Where Have All the Forty-Somethings at the Company Gone?

They looked "lost, anxious, not sure where to go… The burden hasn't lifted — aging parents above, young children below. That's exactly the stage they're at."

In the winter of 2014, Zhang Xun, then in his early forties, decided to leave the Five Star Sports channel. He had been there more than ten years, and he was tired.

Five Star Sports belonged to Shanghai Media Group (SMG). Zhang had joined this state-owned company straight out of college, planning to stay until retirement. But that year he began to suspect that the plans he made in his twenties had trapped him. If he stayed at the station, he would probably fall far behind the young people at internet companies, and end up in the station's own predicament — "surging pressure just to survive" — unable to go forward or back.

Lu Lili turned 40 this year. By 37 he had already worked four jobs at multinationals: Coca-Cola, Motorola, Nokia, Dell. The worry never left him, and every two years he went to look at what else was out there, but as a professional manager he still hit the ceiling. Experience, Lu realized, had made his execution masterful. Chances to actually decide anything were rare.

Around the time Zhang and Lu left their companies, employees born in the 1980s and 1990s noticed that the middle-aged people in their forties were leaving in groups. Apart from a few senior executives, they hardly ever saw their elders from the 1960s and 1970s generations around the office anymore.

When Dong Lei — CEO of the HR firm REForce, and a headhunter with more than a decade of experience — tracked these middle-aged professionals down, they looked "lost, anxious, not sure where to go… The burden hasn't lifted — aging parents above, young children below. That's exactly the stage they're at."

The Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques once offered a broad explanation for this stretch of life, and gave it a rather grave name: the midlife crisis. To prove they still counted for something, Jaques argued, people at this stage often behave in strange, outsized ways. An affair is one. Other symbolic gestures include buying a sports car, getting a hair transplant, finding a younger girlfriend.

Changing your identity at work is another way out. Dong also found that the optimistic, bold ones who leave big companies usually start their own; the pessimistic ones spend those years working themselves to the bone for a new employer, most likely a smaller one.

Either way, they cannot stay on the track they were on.

No One Is Spared

Once "company man" becomes a big part of who you are, the anxiety that comes with age stands out all the more, because now there are titles, salaries and juniors to measure yourself against.

American Beauty is a classic film about the midlife crisis, and it boils the causes down to their essence. Kevin Spacey's Lester is 42. Beside a wife who looks far better at her job as a real-estate agent, and a teenage daughter, he feels like a loser. On top of that, Lester has worked at a magazine for 14 years, and his new boss is Brad, who has been there a month. Brad comes over for a talk, and it looks like Lester is about to be fired.

Things don't usually happen that dramatically. The causes behind them are much the same.

Less than six months after Zhang left Five Star Sports, Lou Yichen, a colleague of 15 years, announced that he was quitting too. The departure of the 46-year-old football commentator became big news in Shanghai football circles. "I've played for the same club for 23 years," Lou told a friend, reaching for an athlete's comparison. "If I don't transfer now, I'll have to retire."

Lou was in fact still well known. He worried anyway that he would be squeezed out for a reason no one can resist: his age.

Some psychological research has found that people who change jobs when they are younger are less likely to hit a crisis in middle age. Another survey found that 80% of professional managers between 34 and 42 are not spared.

It is worse if, like Lu Lili, you happen to live through the decline of your company and your industry.

Nokia's collapse is the sharpest memory of Lu's career. In 2014, when the Nokia brand — just abandoned by Microsoft — announced it would return to the smartphone market, its brand value on the Interbrand ranking was about a tenth of what it had been in 2009. Yet this Finnish company had once held the top spot in mobile-phone market share for fourteen years running.

The last place Lu worked as a professional manager was still a big company: Dell. There he built a hands-on program for university students called Dell Campus Team. Every year it brought Dell more than 100 million yuan in sales. Working with students was new to Lu, too.

And things kept getting worse. According to Gartner, global PC shipments in the first quarter of 2016 fell to their lowest level since 2007. Dell was the world's third-largest PC maker, and fewer and fewer people believed in the PC business.

