My survival strategy for mid-life has been to replace the ambition and balls that got me through my 20's and 30's with age appropriate acceptance of the MANY things I cannot control & don't have time to do, with a wisdom to focus on the FEW things that are likely to matter to me when I hit my 70's and beyond.
For example, I can't control the divorce that consumed a ton of time and money in my 40's, but I have prioritized recovering money & family in my late 40's and early 50's. I can't control a medical condition that somewhat limits what I can do from time-to-time, but I can identify alternatives that give me joy during those times.
I'm blessed with parents and grandparents who unwittingly failed to prioritize correctly IMHO. I paid close attention and intend to do it differently.
Acceptance is basically the one and only key to happiness - it's simple to say and hard to practice. But by practicing it even the most miserably ill and destitute people can be happy. It's also not a particularly new idea, going back at least as far as Buddhism.
It's also why I'm not inclined to agree with things like perceived inequality as being the root of all misery.
What is the point of "winning"? Are you sure that your goals and desire to win are not things that society "tricked" you into believing are worthwhile or important?
Is it? Acceptance for acceptance's sake, I don't get that from the Bible (or most major religious texts?). The 'accept things' is asterisked with a 'because $deity', which just opens up many more cans of worms.
Did you get "accept things because God" from reading the Bible or from conservative American Christians? In my experience conservative Americans Christians have a tendency to be threatened by questions, I think owing to a fairly shallow understanding of God that boils down to "do this because I said so; you can't, trust Jesus to take away your failure", which while not incorrect is incomplete.
But the Old Testament only has three books of laws (Numbers and Deuteronomy, with a few in Exodus), out of 39. Genesis and Exodus give the origin story of how Israel got to be God's people. Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy give the expectations that go along with being privilege of being the people God chose to glorify his name in the earth. There are blessings for obedience, and punishments for disobedience. The rest of the Old Testament is struggling with those laws, namely that God keeps his promises when Israel obeys, but Israel has a strong pattern of disobeying, and God keeps his promises of punishments, too, ultimately kicking them out of the land he gave them. You have some wisdom literature on what a wise, godly life looks like, where is God when you're suffering. A number of the characters get pretty upset with God at points: Elijah says "I thought this amazing miracle would turn Israel back to You, but they're just trying to kill me, wtf?"; Jeremiah says "God you set me up the bomb: if I prophesy people hate me and if I don't prophesy the word burns inside of me until I do"; Job says "I was punished for being innocent, surely if I could bring my case to God he would judge me innocent". And God responds. Then there are people like David, who realize that God doesn't want the sacrifices that the law demands, God really wants a contrite heart. Likewise, Micah says God doesn't want sacrifices, he wants people to act justly.
The Old Testament clearly showed that Israel (and by extension, the rest of us) are incapable of keeping the law, which the teachers of Israel in the New Testament summarized as basically "love God, love others". The New Testament shows God fulfilling his promise from the prophets to solve the problem of people not obeying the law by changing our hearts. This he does through Jesus dying to pay for our failure to obey, and then giving us God's spirit, to change us into people who think the way he does and value the way he does. In the process, we are freed from all the rules and regulations, so Paul says that the follower of Christ is enabled by God's spirit to keep just one law, which is both simpler and harder: "love God, love others".
All that is to say, I don't think the Bible says "accept things because God said so", except arguably in 3 out of the 66 total books. American Christians (maybe others, too, don't know) say that all the time, but not the Bible.
Something interesting seems to be happening in society. We set aside religion, a trend that accelerated exponentially starting in the 60s, but had no real ideological or philosophical foundation with which to replace it, so it simply created a vacuum for meaning. In my opinion that vacuum was largely filled by consumerism and hedonism. But of course those alternatives aren't really alternatives, because they give some flighting moments of pleasure, but offer little to nothing in terms of long-term satisfaction.
So we're effectively recreating, from scratch, much of the philosophy developed thousands of years ago. What you're describing is, in its fundamentals, identical to Stoicism. I'd highly recommend Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations." [1] It's a collection of the writings of Aurelius, a Roman Emperor who is oft regarded as one of the greatest leaders of society. Stoicism is most fundamentally about accepting the fact that there are many things one cannot change. The only thing we can change, about many things, is how we let it affect us.
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The most interesting thing about the writings is that they were never intended to be seen by anybody other than himself. So it's effectively a collection of post-it notes from a great philosopher-king to himself pondering his own existence, mortality, meaning, and inability to change things. It's also quite insightful to appreciate that perhaps the most powerful person on Earth at the time struggled with the exact same issues that affect us all.
He wanted to change society for the better, but ultimately even a man in his position was unable to move a mountain no matter how much he tried. His life was filled with external perceived successes and internal failures. He not only failed to ultimately better society, but could not even better his own son. Aurelius is regarded as one of the greatest leaders, his son Commodus - one of the worst.
