I think we're commercially underestimating midlife women

I’m 41 and I feel like I’m winding up, not winding down.

And the more women I meet around my age and older, the more I think we have got something quite spectacularly wrong about midlife.

We are obsessed with youth. Culturally, certainly, but commercially too. Newness, disruption, coolness, desirability and potential all seem to get disproportionately attached to being young.

And then there are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s who have spent decades accumulating knowledge, networks, experience, confidence and, in many cases, more financial power than they had at 25.

Yet so much of the conversation directed towards them seems to be about managing decline.

Anti-ageing. Menopause symptoms. Incontinence. Things going wrong.

Christ.

Of course those things can be part of midlife. I am not interested in pretending ageing is an endless wellness retreat where everyone suddenly discovers themselves while standing on a mountain at sunrise.

But it isn't the whole story.

There is ambition. Sex. Reinvention. Money. Travel. Leadership. Starting businesses. Leaving things. Becoming less willing to tolerate bullshit. Caring less about what people think. Caring much more about other things.

I have a hunch that we will look back at this period and realise midlife women were one of the most interesting forces shaping what came next.

Not despite their age.

Because they have lived enough life to know some things.

Brands that continue treating them primarily as a collection of symptoms or as younger women who unfortunately got older are going to miss something enormous.