The old energy was gone. It was like an unpleasant disenchantment: the picture of the world he had built in his youth took a hard hit. Lu says he "no longer worships big companies."

He decided to take the EMBA program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. By then he was nearly certain of one thing: a single wrong decision can bring a big company down fast. "If a professional manager just stays put, he's essentially wasting his life."

He had to change.

Just Past Thirty

It is hard for a professional manager to call time on "wasting his life." He may have seen what was wrong as early as his early thirties, but at work, the more professionalized you become, the more inertia there is in what you do. Even when you are no longer being put to your best use, changing jobs feels like another lap of the same cycle.

Xie Peng began his career at Procter & Gamble, known as the Whampoa Military Academy of Chinese professional managers. "You learn at a multinational, then you use what you've learned, and you go around and around inside the multinational circle," he says.

After leaving P&G, Xie was not willing to let his climb be interrupted. He turned down an offer from Harvard's Kennedy School, joined the cleaning-products maker S.C. Johnson, then moved to Kinko's, the largest print-and-binding company in the United States, which FedEx bought in 2003. Xie was 32 that year.

Going back over his résumé, Xie saw it: once P&G is in your life plan, you are on the professional manager's track.

After finishing his undergraduate degree in international relations at Peking University, Xie was picked for an international training program set up by Japan's Sasakawa Peace Foundation. In 1998 he got through five rounds of interviews at P&G, and the salary on the table was 10,000 yuan — roughly 12 times what a government job paid.

Xie is 43 now, and still remembers that before he even started, P&G sent someone to take him out regularly to the best restaurants in Beijing so he wouldn't change his mind. In his first month, he and the other new hires were sent to train at the Garden Hotel, then the best hotel in Guangzhou. He was a little dazzled by it, and he doesn't mind admitting how modest things were back then. He jokes, "We were really just pushing our bicycles around the basement of a five-star hotel."

In Xie's case, the midlife crisis came on gently.

When he decided to leave P&G, the company was still buying up brands and widening its product line in China. Multinationals had not yet lost their standing as China's best employers — a loss that ManpowerGroup, the American staffing firm, would declare complete by 2010.

But "multinationals have a problem. The foreigners run too much of it, and headquarters runs too much of it. Even at Band 5 — Band 6 is the top — the job is basically execution. You have very little authority," Xie says.

In his thirties, Xie wanted a place where he called the shots. With more choices and more information in hand, he worked up his courage and stopped settling.

Weighing Every Angle

In a 2013 paper titled "Unmet Expectations," Dr. Hannes Schwandt of Princeton found that, next to the middle-aged, young people are optimistic and sometimes too optimistic, while older people are at peace. What the middle-aged mostly feel is regret. They have careers and families, but they aren't sure whether they can still ask for more, or whether they should settle for what they have.

Before Zhang Xun left Five Star Sports, his parents asked him to think again. They believed a state-owned company was still the best career a person could have, and that changing anything at his age was not wise. His friends thought it was "time for him to take the step."

Out of many options, Zhang picked PPTV Sports, close enough to what he had been doing. Suning had just announced a 5-billion-yuan investment in PPTV to buy broadcasting rights, which counted as some proof that this was a safe landing. And two Five Star Sports people had gone to PPTV Sports before him — the commentator Zhou Liang and the editor Dong Li — back when traditional media was still thriving.

"It was much harder for them to make that decision then than it is now," Zhang says. His own, by comparison, was very cautious.

Unless their finances are comfortable, few people at this age live for a dream, or for slogans about changing the world. That is what Dong Lei has taken from more than a decade of watching them.

Deng Hao spent 16 years at Huawei, all told.

At 25 he left Fiyta, the watch company under the Ministry of Aerospace, and became roughly Huawei's 12,400th employee. It was a job that made life look more promising: his pay quadrupled, and he could buy a home at least five years sooner.

Over the years that followed, Huawei's headcount grew fifteenfold, to 150,000. The year Deng turned 42, he was one of those 150,000. He moved through many roles, but always around one marginal product line, selling routers, switches and similar gear to customers other than the carriers. In his sixth year at Huawei, he and about 1,000 others were reassigned to H3C, the Hangzhou joint venture Huawei had set up with America's 3Com.