When Aurelius died, he was deified and praised. After his son Commodus was assassinated at the age of 31, he (Commodus) was declared an enemy of the state, his name stricken from record, and public imagery of him destroyed.
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[1] - https://files.libertyfund.org/files/2133/Aurelius_1464_LFeBk... #That book includes two introductions which provide extensive context and other information which is quite important to understanding a fair amount of what is said. Aurelius' writings themselves begin on PDF page 59, which is page 25 in the book's ordering.
The philosophical movement you're looking for is called MetaModernism, or PostPostModernism.
Its specifically about creating a philosophical framework for how to decide what has meaning in our lives. Its about giving people the tools to decide what should fill that gap.
Stoicism is one option, that already suggests answers to that question.
I would like to challenge the notion of the drop of religion being a recent phenomenon. In fact I would counter its been going on at least several centuries. After all, Nietzsche was saying God is dead in the 19th century.
Even before this, the renaissance was a period filled with a turning away from religion and of reintegration of older classical stories and ideas. Descartes and Newton, though religious, introduced a fully mechanical model of the universe which has been growing in strength ever since.
Even in the meditations Marcus Aurelius carefully considers the idea of the universe consisting of nothing but atoms and their motions
I find this a lazy, western-centric, summary of religion's decline. Nietzsche does not a consensus represent, however deep and insightful his statement. It is this kind of casual dismissal of faith that provides one of the fuels to the populist "God and country" crowd exploited by Trump and his ilk.
I'm not sure why you took this as an attack on religion. I was merely trying to provide counterexamples to the claim that the decline of religion's influence in western culture is not something that started out of nowhere in the 1960s.
I'd ask "Why do you need meaning?". Why not just accept that life is meaningless, and any meaning you bring to it is ultimately of your own construction. Seems a lot simpler than continually searching for meaning or purpose, doomed never to find it because it simply does not exist. All evidence seems to indicate that we're complex meat robots, whose existence is basically inevitable given the right initial conditions. What meaning?
If you put a hamster in a cage with a wheel it will, more or less merrily, continue to run along that wheel until it eventually becomes physically unable to and, in the longrun, passes. It's the blessing, and the curse of humanity, to stop and actually consider at some point, why am I doing this?
And these questions aren't just an abstract search for meaning. Getting back to Aurelius, he and his son were given comparable power and wealth to do with as they personally saw fit. And they chose radically different paths. The path one chooses, in most of all things, is going to be a product of your own personal ethos, which in turn is going to be a product of how you view the world.
And thinking about such things can not only provide greater contentedness, but also help direct you in unclear waters. Why do you do what you do, and is it in line with what or whom you want to be?
Why do we respond to meaning? Why do we seek it out? The difficulty in the search may be part of the answer: we need mountains to climb, both outside and inside ourselves.
Meaning is oxygen, and I'll continue optimizing for it.
I've had this feeling in life that after middle age, it is most satisfying to adopt the mindset of a teacher. No more am I an explorer or barrier breaker. I am now a foundation, a home, a tome of knowledge and wisdom that should be used to help the next generation get a leg up.
For myself, my first career was wrecked by new technology. Now I am 40 years old in an entry-level SWE position alongside 22 year olds working under people in their late 20s or early 30s. Not only would none of these people accept me as a source of knowledge but they can hardly bare to give me the time of day. I am very proud of my contributions to the team and I don’t hold it against them, but the makings of dignity are taken for granted far too often.
What’s wrong with entry level SWE at 40? Working for and with younger people is no shame.
Someone dear to me could have started SWE at 38 but felt as you do and quit. More than 12 years later they would be a veteran at the job but instead today still are looking in from the outside saying 50 is too late, regretting their decision and making excuses just like they said at 38. Wrong then, wrong now.
12 years from now you will probably kick yourself for worrying about what worries you today. I am proud of you for making a change; stick with it! Few industries consider you senior after 3-5 years.
I think what you do in your work/job is only one piece of this pie. Surely you have more experience and wisdom to give about other aspects of life that are not SWE? There are loads of people out there who don't need your SWE advice but they may need your other advices.
I learned this full speed into a brick wall via an MS relapse in my last semester of graduate school.
There are always things that you can't control. It's best to adjust your worldview to accommodate that, or if the unexpected does happen, you won't adjust easily. Speaking from experience.
One thing I love about Tolstoy's War and Peace is how it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives. They feel adrift, then find some great cause to push them forward, exhaust the possibilities of that cause, and find themselves disillusioned when they discovered that they have not "solved" the problem of life. This happens over and over again to some of the central characters of the novel, Prince Andrei and Pierre.
