Ailsa Chang turned 50 this year. She planned her birthday party “with the intensity of a heat-seeking missile,” determined to prove to the world, and maybe to herself, that she was thrilled about the decade ahead. She still isn’t sure if that was genuine excitement or a defiant performance. Probably both.
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That tension got her excited to talk with her NPR colleague Allison Aubrey, whose new book, “Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love,” argues that the years after 50 can bring renewed purpose instead of decline. Aubrey joined Chang in person at NPR West in Culver City to discuss it.
Aubrey has a wider window in mind than most people picture when they hear the word “midlife.” She puts it at 50 to 75, she said, pointing to a Pew Research Center projection that 3.7 million people worldwide will be over 100 by 2050.
At a time when a century-long life is possible, Aubrey said, then turning 50 doesn’t mean winding down. It means roughly half a lifetime is still ahead, with room to look past parenting and paychecks and ask a harder question: What is my purpose now?
To find answers, Aubrey interviewed more than 150 people making what she calls a “third turn,” a phrase she borrowed from her grandfather’s “Kentucky Derby wisdom,” about the unexpected opportunities to surge ahead in the third quarter of life. She found a pattern in the stories that struck her most: people who took the skills and instincts built over a career and pointed them toward something more personal, something closer to legacy than to a job title.
These stories are at the heart of “Your Turn”: A lawyer who closed her practice and opened a bookshop. A nurse practitioner who started singing lead vocals in a band that tours up and down the coast of Maine. And a former magazine editor, Joanne, who Aubrey describes as a “buttoned-down and a committed perfectionist,” who signed up for her first improv class in her late 50s.
Joanne is in her 60s now and performs improv in Washington, D.C. She told Aubrey that improv gave her a new script for life: saying “yes, and” to whatever came next. Chang said the story pushed her to consider her own leap, singing lessons and an acting class, which she committed to on the air.
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Chang asked Aubrey how two reporters who spend their careers in hard news should think about making room for play. Aubrey pointed to a study she covered earlier this year out of University College London. Researchers found that people who regularly engage with the arts, through singing, dancing or going to the theater, appeared to age more slowly at the cellular level than people who don’t.
The effect on biological aging, which is a person’s rate of aging compared to peers, Aubrey said, appeared as strong as the effect of exercise.
Chang, who isn’t married and doesn’t have children, said her friends function as her family, and Aubrey’s book convinced her they’re also keeping her healthier. Aubrey agreed and offered two reasons.
First, emotions are contagious. They spread between people, she said, so surrounding yourself with creative, optimistic people tends to make you more of the same. Second, after interviewing more than 150 women who made compelling career pivots, Aubrey said she noticed a formula, that mirrors a curriculum on midlife learning program developed by Marc Freedman, an aging expert and founder of the nonprofit CoGenerate: Go inward first, back to whatever lit you up as a kid, whether that was singing or drawing or something else entirely. Then go outward and find the group or organization built around that interest.
Chang asked whether writing “Your Turn” reflected Aubrey’s own third turn. It did, Aubrey said.
As a science reporter, she trusts the scientific method to answer a question with evidence. But the questions she found herself asking in the mirror, about identity, her changing body and her purpose, don’t resolve that way. Writing the book taught her to make room for both, she said: the evidence-based tools she still relies on, and the wisdom and intuition that can help us listen to our hearts and move forward to a next chapter full of adventure, joy, purpose and play.