studied midlife as much as you have. What the hell do you have an interest in midlife for? Considering you've just turned 41 and you've been studying it for at least 10 years, what was it that led you to being interested in midlife in the first place?

**Frank Infurna** (2:15)
Well, first, I'm a big fan of yours and I greatly appreciate you inviting me on, so we can chat about all things midlife. I've been a big fan of yours for a long time as well. Gosh, I feel like the nice thing about research, you can go in whatever direction you have most interest in. I feel like I have been studying midlife for at least 10 years now, and it didn't always start that way. In grad school, I was interested in older adults, and that was because of my close relationship with my grandparents. So it just made sense to go into researching older adults. And my grad program had this emphasis on lifespan development. Earlier stages in life predict outcomes later on in life. And so I always had an eye on midlife, and I guess it wasn't until about 10 years ago when I started a research study with a colleague of mine here where we gave middle-aged adults a monthly questionnaire for two years.
And we asked about their health, well-being, social relationships, and life events. And for me, what really stood out for me was how, as part of these monthly questionnaires, we had an open-ended response of, did anything else negative happen this month? And it was just amazing how open and honest the participants were about what they were going through during that past month. And that kind of just snowballed into what I've been working on now, today.

**Chip Conley** (3:55)
So what were some of the key lessons? And again, I love the fact that you're also, you'd said to me as we were coming on, your research is becoming me search, partly because you are 41 years old and you're depending upon what we define as midlife. And I define it very broadly, as you may know, but 35 to 75, you're at the early stages of midlife.

**Frank Infurna** (4:16)
Right. So I think some of the things, and it's kind of, you know, I feel like a lot of my research is focused on kind of the negative things that have been happening in midlife. And I think what's really cool about what you've been doing is emphasizing the positive and I'm trying to work on emphasizing the positive more so. But I think within these open-ended responses, you know, they were talking about, you know, the stresses of various life transitions of how their aging parents were moving to be closer to them and they hadn't lived close to family for over 20 years. And so adjusting to this, the aging process of their parents, they were worried a lot about their kids, that they were moving out of state, getting new jobs or not being able to find a job. And a lot of stresses about finances, unable to pay big bills like car repair or air conditioning and different. And also, I mean, one also comment that repeatedly stood out for me was how people talked about their health insurance and different changes and how, because they had to change health insurance, their doctors that they had been with for like 15 or 20 years were no longer covered. So they had to like transition care. And so I'm just trying to put myself in these people's shoes of like, wow, like that's just something that, you know, I hadn't really me personally been exposed to. I mean, and it's just trying to give voice to these people's stories.