This is not to disdain projects or causes. The older I get, the more I realize that life is a continually evolving question, and the task of living philosophically is partially about living comfortably with the ambiguity that that implies.
it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives
That is pretty much the theme of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, written many a moon before War and Peace. You have a king who cycles through everything he thinks he could possibly desire, attaining all of it, and realizes at the end the answer to the problem of life was... well, I'll let you figure out the rest:
Love this! I too got the sense of growing through phases via fiction. And your comment is surprisingly similar to what I said about War and Peace recently here! https://kite.link/Fiction
Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Focusing on effectiveness on helping others is probably an important component as well.
I recommend looking into Effective Altruism - "a philosophy and community focused on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations"
In my case I've joined Giving What We Can ten years ago - giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities. No matter how badly my day goes, I can always reflect on how nice it is that through my donations thousands of individuals have benefited greatly.
I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world better" on the fringes.)
I think effective altruism and the kind of altruism that can give someone deeper meaning and connection (and thus avert things like midlife crises) are not the same, sometimes maybe mutually exclusive.
Going out to a remote country and helping people directly yourself, while you live with them and are integrated with their lives, might give you a sense of connection and meaning[0], but EA would likely dictate that this is a pretty ineffective use of your time, since you're probably much better at things like $YOUR_CAREER than you are at directly helping people in remote countries with their problems. So you should instead do $YOUR_CAREER, make money and donate it to people who can help others more directly, with perhaps a less personal touch (more "mass distributing mosquito nets", less "helping individual families with issues").
[0]: Of course if you're completely ineffective, you might not feel good about it. But I think the level of effectiveness required to make you feel good is much, much lower than the optimal levels of effectiveness that EA is shooting for.
I wonder some of the time what role self deception can play in finding meaning. If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
> If we only have so much agency to make a difference in the world, how much should we beat ourselves up over the inability to change it?
Definitely something to consider. For a long time, I justified my actions with a combination of "well, I'm doing good with the money", "if I didn't do this, someone else would so quitting doesn't accomplish anything", and "unlike a narrative protagonist, I don't have the capability to change the world".
I don't think that's a question of deception at all. Just measure yourself up against the amount of change that you can and want to have on the world. It's pretty simple.
If you want to save or improve 10 lives, do that. It doesn't matter if there are millions of people still starving. You still made the incremental change that you wanted to
> Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life.
Given this is a thread about philosophy, and this looks like the sort of thing that sounds so true nobody bothers looking too closely at whether it is, I feel compelled to ask why it is so?
I wonder if mid life crises possible arise in part due to the lack of a legacy we leave behind, whether it's kids, works for future generations, art, etc, and even acts of altruism. Maybe doing selfless things can be just as strong a cure for the things you always wanted to do for yourself that you feel you haven't lived up to yet?
To me it rings true from first principles that involving others in your life leads to higher satisfaction.
If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what seems to happen to many people after a certain age threshold. As we become more self-sufficient, contacts become harder to initiate and sustain. Helping others, however, is increasingly more of an option as you gain age.
Addendum: the above reasoning doesn’t directly address impersonal ways to help (e.g., through donations).
> If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects.
I think this assumption needs further justification given that I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others, and there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware. I don't see an obvious link between these things.
If you reject the assumption that self-awareness is inherently social, then feel free to disagree. I guess I’m not actually arguing from first principles and we can’t properly get to the bottom of it here.
> there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware
I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context.
> I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others
We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.
There's a whole (relatively new) empirical study of happiness, called Positive Psychology, that's been ongoing for decades.
The claim I made is broad, so it's not based on one experiment, but on numerous factors that point in the same direction. We are social creatures, and feeling like we are a part of a greater whole makes people happier. In the recent book Happy Money, the authors, two Ph.D. researchers in the area, describe experiments that indicate that spending money on others promotes happiness. Of the three components of Self-Determination Theory, one is "Relatedness", feeling connected with and caring others (contributing to a bigger whole). I'm happy to share more.
Somehow, I am associating Self-Determination Theory with ACT -- acceptance and committment therapy. In any event, 'acceptance' and 'committment' appear pertinent to many comments here.
Even if what you say is true, I don't think it necessarily follows that this would prevent or mitigate a mid-life crisis. There are after all many things that can cause unhappiness.
I am willing to bet there's a lot of variation in "midlife crisis". I glanced at Wikipedia to see, and one of the possible sources seems to be when people reflect and realize they have not accomplished much.
For all the things I've done that normal society considers "accomplishments" (learning to play piano, winning in competitive chess and sports, etc) none, I think, have been as good (for the world and long-term me) as the direct effects of my charitable donations to cost-effective charities. I'm 36 now, so maybe I'll have a midlife crisis in the future (I'm still young); even if I didn't have those accomplishment, I don't think I'll be able to wallow in "I've not accomplished much" when I know I prevented many many people from getting malaria (and all the negatives that accompany it).
