This week Lisa Snowdon announced she was launching a new pro-ageing podcast called We’re Not Getting Any Younger with TalkSport’s Andy Goldstein. The pair will be tackling “living well, longevity, getting older, diet, movement, food, hormones, hair loss, eyesight issues, Andy’s terrible memory”. Hormones are mentioned but, for once, they are not the headline. I say “for once” both because for the last few years Snowdon has been one of the most powerful menopause advocates, and because menopause has been dominating the midlife conversation online.
I know, because as the co-founder of online platform The Midult and co-host of the podcast I’m Absolutely Fine, midlife has been the wallpaper of my world – it’s both business and personal. Annabel Rivkin and I founded The Midult in 2017 and joined a brilliant crowd of women such as Kat Farmer, AKA Does My Bum Look 40, on Instagram, as well as Lorraine Candy and her Postcards from Midlife brand talking about this age stage.
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The conversation generally focused on how to stay relevant and engaged with the world when the world didn’t particularly want to engage with you. The media put you in the “busy working mother” box and abandoned you there. Slowly but surely the discourse developed, until 2022 when conversations about midlife became conversations about menopause. In fact, menopause has been the principal women’s health issue of the last two years, due in part to tireless campaigning.
Advocates such as Davina McCall, Cherry Healey, Snowdon, Mariella Frostrup and a host of others have agitated, impressively, for better representation and better services for women reaching this phase of their life. Phrases such as perimenopause have become common parlance, and horror stories of misdiagnosed depression and anxiety, left women, well, anxious and depressed. All dialogue around women in their forties and early fifties became menopause-coded; where women had previously shied away from discussing flushes and fear, suddenly we had to be hot messes.
This, of course, has been a good thing. But, as a result, conversations on midlife shifted from funny or knowing confidence boosts, to urgent conversations about midlife identity. Exclusive analysis of 15,000 Instagram posts from 2023 found the most engaged content all reflected this: Nadia Narain’s post is about midlife identity, here, (4% engagement rate); Sophia Cook asserts the importance of living urgently, here, (4% ER); Sam Baker and Stacey Duguid’s discussion about Duguid’s crisis, here, (3% ER). Suddenly midlife, subsumed by menopause, had become a desperately serious business.
However (and thankfully) the pendulum has shifted again. Key messaging around midlife has expanded and moved into a joy phase. Social data in 2024 confirms this vibe change: the most engaging organic midlife post this year, according to CORQ data, featured Eilidh Wells and her Girls Overheard gang raucously getting their belly buttons pierced, here (6% ER). On The Midult Instagram, where we have always posted energetic, comedy content, our engagement is up 158%. On the podcast, our listeners are up 20%.
Marianne Jones, journalist, creator and co-founder of the hugely successful Been There, Done That, Got The Podcast with Kat Farmer, agrees humour is the secret sauce around these conversations. She says: “Women of our generation are the funniest women I’ve ever met but we haven’t been able to get away with it that much”.
She adds that in the beginning of their podcast she would censor Farmer, who is famously sweary but, after sweating through edits, decided to let her be. Jones tells me the feedback from listeners was instant: “They said ‘this is what I say with my mates. This is who we are’. I think that’s what we’ve managed to capture.” Jones adds: “And obviously women of our life, stage and generation, we don’t talk about the menopause, 24 bloody 7”.
Don’t get her wrong, Jones will talk about menopause, fluently and wisely, but she feels the tone on social media over the last few years has been like “homework.” Capitalising on their dynamism, the pair have just published the last episode of their podcast, which has more than 1.25 million downloads. They are instead moving to regular, sponsored Instagram Lives so they can project all that unvarnished, unedited, humour and joy.
While I am glad to have the menopause conversation out in the open, so that we can shake off any unwanted shame, I am happy to feel this bit of midlife thrill in the air. Perhaps brands wanting to engage grown-up women’s attention into 2025 should partner with creators who reflect this change. Not THE CHANGE. After all, we didn’t come this far, to only come this far.
By Emilie McMeekan, features director of CORQ. Picture credit: Lisa Snowdon via Instagram.
