This Is Life at 400
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits, and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
—Shakespeare, As You Like It
The division of life into age-based roles like childhood and adulthood, or middle age and old age, is a cultural universal—something found in all known human societies.1 It can actually be seen in all complex organisms, since each must find some way of balancing the competing demands of growth, reproduction and survival. The American Sand-burrowing mayfly spends a year growing underwater as a larva, then, all within five minutes, takes on its adult form, mates, lays eggs, and dies. An oak tree, on the other hand, spends decades maturing before it begins its stately annual cycle of acorn-shedding. Despite the differences in speed, life stages are well defined in both cases.
We Homo sapiens are no exception: our life stages are the biological foundation on which our culture is based. From the Bible to Shakespeare, and from bar mitzvahs to celebrating your 21st birthday in a bar, our stories about ourselves revolve around set stages of our life. They shape almost every aspect of our existence: how we see ourselves and how we see others, our plans and our ambitions, and the social structures through which we move.
They also assume one thing: a natural length of a life. But