So I'm pretty sure that "mitigate" can happen, even if not "prevent". And the phrase you use "necessarily follows" might mean you're being rather stringent, but that seems to me too-high a filter to accept good advice ;)
We're inherently very social creatures. I'm sure a lot's been written on this, but I like "The Social Leap"'s telling of it: we basically evolved from our primate ancestors by being pushed out of the rainforest into the Savannah. Our normal primate defense of climbing into trees was unavailable, and the way we found to survive was working together in groups.
Years of evolution have wired into our brains that we're supposed to be interacting and working with others.
Ah sure, that's a broader claim and I think is less obviously true.
In general, I think a lot of existential crises are caused by having some psychological need not met, and so making sure psychological needs are met seems like a reasonable approach for preventing/addressing them.
Another part of this claim that's not super obvious to me is how/why _helping_ people specifically is important, as opposed other ways you can have people in your life.
I would note that servants, butlers, cleaners, and the like who spend large chunks of their day serving others are generally not held in high regard by society. We even use community society as a punishment for criminals.
I'm 45. I'm at least halfway through my turn. I'm definitely feeling the mid-life blues. I wonder if I'm wasting my life slinging bits for companies that probably won't exist in 15 years. If I'm doing an acceptable job at raising my children. If I'm contributing usefully to humanity AT ALL. Pretty soon the merry-go-round is going to start spinning down for me and my utterly insignificant portion of the universal timeline is going to be over with. Christ, if that's not depressing, what is?
No, I would suggest that if one never experiences the mid-life crisis then they aren't performing their philosophical due diligence. The trick is to not let it consume you and end up fucking up everything good in your life.
Get depressed, re-evaluate your life, make some positive changes, stop obsessing with accumulating gewgaws, and start helping people - that's the good shit.
What you don't want to do is quit your job, abandon your wife and kids, and run off to a polyamorous colony in Thailand. Otherwise, it may turn out that your purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others...
I wonder if the "midlife" part of midlife crisis does some harm. Other then me not being in my midlife (well i hope lol, don't think i want to die at 60) a lot of those issue resonate. Shrinking of possibilities, empty feeling as i pursue things. Ive felt this way on and off since my 20s and have talked with friends about similar feelings.
> I wonder if the "midlife" part of midlife crisis does some harm.
As someone who more or less started a midlife crisis last year, this rings true. Among other things, there's a social double bind that lies at the root of this that must be examined.
On one hand, young people are framed as unable to understand themselves and that they must suck it up and act like adults. On the other hand, when those that do "suck it up" later end up in crisis, they are demeaned with, "You should have figured yourself out by now."
I yearn for a world where midlife crises are a cause for community celebration. One where we can say, "Tayo42, this is an important time in your life and everyone is here to rally around you while you navigate these feelings."
Instead we seem to socially allow for, but discourage people from self reevaluations - that there's a window in midlife for people to rediscover themselves, realign their goals, and sort out their lives, but instead of celebrating, we discourage it. And for what? So that we maintain the illusion of some sort of identity integrity?
Maybe I have something to learn here, but it would be hard to convince me that the current state of the social response to crises is anything but maladaptive.
I have a suspicion that the reason for the discouragement of midlife crisis is inflexibility in a society where people must work to earn money to live. If you're in your 30s and have dependents, quitting your job puts the QoL of your dependents in peril because there's no general societal-level support program for that sort of life pivot.
That makes sense. It explains how social pressure bifurcates the group.
There are those who don't have the resolve to go through with it, but end up in this persistent feeling of emptiness brought about by self-alienation.
And those who do enter into some crisis, but feel the social friction when their actions run counter to norms but the relief of internal alignment associated with self-actualization.
It's pretty sad that rather than offering social support to folks in crisis so that they have a safety net during this process to limit the downside, we've instead inverted the environment to limit the upside. The opportunity loss is confounding. There's a terrible self-reenforcing mechanism at play which goes like this, "Look, things are terrible for people in crisis. Don't be like them," all while contributing to the terrible environment that's being positioned as inevitable.
I agree. I think we've done a very good job at dismantling exactly the sorts of support networks that would normally fill this role - namely family and community. It seems as though these networks would generally step in during any sort of crisis experienced by a member and help keep things stable.
The state-run, compulsory alternatives seem a poor substitute, and I'm not sure we're socio-biologically equipped to make the transition. The only way forward seems to be to identify the cause(s) for the dissolution of family and community as reliable networks and revert/fix them.
I wish I could recommend Bowling Alone[1] from personal experience, but I expect those that have read it would find this to be an apt place to drop such a suggestion.
At 35 I started calling myself “middle aged” and my coworkers around the same age looked at me like I was insane and then a rather uncomfortable discussion ensued about age and average lifespan in the US. Nobody in their 30s wants to think that they are in fact “middle aged” and it might be the time to have a “midlife crisis”.
