The Four Life Phases

“Life’s racecourse is fixed,” wrote Cicero near the end of his life. “Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its appropriate quality.” Across all cultures and epochs, all classes and races, the experience of aging is a universal denominator of the human condition.
“From a biological standpoint,” observed Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang, “human life almost reads like a poem. It has its own rhythm and beat, its internal cycles of growth and decay.”

The ancients made sense of Cicero’s “stages” or Lin Yutang’s “rhythm and beat” by portraying human aging as a circle that nature and society divides into four parts. To several North American native tribes, life has been experienced as “four hills” (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), each corresponding to a wind and a season, and each possessing its own challenge, climax, and resolution. To the early Hindus, it was a journey through four ashramas, four phases of social and spiritual growth. Pythagoras was among the first western thinkers to interpret life as a cycle of four phases, each roughly twenty years long and each associated with a season: the spring of childhood, the summer of youth, the harvest of midlife, and the winter of old age. The Romans likewise divided the biological saeculum into four phases: pueritia (childhood); iuventus (young adulthood); virilitas (maturity); and senectus (old age).

In the modern era, the quaternal seasonality of the human lifecycle has remained a constant in literature, philosophy, and psychology. “Metaphorically, everyone understands the connections between the seasons of the year and the seasons of the human life,” writes sociologist Daniel Levinson. “Each has its necessary place and contributes its special character to the whole. It is an organic part of the total cycle, linking past and future and containing both within itself.” Carl Jung similarly describes the “arc of life” as “divisible into four parts.”

We connect our lifecycle with the seasons of nature not only to link our personal past to our personal future, but also to locate our own life within a larger social drama. Modern history has its own seasons—its own wets, hots, drys, and colds. Now consider what happens when one group of people grows up in a wet season and comes of age in a cold, while a later group grows up in dry season and comes of age in a hot. Because the seasons of history shape the seasons of life differently, the result is different generations. More fundamentally, because the seasons of history arrive in a fixed pattern, generations will also arrive in a fixed pattern—a recurring cycle of four archetypes. Rooted in ancient temperaments and enduring myths, these archetypes connect personal time with social time. Created young by the seasons of history, the four archetypes recreate those seasons, in the same order, as successive generations pass through life.

Like the seasons, the four phases of life blend one into the other, guided by a rhythm that allows variation. Where a season’s length is determined by the time from solstice to equinox, the length of each lifecycle phase is determined by the span of time between birth and the coming of age into young adulthood.

In American society, the ritual acknowledgment today occurs at 21, the age of college graduation and initial career launch. Afterwards, a person is deemed to be an autonomous adult. The length of life’s first phase fixes the length of the other life phases as well. Once one batch of children has fully come of age, it and it alone comprises the society’s young adults, casting its next-elders into a midlife social role. This now happens when the latter reach age 42, the minimum age U.S. history (though not the Constitution) has declared acceptable for a President. And, in turn, the group entering midlife pushes another into an elder role, now starting around age 63, today’s median age for receiving one’s first old-age benefit check from the government.

Since the share of people able to survive the elderhood phase of life has grown enormously over the last fifty years, it may make sense to define a new phase of life: late elderhood (age 84 on up). The social role of late elders is pure dependence, the receiving of comfort from others. Apart from consuming resources, few of the very oldest of today’s Americans are altering the quaternal dynamics of the lifecycle. If late elders ever swell in number, or if they ever collectively assert an active role, the impact on the saeculum (and on history) could be substantial.

The phases, and social roles, of the modern American lifecycle can be summarized as follows:

• Childhood (pueritia, age 0–20). Social role: growth (receiving nurture, acquiring values).
• Young Adulthood (iuventus, age 21–41). Social role: vitality (serving institutions, testing values).
• Midlife (virilitas, age 42–62). Social role: power (managing institutions, applying values).
• Elderhood (senectus, age 63–83). Social role: leadership (leading institutions, transferring values).
• Late Elderhood (age 84+). Social role: dependence (receiving comfort from institutions, remembering values).

The first four (childhood through elderhood) comprise the quaternity of the human lifecycle. The length of these four—roughly 84 years—matches the span of the American saeculum dating back to the Revolution.