In 2015, his second year back at Huawei's Nanjing research institute, Deng chose to leave. He decided more or less right after reading a speech titled "Live Happily Through a Life Full of Hardship." A Huawei party official gave it in response to a run of employee suicides and self-harm, and cases of depression and anxiety, at the company in 2014.

As with his first career move, Deng says he weighed every angle and concluded the time had come.

"At my age you're running on experience," he says. "The body can't keep up the way it did, and there aren't many chances left at work." Experience aside, on the other two counts he is no match for the young.

Even the resources he had built up over the years were not necessarily any use. He couldn't do what colleagues who left earlier did and become a distributor for H3C and Huawei equipment: competition in the networking market had grown fiercer and more transparent, and margins kept thinning.

Neurodermatitis

Deng got past these obstacles, and as he set to work on Dreamook, a brand-new children's culture project, the neurodermatitis on his neck flared up again. He'd had the same trouble in his twenties, when he first joined Huawei.

That patch of skin made the 43-year-old Deng look, oddly, like he had his youth back.

Every middle-aged person wants that. Each of them remembers the version of himself who was riding high at 25. Lu Lili says he was in the first wave of professional managers the multinationals trained. His direct boss was one of the earliest returnees from Canada. He read the Coca-Cola job ad in the English-language paper China Daily.

Then, in no time, they arrived at what Victor Hugo called "the old age of youth": in Paris, 40 is the age when young waiters begin calling you "madame" and stop winking at you as a joke. In the United States, suicide rates rise in middle age, and a study of a European population found that the share of middle-aged people taking antidepressants is going up.

Mainstream young people are less tolerant of the ones trailing behind them than you might think, which raises the odds of a "midlife crisis." Even outside the results-driven workplace, the mass media that young people dominate overstates how common affairs are in a midlife crisis. On the social platforms where the young are most active, the buzzwords they cook up work like a wall between age groups.

They also mock people who post endlessly about their kids. The cruel part is… since last year, couples who have just reached middle age have probably weighed one nagging question countless times: should they have a second child?

Dong Lei believes professional networking can carry them through the crisis. In networking, the middle-aged can step out of the settled scene of "wife, kids and a warm bed" for a while, and pick up new information and opportunities — besides, socializing is a young person's thing to begin with. By the time they make up their minds to leave the big company they have worked at for over a decade, things may genuinely start to improve.

Lu Lili used to work out of an office tower in the China World Trade Center. Now his company sits in the You+ community for young entrepreneurs, and except for two or three people, the whole team was born after 1995. These young people who take orders from him know the mobile internet well and have pitifully little experience. Nothing like the clear career choices Lu made when he was young: they walked into a company that had barely started, carrying almost no assumptions, and the first thing they ran into was a middle-aged boss who had lived through Nokia's collapse and Apple's rise.

The gap in years, if anything, left both sides feeling that this was new and exhilarating.

Exhilarating

The American writer Barbara Bradley Hagerty belongs to the camp that doesn't accept the "midlife crisis." In Life Reimagined she writes: "In our forties and fifties we may stall briefly, or go through a transition — but that transition can be exhilarating rather than terrifying."

The stories we heard bear her out. Lu Lili started Ai Luobo, an internship and job platform for university students. Xie Peng and fellow P&G "alum" Huang Xiaonan co-founded iPinYou, a programmatic ad-buying company that has already closed a Series D. Zhang Xun is general manager of sports at his new employer, PPTV Sports. Deng Hao founded Dreamook, a children's culture project he believes has an enormous market ahead of it.

But their changes have been, if anything, a little overcorrected. Lu Lili used to review his career plan every two years; now he thinks about it all the time. Xie Peng finally has a company where he calls the shots, and he hopes the public holidays get fewer and fewer. Zhang Xun sometimes has to tell himself there is no way back.

So the burden and the anxiety have not entirely gone away. Yes — it is quite possible that the "midlife crisis" is only just beginning, right after the exhilaration.

(Intern Zeng Menglong also contributed to this article.)

Cover image from thetelecomblog, iTunes, Coca-Cola, xiaorizi