Or even worse, you could die in a car accident tomorrow. So much for a midlife crisis, let alone happy retirement.
Obviously, throwing the future to the wind and only caring about the present is stupid, but like you say there is absolutely an argument to be made that we should make the most of the time we have right now because tomorrow isn't guaranteed.
Retirement is a new thing, however. In fact, this is the first generation to retire with money being paid for by the current working generation. If you are using that same system for your retirement, you are basically betting on the new-born of today to pay for your retirement.
35 years from now.
Think about how much the world, technology, politics and ideology have changed since 1987. If you think the born-now will honor your retirement claim (that you/gov are making since new-born can't agree?) then, yeah, go for that retirement thing.
I think a lot of it is that people mostly think of it as "the middle phase of adult life" rather than "the middle of your entire life"; 20s and 30s are when people traditionally establish their careers and families, 40s and 50s are the "middle age" where people would settle down into a routine with their career, raising their kids, etc., and then after that they'd start thinking about retirement and the "golden years" so to speak. If someone has followed this sort of pattern in their own life, it's probably pretty jarring to think of yourself as only just approaching the tail end of your establishing phase of your adult life and then have it pointed out that you might be past the midpoint of your lifespan.
That said, I've also always found the terms "middle aged" and "midlife crisis" to be weird due to them not really making a lot of sense literally. Idioms like this seem pretty common in everyday language though, to the point of being standardized; as a young kid I was shocked when my punishment for some minor thing that was supposed to be for the "weekend" extended into Sunday despite the fact that our family calendar clearly showed it as the beginning of the week, not the end. It's not just language either; the earliest New Year's Eve I can remember, my parents had a very hard time convincing me that we had changed from December 31 to January first at 12:00 because it seemed so unreasonable to me that 12 would be the first hour of the day instead of the last, and I felt cheated that I didn't get to stay up until 1:00 like I expected.
Yeah I'm 34 in SF, turning 35 this autumn, and feeling like I'm literally in my prime. Old enough to have matured, experienced enough to have some good battle scars, young and energetic enough that there's decades of quality life ahead of me.
The mindset stability that came in the past few years has been nice. Hustling for the shiniest immediate goal in sight no longer appeals, but there's plenty of energy to go after long-term goals in ridiculously effective ways. The sort of laser focus and disregard for extraneous bullshit that 10 years ago I couldn't even imagine was possible.
He's not. Assuming he's male, physical peak is near 26, intellectual peak early to mid 20s. This doesn't mean you can't learn new things nor does it mean your body isn't fit anymore, it just means you're already on the way down.
My measurable physical stats are much better than they were at 26. Yes I notice junk food a little sooner and can't handle as much alcohol. But I can run a marathon faster, do better in the boxing ring, and can lift more weight with higher volume.
The main physical drawback that I can see are slower reflexes. That comes out in the boxing ring when going against people 10+ years younger.
> intellectual peak early to mid 20s.
Depends what kind of intellectual peak you measure. My focus is better and more intense. My ability to learn new stuff has greatly increased because I have a bigger vaster framework to hang new knowledge onto.
And I am infinitely better at solving difficult problems in a dumb easy way because I no longer care about showing off how smart I am. This not only makes my solutions easier to build, they're also easier to maintain so future me will have less work to do.
What I'm probably less good at these days is waxing poetically about the sort of very deep thoughts that feel deep to a 25 year old. And pointless brain twisty puzzles that I was never good at anyway.
I'd say these days, intellectually speaking, I'm more of a reliable orc that plows through problems with brute force, than an elf fleeting about using dexterity.
+1 on the boxing part. My problem is more about stamina and cardio than it is about reflexes. I do see the reflex problem so when going against a couple of weight classes below myself, heavier people tend to be a tad slower anyways. But then I reached a point where the younger folks tend to go easier on me, not sure if I like that. Not that I train half as much as I wished I did, Covid really put a dent into that...
> More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.
It's crazy how much this can vary. I'm 34, but I'm female and from a family where multiple people have lived to be over 110. I've always estimated my 'mid life'/halfway mark to be about 45.
Sure but the effectiveness of upcoming years seems much higher. Where I used to toil for 10 hours to do something, I can do the same thing now in 1 hour.
Resources are higher too. For lots of things that used to take time, I can just pay someone.
And lets not forget I spent the first 10 to 15 years being basically useless.
I wonder if this is the result of being surrounded by so much marketing.
Coincidentally, I read an article in the Economist about male fertility that said 35 is when a man's sperm starts to become less effective. So, slightly less than full of life, I would say.
'Midlife' is not about how long do you live, it's about how advanced you are in the expectations of the social life script, after 'raving youth' and 'settled elderly'.
Some cultures have four-part scripts, some three -- not all two.
