What is the official age when you can consider yourself to have become older and less interested in what's going around you?
Some surveys point to the mid-thirties.
So, what is the ideal age in our lives? Some believe it is the carefree teenage years, or the college years. But reaching 35 might be a turning point in your life, both personally and professionally.
According to a study conducted by the University of Kent, the age of 35 is not only the age at which we are no longer seen as "young," but it is also the age at which men reach the "peak of loneliness," and women the "peak of boredom."
In addition, this is the age when we begin to dislike our jobs, according to a survey conducted by the human resources company "Robert Half" in the UK, which included more than two thousand employees.
Some research indicates that during the mid-thirties, family pressures and financial responsibilities increase, causing a lot of problems both at work and at home.
Increased pressures? In the mid-thirties, the idea of job security becomes more urgent. According to data collected by the National Office of Statistics in the UK during a survey conducted in the first quarter of 2017, employees aged between 35 to 49 were twice as likely to be laid off compared to those aged 25 to 34.
In addition, those in that age range (35 to 49) were less satisfied with their jobs than their younger counterparts, according to the survey.
The survey also indicated that one in six British employees over 35 are not happy in their jobs, which is twice the rate for employees under 35 years old.
Ashley Webman, a director at the British company "Robert Half," says that younger workers often benefit from lowered expectations from their managers, and the high ambitions ahead of them, while workers in their mid-thirties struggle to answer the question: Have I achieved what I want?
Julia Clark, who works for Ipsos market research, says it's fair "to consider that some differences between pre-35 and post-35 may be due to the fact that we are the ones who enforce this breakpoint."
Clark adds that it is common among research companies to use age brackets that are spaced ten years apart or more. Therefore, these age classifications may not be consistent with each other.
For example, a 20-year-old person is typically in a different life stage compared to someone who is 29, yet both are placed in the same age bracket.
Therefore, as Clark sees it, the first age stage for employees should be from 18 to 24 years, then from 24 to 34, and so forth.
Women over 35, who want to have children, face concerns about fertility, although recent studies indicate that fertility in women does not decline sharply and suddenly as some might expect.
In the United States, there is a rising number of women postponing their first pregnancy until after their thirties in order to continue their studies and secure a better job.
The latest statistics from the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," part of the U.S. Department of Health, indicate that women in their early thirties are now having more children than their counterparts in their twenties, for the first time in recorded history in the country.
There are also economic reasons that lead to delaying childbearing, as a study published in 2011 in the "Population Economics" journal found that each year a woman delays having children leads to an increase in her job income by nine percent.
Delayed decisions, says Dilip V. Jeste, the director of the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of California San Diego, are part of a misunderstanding that our twenties and thirties will be the best years of our lives, and that decline in various aspects of life begins later.
However, in reality, these years are filled with different stresses and concerns related to making critical decisions in our lives.
Furthermore, the rising life expectancy in advanced countries, along with the abundance of options in a globally interconnected economy, makes settling down in one job and one geographical location more challenging compared to previous generations.
Jeste says: "In the past, people would make long-term pivotal decisions at the beginning of their twenties, but Millennials today continue to delay such decisions."
"They postpone marriage and having children, thus, many of the pressures that used to occur early in life now happen in the thirties," adds Jeste.
But as Jeste says, the good news is that the rest of your life could be happier. Yes, aging might not be pleasant, but your mental abilities might improve with decades of age.
Jeste says: "We know ourselves better, make wiser decisions, and tend to be less selfish. This is the wisdom that comes with experience, which you only gain as you grow older."
