Welcome to middle age!
The idea of "midlife," and particularly the decline associated with the period, has become widespread in Euro-American culture. The symptoms of middle age are equally pervasive: back pain, mortgage payments, and an aversion to loud late-night activities. This pathology of midlife has even recently begun to be exported to all territories in the contemporary world system; people around the world are being invited to change the way they think about mature adulthood and to adopt the middle-class American version of middle age. Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) is a welcome antidote to this epidemic, providing a refreshing examination of both this received idea of midlife and of alternative "fictions" that operate in cultures where middle age does not even constitute a life stage.