I once read a book about Ulyssean aging, IIRC. It described persons such as Thor Hyerdal who in essence started new lives (full of recognized accomplishment) near age 60.
From about 40, I found myself thinking more in terms of how much time I have left and what I can still realistically hope to achieve, rather than in terms of how long I've lived.
I was 43 when my father was diagnosed with a bad cancer that would kill him two years later (at 69).
Those things together triggered a lot of things that I think made up a mid life crisis, now I'm 48 and it seems to be getting better.
Yeah, this hits home. I'm only 28 but can feel my life becoming more and more predictable and stagnate. At the same time, I'm too afraid and money-conscious to make any bold changes (e.g., quit my job, start a business, go back to school, live in a van for a year, do something weird with my life). This is an incredible source of anxiety and depression.
I've started therapy and have made some progress. If I can become less anxious about money, I think I'll be able to find sustainable happiness. But I know this will be a lifetime struggle.
At 29 I took a year off everything and traveled. One thing I've learned in the decade+ since is that every year that goes by makes it harder to do. If you're feeling the itch just do it. You'll have a lot of years in your career so don't think you're missing out on anything -- assuming you're able to make the finances work.
Just realize that you can be fired at moment from your job and have trouble (if economy) to find a new one. You'll realize how fragile your current situation is, and going through a rough experience will be worth it (to figure out how to make your future more anti-fragile).
Of course most people go through it the hard way (firing, divorce, etc...) But I don't suggest you do it now, but if you are not saving any significant money from your current job you might as well just leave.
The way I think about stability is that it's actually how I can not stagnate. Stagnation comes from going around in circles trying to fix the same problems over and over again. Stability allows me to make incremental progress over a long period of time toward my dreams.
Love that you started therapy. Feel free to reach out to me (email in bio) if you want to chat about this in general.
Some people would suggest that you could work on meeting someone and starting a family. (So you can move on to the next struggle!) Preparing myself for this and figuring out how to renounce partying was in fact meaningful for me as I transitioned to my thirties. This clearly isn't for everyone though.
careful with therapy which ends with acceptance of wage labor (or other oppressive institutions which wind you back into wage labor), maybe think on that a bit given your skillset as an HN visitor
Yeah, we need hope, we need something to look forward to, we need something to be passionate about. In early life, we assume that a spouse and job and kids and a house will be just that. Once we get there (midlife or not), we often find it unsatisfying, so the "crisis" is to go looking again. From the outside, the person having the "crisis" already has the "perfect" life so it looks like foolishness.
The big takeaway for me was that expecting life to ring perfect based on my wisdom at 20 is pure silliness. I now know what I know, I can only go forward. So what gives me satisfaction and hope now. Then I (try to) execute on that.
I think generally these things might just be called existential crises, and it just so happens that people tend to experience one at around 40.
I've also been having one for the past 3 years (the tail of my 20s), which I've been kinda labeling my "quarter life crisis" (which isn't really mathematically right but seems to align with popular usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis)
To me, the crisis comes from having exhausted the low hanging fruit of accomplishing what society expects of you and the feelings you get from youthful joys of sex/food/whatever.
There's a switch that needs to be flipped, from 'I want to feel good', to 'I am doing what needs doing'.
You know what needs doing. You know what needs to stop too. Not to feel better, it won't feel good at all, but it needs doing.
It's irrational - who says anything needs doing? Nothing needs doing, we're all going to die, we only live once, etc. Yup! Needs to be done anyway, or you distract yourself. Those are the two options :)
I'm distracting myself right now! I haven't flipped the switch, I'm still hanging on to feeling good, but with every year, with every month, the flip of the switch just makes... so... much... sense. It's destiny, really. Doing, or distracting.
A great way to spontaneously trigger a midlife crisis, no matter your age, is to watch Youtube videos about the universe, the origin of life, etc.
You'll get this inspirational rush of how amazing everything is, how vast the universe, how incredibly unusual for life to exist and for us specifically as a species to exist. And the advanced state we're in, able to do almost anything.
And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.
You're not exploring anything, you're not celebrating life, not producing any meaning. You just sit there, like a robot, pissing it all away. Not depressing enough? Your existence is actually the top 10% of humanity.
And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.
Beats the hell out of scratching out a subsistence living. That ain't gonna afford me much of any opportunity other than scratching at the ground and hoping the locusts don't eat it. Anything beyond that, and we're just arguing about the degree of technology that we're comfortable with. That doesn't sound nearly as noble, I suppose, but I always thought Thoreau was kinda full of it anyway.
So you do you, but I'm smack in the middle of midlife, and I'm having no crisis at all.
Could be worse is not that much of a comeback. But I'm happy that you're happy.
I'm not unhappy, and I was exaggerating, but I do believe there's quite a gap between how amazing our existence is and how unamazing we tend to spent it.
