Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

Some wit once wrote that middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work. If a new study is to be believed, British people are experiencing the classic symptoms of mid-life crises earlier than ever before.

The concept of a mid-life crisis remains, for some people, a myth, the false construct of a society that's become much too enamoured with youthfulness and self-analysis.

For others, though, mid-life crises are very real and worrying. They mark the end of the joyous and sometimes painful journey of discovery that is young adulthood and the beginnings of an awareness of one's own mortality.

The new report, released last week by the relationships advice charity Relate, found that for many Brits the years between their mid-30s to mid-40s are the unhappiest decade of life. This it said is the time when more people than average feel lonely or depressed.

For Relate, the survey's findings suggest that people aren't waiting until their mid-40s to start feeling middle aged.

Meanwhile, a report in the Sunday Times this week announced the rather obvious fact that a new generation has taken over the leadership of British politics. These leaders are all in their early 40s.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all part of the so-called Generation X, born between 1961 and the early 1980s. The term was first coined by photographer Robert Capa but made popular by Douglas Coupland in his book of the same name.

This generation is now coming into leadership in every major sphere of influence in society. It hardly needs saying that in the world of digital media technology GenXers have long reigned supreme. Most of the largest internet-related companies were either founded by GenXers - as is with Amazon, YouTube and Google - or are run by them.

In British law firms, according to the Sunday Times, the average age of partners is 38 to 40, while the number of FTSE 100 CEOs aged under 45 has doubled since 2008. In education, a growing number of head teachers are in their late 30s to early forties - only 25% are over 55.

In the entertainment industry, GenX has elevated the skills of the animator and the comic-book artist, turning them into mainstream money-makers. Through Gen-X interest, the documentary movie genre has taken on a new significance in our experience of society and culture and this cohort has initiated major breakthroughs in CGI, 3D and other technologies that underpin the magic of movie-making.

And the list goes on: GenXers are on the rise right across the social spectrum.

I've been researching, writing about and working with Generation Xers since the early 1980s, when I was a youth worker in Melbourne, Australia.

I've founded several networks and organizations that have provided services to GenXers, in Australia and in Europe. One of these networks grew in ten years to represent some 60,000 teenage GenXers, at a time when my homeland had the highest rate of teen suicide in the world.

After years of observation and research, several things mark out Generation X as unique. These factors among others will shape the way they exercise leadership throughout our society over the next decade and more.