Essay

Every Five Years or So, I Start Again

October 26, 2026 · by Meghan Rusco

I find that every five years or so I go through a readjustment period where I have to figure out what I want my life to look like next.

For a long time, I wondered if that was just me. If I could not settle. If everyone else picked a life and stayed with it, while I kept stopping to ask if mine still fit.

Then I learned that a psychologist had spent years studying exactly this pattern.

What Levinson found

In the 1970s, Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson interviewed 40 men between the ages of 35 and 45 in depth about their lives. From those interviews, he published The Seasons of a Man's Life in 1978.

Levinson used the term "life structure" for the basic pattern of a person's life at a given time — their work, their family life, their home, their relationships, and the choices holding all of that together.

His idea was simple, and it has stayed with me: we do not build a life structure once and keep it forever. We build one, live in it for a while, and then we reach a transition where we question it, reappraise it, and begin building the next one.

He described transitions lasting about five years, and more stable periods lasting about seven years. The midlife transition, which he placed around ages 40 to 45, was a time of re-evaluating earlier commitments, giving attention to talents or wishes that had been put aside, and feeling a new urgency about time and meaning.

Later, in work published with Judy Levinson in The Seasons of a Woman's Life (1996), he studied 45 women — homemakers, corporate and financial career women, and academics — and looked at how women moved through similar building, questioning, and rebuilding periods, while carrying the particular pressures women face around work and family.

What later research added

Levinson's work is a map, not a rule, and it is important to say that plainly.

His first study was small — 40 men, all in a similar age range — and researchers have criticized it for that small sample size and for the time period it came from. Later, larger research has not supported the idea that everyone has a dramatic "midlife crisis."

That is actually the reassuring part.

In research from the Midlife in the United States study (MIDUS), Elaine Wethington found that only a minority of adults — often reported as about 10 to 20 percent in summaries of that work — described having a midlife crisis, and for many of them it was tied to a major life event, such as a health problem, a job loss, or a divorce, rather than to age alone. Larger midlife research from the MacArthur Foundation network likewise found that many adults between 40 and 60 described a sense of well-being, and many women described midlife as a freeing, satisfying time.

More recent lifespan research by psychologist Margie Lachman, who has studied midlife for more than 30 years through MIDUS, points in the same direction: only a small percentage of people report a midlife crisis, personality can still change in midlife, and many people report a strong sense of control and well-being at this stage, along with stronger emotion regulation.

In other words: re-evaluation is common. Crisis is not required.

That distinction matters to me. I am not in crisis. I am in a readjustment.

And right now, for me, it is showing up in three places at once.

Home

Home is not just where things are kept. It is the structure that holds your daily life.

When my family was in a different season, my home needed to work in a different way. Now I find myself looking around and asking different questions. What do I want this space to feel like? What still serves the life we are living now, and what is just left over from the life we were living before?

Clearing something out, moving something, letting something go — those can look like small house projects. Sometimes they are part of a bigger question: does this home still fit the people we have become?

Work and career

Work is one of the biggest parts of any life structure, so of course it gets questioned in a transition.

Not just "what job do I want?" but how do I want my days to be spent? How much of my energy should work take? What kind of work still feels meaningful? What have I learned — in school, in my career, in my own health and life — that I want to carry into what comes next?

Levinson talked about "the Dream" — the picture a person carries of the future they are working toward. In a readjustment period, that picture gets looked at honestly. Some of it still fits. Some of it has changed. Some of it was right for a younger version of me and is not right for who I am now.

That is not failure. That is updating the picture.

My role in the family

This one may be the quietest, and the deepest.

In a family, roles change as everyone gets older. Being needed does not end, but it looks different than it did in the years when children needed hands-on care every day. At the same time, you may be rethinking roles you have carried as a daughter, a sister, a partner, or the person everyone counts on to hold things together.

A readjustment asks: which of these roles still fit? Which ones need new boundaries? Where have I been living from habit or expectation instead of from choice?

There can be grief in that, even when the change is good. There can also be room — room to ask what you want, maybe for the first time in a long time, without feeling selfish for asking it.

No wonder people come and go what are the odds you are at a compatible place with compatible goals and feelings as another human how very rare and precious

Not a crisis. A season.

If you recognize yourself in this, I want you to hear this part: needing to figure out what you want your life to look like next does not mean your last five years were wrong.

It may mean they did what they were supposed to do. They carried you to here.

A transition, in Levinson's language, is where an old life structure ends and a new one becomes possible. You question what you have built. You explore what could change. You move, slowly, toward the choices that will hold the next season.

You do not have to have the whole next picture today.

You only have to be honest that the old one no longer fits in quite the same way — and give yourself permission to start asking what the new one might look like, at home, in your work, and in your place in your family.

That is where I am. Every five years or so, I start again.

Not from nothing. From everything I have learned so far.