Did you know that someone who is forty-nine is about three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who’s just a year older? According to Daniel Pink in his brilliant book, When; The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, that’s a fact, Jack.
Likewise, twenty-nine-year olds are about twice as likely to run a marathon as twenty-eight-year olds or thirty-year-olds. And, according to the same study done by social scientists Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, people who are at the end of a life decade (e.g. 29, 39, 49) are overrepresented among first-time marathoners by a whopping 48%.
Now, I personally have zero interest in running a marathon. But I am intrigued by the idea that when a person’s age nears the end of a life decade, the research suggests that they tend to crank up their efforts a bit in the old goals department.
I enjoyed reading about this phenomenon in Pink’s book. Apparently, Alter and Hershfield even came up with the term “9-enders” to describe people in the last year of a life decade.
“Reaching the end of a decade,” Pink explains, “somehow rattles people’s thinking and redirects their actions.”
Or, put another way: 9-enders get stuff done.
Mind you, what one gets done in the home stretch of a life decade isn’t always for the best. Alter and Hershfield’s research also discovered that the suicide rate was higher for 9-enders than it was for people whose ages ended in any other digit.
Likewise with cheating! On the Ashley Madison extramarital-affair website, nearly one in 8 men were 29, 39, 49 or 59…which is about 8% higher than chance would predict.
Alter and Hershfield admit the energizing effect of the end of a decade doesn’t make logical sense. “The earth doesn’t care about keeping track of our age,” they say. “But people do because we have short lives. We keep track to see how we are doing.”
Pink suggests that “What the end of a decade seems to trigger, for good and for ill, is a reenergized pursuit of significance.”
When I thought back to what my 49th year held for me, I couldn’t help but wonder if these guys were on to something. Three months after I turned 49 (in 2017), I finally sold the home I’d been living in (and griping about) for 7 years, put my belongings into storage and hit the road with my dog for 18 months.
When my mom turned 49 (in 1974), she divorced my father after 18 years of marriage and proceeded to raise 4 kids on her own.
How about you? Have you experienced a significant year when you reached the end of a life decade?
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Originally Published on Pink Gazelle
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