But i have issue with your 'unamazing': the mere fact of existence is a miracle, and what you do with it is up to you. The amazingness is an entirely made up and subjective judgement.
In this case, you just seem to be going around saying 'you are spending your life mediocrely' because that's your measure. From my perspective, you have no business declaring that to be a universal value.
I personally think there are billions of different ways to spend this life, and billions of different ways to value it.
We might try to establish some external measurement, as you appear to be doing, but what is that actually worth, besides making you feel like you have some company in mediocrity?
> You're not exploring anything, you're not celebrating life, not producing any meaning. You just sit there, like a robot, pissing it all away.
I would suggest that meaning can be found, even if you are unable to transcend our human limitations in this insanely large universe. But I can tell that you are on a path of reflection of what a meaningful human life means for you, and that's exciting! I wish you the best!
(Don't read this as if I have it all figured out, because I most certainly do not)
And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.
"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Blaise Pascal
Part of being human is embracing both of these realities though. We can get satisfaction from spending 4 hours perfecting some small nuance in code to make it run smoothly and we can feel awe pondering the vastness of the universe.
I'm looking at journal articles about how age correlates with happiness and this sentence doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the state of research:
This paper is the mirror image of Blanchflower (2020b) that examined unhappiness data and finds comparable evidence using twenty different measures for an unhappiness curve that maximized with controls at age 49 compared with a zenith of happiness estimated in this paper at age 48.
Back in the day, people would get married and have a few kids early in life. 48 is when the kids would be leaving the home. So you are probably making a decent salary, no longer have kids at home, and are young enough to still be healthy. Now you can have sex without worrying about the kids hearing. Can travel whenever you want. Have money to buy whatever toys you want. Have time to pick up new hobbies. Etc.
Bottom line, I wonder if these figures come from baby boomers and/or Gen X. Later generations tend to get married later and put off having kids to later, so I would expect their happiness zenith to be late 50s or 60s.
49 or 50 is the average age when kids leave the house today. Average age of the mother at last birth is 31 in the US: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/ca.... That's as of 2019, for women in mid-late Gen X. The average. The number will drift up a bit with millennials, but since the average age of the mother at first birth has gone from ~25 to ~27 I wouldn't expect to go dramatically up.
Empty nest syndrome seems to typically set in once the kids are actually gone. I'm also not sure anyone's quality of life drastically improves due to that one factor, anyway. It's mostly young kids that really disrupt your life, not any kids at all. You can travel and leave a 16 year-old home alone, and that should be old enough to not worry if they can hear you having sex. The next big quality of life jump is when they no longer depend on you financially, but that is likely to happen well after they move out, not immediately.
I started reading this book in a bookstore. In the intro, I recall him mentioned how he felt a blandness of middle age starting in his late 30s -- soon after he got tenure in his faculty job at a university.
As a "recovering academic" myself, it sounded more like the very particular rat-race of "tenure track, emeritus, and die" had disappointed him more than anything about midlife in general. So, I put the book back on the shelf.
I think 38 is a great age to get into it. You're young enough that your reflexes are still there but old enough that you know you're not bulletproof. My friends and I got into motorcycles around 18-19 and imo we're all lucky to still be here (we all stopped riding a few years later...i think we collectively came to realize that, while fun, riding in our particular area was too risky to be worth it even if you're 100% on your game all the time).
My strategy for beating middle age: I just had my first kid at 40 and my next one is due just after I'll turn 42. I don't think I'm going to have time for midlife navel-gazing. "What is the point of all this?" is a question that stopped having meaning when my son was born.
Historically, people entered this difficult stage of life at just the moment they were finishing raising their kids. I have to wonder how that changes things, now that older parents are much more common (or, on the other hand, now that so many more people don't have kids at all).
I had my daughters when I was 38 and 40. The youngest heads off to college today. I've had plenty of time to contemplate life in the last 20 years. In fact, raising two daughters has made that seem even more important.
Around the age of 40 I made a point of really slowing down my thinking about the future; realizing what I could control (not much) and deciding what was important to me. Naturally this has changed a bit in the last 20 years, but not the underlying philosophy. You only get so many breaths in this life time, so use them wisely.
TL;DR: you're always exhausted, since getting up in the morning, which you shouldn't, until early in the night - something I lack the grasp to understand, despite being more or less fit and not sedentary.
I guess it's the body starting to giving up on you somehow.
One thing I've found in philosophy that's informed my thinking about happiness is the paradox of hedonism, which suggests that I'm better off not striving for happiness at all, at least not directly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism
That, and also Freud's sobering words, written to one of his patients: "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness."
So many threads discussing with an engineering mind if 40 is half your life, a third, blah blah blah.
Truth is you don’t have tomorrow for granted. We could die today, tomorrow or in 90 years. Planning ahead so strictly is like wrapping a blanket around your head for safety in a firefight.
