life begins at 40

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom asserting that reaching forty marks not a decline or a closing down but an opening up of life's possibilities, as accumulated experience, self-knowledge, and freedom from the uncertainties of young adulthood combine to make middle age the period when people most fully inhabit their own lives; the phrase gained wide currency following the 1932 publication of Walter Pitkin's self-help book Life Begins at Forty, which argued that increasing life expectancy and changing social conditions made middle age a time of new opportunity rather than the beginning of the end; the saying is used as an encouragement to people approaching or passing forty who are anxious about aging, asserting that the best chapters of life may lie ahead rather than behind; in contemporary usage it functions more broadly to assert that any stage of life one has previously undervalued can prove to be a beginning rather than a conclusion when approached with openness and intention