THE 30s and 40s should be the richest and most fulfilling years of life. At no other time will most people feel so needed, so connected to others.
Men and women are at the peak of their creativity and their careers. In their personal lives they're capable of greater sexual intimacy than when they were young. Enjoying the physical and emotional closeness of children should be one of the greatest joys of this time - a real privilege that many an older person, their lives past, looks back on with nostalgia.
So why are so many people in their late 30s and 40s so miserable? Why are they succumbing to marriage breakdown, stress related illnesses, depression and work overload? Why, most of all, are so many finding it so hard to be happy?
Between the ages of 35 and 40 some people would experience an extraordinary degree of pressure in middle class Irish society," says Dr Bernadette O'Sullivan, psychologist with Vico Consultation Services in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin. We have structured society in such a way that some people are trying to do everything at a particular period of their lives. They are parenting young or teenage children and trying to keep careers on track while keeping their adult to adult relationships going ash well." It is, she adds, an awful lot of activity to be engaged in over a relatively short span of time.
Twenty years ago in Passages, Gail Sheehy gave the classic modern psychological view of life's inevitable stages. The early to mid 20s were supposed to be about risk taking and career building; the late 20s and 30s devoted to nest making and child rearing; and the 40s about letting go of children and looking back towards the inner self.
At about this time, Sheehy's theory goes, the midlife crisis kicks in like a rocket as people begin to feel their mortality and engage in the painful process of assessing their achievements and coming to terms with their losses and limitations. That's why depression, if it's going to occur, usually hits around this age.
But in the 1990s, life hasn't turned out like this. It's as though life has lost its natural rhythm and all the major responsibilities of our lives have been telescoped into one single, hectic decade - give or take a few years either way.
An insecure job market where the supply of entry level workers outstrips - demand means that people in their 20s are being burned out by employers who know that they are easy to replace. When they marry, the young couple in their late 20s are likely to be forced to delay real homemaking until they can save enough to buy a house, which may not happen until they're 30.
With two careers on the boil, and we are talking here about the strata of society lucky enough to be in the workforce in the first place, many couples may not get around to having children until their mid 30s when, for a minority, the delay may bring with it the risk of age related infertility and all the heartache, exploration and expense that that can bring.
Postponement of life's goals can lead to the impossibility of fulfilling them. Another hazard of the current scenario is that by the time many in their 30s feel free to settle down with a lifetime companion they often find they're aren't so many free and likely candidates left.
Once couples have finally got the home, the children - and the carers to finance it all - they may then find themselves under intolerable pressure balancing home and work commitments and constantly bickering about the division of domestic chores. Many women are disappointed to learn that, instead of feeling fulfilled by their involvement in both the public and private domains, they have become sandwiched between children in need of intensive nurturing, elderly parents ho are becoming needier by the minute, and the relentless workplace.
IN THEIR 40s many women feel so burdened by the responsibility of providing perpetual emotional sustenance to large numbers of dependants that they begin to crack up - suffering from stress related illnesses like irritable bowel syndrome or mental distresses like depression.
"Marriages are subject to so many pressures, says Ruth Barror, CEO of the Marriage Counselling Service, "financial problems, career problems, care for older relations, care for teenagers and young people in their early 20s who are supposed to be flying the nest but aren't because they're not economically viable until they're 25 but who still cost a bomb. The number of dependents is never as great as it is in the 40-55 age group."
It makes you wonder: when would such people feel free to indulge in the legendary mid life crisis? At 60? Perhaps not even then.
"People don't have creative thinking time anymore. The solitude required for spiritual development has become a luxury item," says Ms Barror.
Family life and the time to parent at leisure is becoming dangerously close to becoming a luxury item as well.
"The fact that women now have access not just to jobs, but to career opportunities creates incredible stress because, like their husbands, they too are overly conscientious workaholics," Ms Barror adds. "There is such fierce pressure in the workforce that we can not have a family life anymore."
"Actually, I don't know how we manage to live at all. People are killing themselves."
It all begins to sound as though the traditional mid life crisis is being replaced with a nurturing crisis. "Who is doing the holding? Who is holding life?" asks Ms Barror. "Who is nurturing? Who is holding the children? It's an emotional thing. They don't know they are loved if you are not available. You get home and you are so tired that you don't have space for yourself much less them."
