Every career theory has to answer the same awkward question: what actually changes when you turn forty-five that is supposed to change when you turn forty-five?
Because if you look around, the honest answer is: less than the textbooks predict.
Take a hypothetical Sarah. Forty-seven. Two children, one dog, a house that is finally paid off, twenty-two years at the same insurance company. She has just asked her manager for a sabbatical because, in her words, she wants to figure out what she actually wants to do when she grows up.
Her age says she should be in Maintenance — a stage in the most-quoted career framework of the last century, first named by American psychologist Donald Super in the 1950s. In Super’s model, Maintenance is where you consolidate. You polish, deepen, mentor. You defend the position you have built. It is meant to be the stage you enter around forty-five and stay in until roughly sixty-five.
Sarah is not consolidating. Sarah is exploring, which is a different Super stage entirely — one that is meant to happen in your late teens and early twenties.
The five stages, and the part everyone misses
Super’s Life-Span, Life-Space framework proposed five career stages:
- Growth (roughly ages 4–13) — you form a self-concept.
- Exploration (14–24) — you try things out; you notice what you like and what you are like.
- Establishment (25–44) — you commit and build.
- Maintenance (45–64) — you consolidate, protect, transmit.
- Disengagement (65+) — you withdraw and let go.
The ages Super attached are widely quoted. They are also, and here is the part most people miss, not really the point. What Super actually claimed was that a person can pass through these stages more than once, in any order, at any age. He called it recycling. Every mid-career pivot, every parent returning to work after twenty years, every retiree taking up a second career as a painter — these are Super’s model recycling.
Which is to say: Super saw Sarah coming.
If not age, then what decides your stage?
Four things, according to Super — worth putting your own life against:
- Your self-concept. Not who you are, but who you think you are. When those two drift apart, you start feeling unsettled, which is often the first signal of a stage shift.
- Your life roles. Super was among the first to insist that “career” also includes the roles of student, worker, parent, spouse, citizen, hobbyist. Your working stage cannot be understood apart from what is happening in the other roles.
- Your context. A recession, a redundancy, a health event, a child leaving home — all of these can push you back into Exploration whether you asked for it or not.
- Your readiness. Super’s term was career maturity — how well-equipped you are, psychologically, for the tasks of your current stage, not for the stage your age says you should be in.
For your ikigai
If you have felt guilty for not having it sorted “at your age,” Super would gently point out that guilt is not evidence.
Two useful questions:
- Which of Super’s five stages best describes where you actually are right now? Answer honestly. It might not match your age.
- If you are in a different stage than your age suggests, what is asking to be recycled? Something is being revisited — a self-concept that has drifted, a life role that has shifted, a readiness that was never quite built the first time round.
Sarah is not lost. Sarah is recycling. That is a Super word, but it is not a Super phenomenon. It is a very human one.
Further reading
- Super, Donald E. (1957). The Psychology of Careers. Harper & Row.
- Super, Donald E. (1990). “A life-span, life-space approach to career development.” In D. Brown & L. Brooks (Eds.), Career Choice and Development (2nd ed., pp. 197–261). Jossey-Bass.
- Hartung, Paul J. (2013). “The life-span, life-space theory of careers.” In Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work (2nd ed., pp. 83–113). Wiley.