They are, however, the measure.
Yes, and...?
On average, possibly, that's why the start of middle age is considered soft. But the point is that generally around the mid-forties it's harder to conceive and many women have already hit the biological brick wall at that point.
No. The definitions provided by the wiki are either 40 or 45 for the start (they are two separate definitions). You are welcome to consider it a soft start though - but the provided definitions don't have a soft start.
That seems improbable to me, as the majority of people won't get access to their retirement benefits for another five years. Additionally there's a hell of a lot of people who retired long after 65.
Well, I guess you have access to google and can disprove it in about 5 seconds.
You can. But... what is the point? You talk about major events that affect lifestyles as being "not the best measure", but instead suggest something completely unrelated to how life is lived such as splitting a lifetime into equal portions is meaningful in some way.
Meaningful to whom? I mean, why would you do that? Why three? Why break it up at all? We don't talk about middle age because we're interested in the passage of time, we talk about it because it's a phase of life, and it would be an extraordinary mathematical coincidence if the phases of life just happened to line up with average-adult-life-expentence/3.
I told you the point. So you can see when the mathematical start of the middle third of your life is. Some people who use mathematics every day (like me), tend to quantify things with numbers. It doesn't "mean" anything other than what it is. You are reading waaaaaay too much into it. A lot of us are in fact interested in the passage of time. Again, it's an arbitrary "phase of life" when you include so many variables that aren't related and don't apply to everyone. To make that clear, menopause is a phase of life, so is puberty, but when you start with a biological phase of life like these, then chuck in some sociological factors as an end point, then you have an arbitrarily defined "phase of life". Arbitrary phases will differ a lot from decade to decade and country to country (which is fine of course).
To talk of middle age the way you're doing is to divorce not merely the term from its meaning, but from the reason the term exists in the first place.
How am I talking of it? I'm being critical of the markers used but that doesn't divorce the term from it's meaning. I'm having a bit of fun examining the term.
Actually, yeah there is. If you start using phrases that are in common use with your own definitions, then people won't understand what you're talking about, and you'll be babbling incoherently without adding knowledge.
If we were to talk about the history of the PC, and I said "It's a shame the PC died sometime around 1992, it was a great thing, and nobody has ever successfully brought it back", you'd be pretty pissed off at me if it turned out I was using the word PC to describe "Computers made by Commodore".
So yeah, you have to at least try to use the same definitions everyone else is doing in normal life. In your case, bizarrely you're the one creating an arbitrary definition, while calling everyone else's arbitrary, when in fact they're using the phrase correctly. Yes, there's some fuzziness there, but that's not because the term is bad, it's because it's difficult to pin down exact dates that describe that middle phase of life.
Yeah, nah. There is not a rule. You inadvertently proved this (of course). You can make up any definition you like. I thought it was obvious (silly me - should have specified) that to use the new definition you must tell your audience of your definition (like I did in my example). So you just redefined PC and now I know your definition of it and we can have a conversation about it. It is that easy, and it is totally allowable. Nothing prevented you from doing it.
Case in hand, the wiki gives two separate definitions for middle age. You would have to let your audience know which definition you are using to have universal understanding. I can add definitions to the nth degree for the time period of middle age and you are in exactly the same boat.
Nice chatting.