Going too are the multi generational family groups sitting round the Aga talking about their collective problems. In busy two career families a meal with friends occasionally may be the best you can do. In any case most people know better than to burden their friends too much. Today if you want someone to listen to your problems more often than not you have to pay for the service.
"There is nothing inherently difficult about being this age," believes Dr O'Sullivan. It's what the social structure is doing to us - and we are participating in it. People do not suddenly crack up at 45 the society is pressuring them to crack up."
They suffer no mental pain which could not be fixed tomorrow if their lives could be structured differently - which means structuring society differently, Dr O Sullivan believes.
GPs can prescribe tranquillisers and psychologists can offer counselling but we can actually do very little more than a patch up job for people. We're just mending things instead of offering long term solutions," she adds.
"The solution is not therapy, the solution is in changing society. Therapy can help but the real problem is larger than us and it is wrong to blame individuals in this way."
FLEXIBLE working and job sharing would solve the problems of most of the people who come to her for counselling, she believes. It's simple: if we are to have a healthy society, people with families must be enabled to spend time with them, she believes.
That's also the view of Dr Cary Cooper, the American born Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and one of the world's foremost experts on workplace stress.
His research over the past 20 years has shown that work overload and the contract culture of the 1990s are together killing family life and causing an epidemic of stress related illness, including heart disease, depression, sleeplessness, difficulties in personal relationships and sexual problems.
He believes that companies will begin to make work more attractive as they begin to realise that psychological distress and family breakdown harms their bottom line.
Speaking to The Irish Times, he said the stress of the 1980s was about the new enterprise culture then spreading throughout Europe in which people placed stress on themselves by taking entrepreneurial risks. The stress of the 1990s, however, was completely different and much more destructive because it was being imposed on workers by management.
Job insecurity is being deliberately created by companies large and small as they down size, creating massive redundancies. While millions of people in the prime of life are having their potential thrown away through unemployment, those who are employed are suffering from work overload as staffs are down sized or right sized" as US companies like to call it.
Contract workers, especially, are suffering the stress of working inordinate numbers of hours and the stress of work overload - as well as the stress of job insecurity," says Dr Cooper.
The greatest threat to the two career marriage could be the contract job, with two partners on contract feeling under pressure to outperform their colleagues at the expense of nurturing each other at home. "Men and women are coming home late from working, feeling job insecurity and the stress of work overload and this is not good for their relationships with their children or their marriage," he says.
"Presenteeism" is the term coined by Dr Cooper to describe the phenomenon whereby workers feel so insecure in their jobs that they attempt to be present at work at least 12 hours a day. Even when they dare to go home, sufferers of "presenteeism" keep a jacket hanging over the back of the chair, the computer screen on and the lamp switched on over the desk to make it look like they are still on duty.
PRESENTEEISM is reaching massive proportions throughout Europe as more organisations adopt the policy of keeping only their "core workers" on staff. In an attempt to appear indispensable, workers want to be seen to be the first in the office in the morning - and the last to leave at night. "Presenteeism is a disease as harmful as absenteeism," he says.
His analysis of the workplace is so bleak that it is surprising to hear that he sees light at the end of the tunnel.
He is convinced that as companies realise how badly work stress ultimately harms them, they will begin to change to become more worker friendly. And who is going to benefit most? Women workers - and therefore families.
As the contract culture takes over, increasing numbers of so called "premium workers" will be on contract. These highly specialised free agents will be much in demand and expensive to train so that it will be in their employers' interest to make their working arrangements attractive rather than lose them to other employers.
Companies will also be motivated to improve conditions when they realise that employee sickness and absenteeism cost money.
Litigation will increasingly be another motivation for change, as workers sue their employers for putting them under too much stress, a precedent already set in the UK in 1994 in the case of John Walker v Northumberland Council.
But the future trend which will have the greatest impact on the family and on society is that as the contract culture takes over women will gradually come to predominate contract work, says Dr Cooper. This is because women are better at adapting to contract work since they're used to dropping in and out of the labour force and moulding their working hours to suit their families.
It is men - not women - who are actually under threat, he believes. The "bottom line" for the family in the 21st century could be that the women who are now carrying the burden of nurturing will ultimately have the most to gain from the changing work practices of the future. But there's a price for everything it seems and Dr Cooper warns that this competition for suitable work between men and women can cause real problems in marriages.