Don’t overplan, don’t quantify everything in life, relax, enjoy, smile and roll with the punches as much as you can. We only get one life.
For me, maybe for alot of people, COVID provided the impulse that revealed my own midlife crisis. It was all that time away from work and with family that forced me to begin coming to terms with how shallow my identity outside of work had become. I can never go back to my pre-pandemic self, and that's probably for the best. Even though my current role is great in compensation and substance, I still feel this malaise lurking.
Acceptance is important, necessary, but, for me, not sufficient. I'm not sure what my atelics are. I'm not in crisis by any means, nor at risk of buying a Tesla or having an affair, or whatever else, but the struggle is real. Midlife blahs
In this sense, Setiya believes, “Midlife” is about middle age, but middle age just represents a more acute stage of existential insecurity that is always present.
Makes me wonder, what does existential security look like, because the quote rings true.
I think "philosophy" can be substituted with any idea that serves as viable coping mechanism to stress. Any idea that impacts your life in such a powerful way transcends into the realm of spirituality.
To keep an open eye on my own internal biases, I always remind myself that in this very moment on this Big Blue Planet, there are millions of people starving and suffering, and I am really, really glad that I am healthy and alive.
>Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Reading Markus Aurelius Meditations also helps me a lot:)
These kinds of discussions remind of this passage from Mere Christianity by CS Lewis:
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and
want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts
of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep
their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or
first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites
us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.
I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful mar-
riages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones.
There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which
just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife
may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and
chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us. Now
there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one.
(1) The Fool's Way. — He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes
on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more
expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the
mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich
people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from
woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent,
from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is "the Real Ihing" at last,
and always disappointed.
(2) The Way of the Disillusioned "Sensible Man." — He soon decides that
the whole thing was moonshine. "Of course," he says, "one feels like that when
one's young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the
rainbow's end." And so he setties down and learns not to expect too mueh
and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, "to cry for the
moon." This is, of course, a mueh better way than the first, and makes a man
much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he
is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls "adolescents"), but, on the
whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably. It would be the best line we could take
if man did not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there,
waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow's end? In that case
it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our sup-
posed "common sense" we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.
(3) The Christian Way. — The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with
desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well,
there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such
a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If
I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the
most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of
my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.
Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it,
to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hånd, never
to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other,
never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind
of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true
country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed
under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that
other country and to help others to do the same."
So, it's either keep grasping at something that isn't there, give up on the thing and accept it isn't there, or come to Jesus and get it in the afterlife.
I've always been baffled by CS Lewis. Quite a mix of insight and rational incoherence.
Might I suggest elaborating on the incoherence. This reads as a summary of points and then simply exclaiming “incoherent!”.
To summarise alternatively, if you can’t get it in this life, don’t pretend you can, and instead find hope in the next. Given how little we know about consciousness and what happens to it, it’s not technically incoherent. Possibly not provable but not incoherent either.
Thanks for the quote, now I want to go read that book! I really like the way he voices parts 1 and 2, as it echoes similar thoughts I've had but haven't articulated so elegantly.
I think my personal answer to (3) is slightly different but to each their own!
Downvoted because one author has a particular way of symbolizing or relating trancendence? IIRC Hinduism devotes an entire quarter-life stage to time for such focus.
Lots of comments seem focused on avoiding a "midlife crisis", I think its more that it can't be avoided, and what do you do with that reflection and realization. How to use it to better yourself, your life, your people.
People need more philosophy in their lives. All of the modern "self-help" nonsense is just a reductionist, simplified shadow of what the ancients have had to say for thousands of years.
"Those who succeed in an outstanding way seldom do so before the age of 40. More often, they do not strike their real pace until they are well beyond the age of 50."
Can, it can also screw you up even more. Rather ignored part of many "this can do x" articles. A great deal of philosophy is built on individual "thinkers" trying to find the truth in their own heads. A lot of them died pretty unhappy. Many philosophies when distilled down to masses resulted in genocides like French revolution. (This does not apply generally.)
I don't know, $2 million invested at 5% return would equate to a post-tax income of about $75,000 or so per year which meets the threshold level of being able to own your own home (in a region with relatively depressed property values perhaps) and engage in whatever (relatively low-cost) activities you wanted to for the indefinite future, be it gardening or programming or art or whatever.
Of course, that's all predicated on a stable civilizational standard which is not at all guaranteed these days, due to issues like climatic instability, social strife, etc.
Perhaps they can buy an annuity or something that will bank on 7% average annual over a 20-30 year timespan and guarantee 5% real return each and every year.
If such annuity existed, people wouldn’t put money into index funds :) They have similar or smaller average expectations there, but with no guarantees and with massive volitality.
It suggests that for an annuity with a 2% annual growth (which at least maybe approximates "flat real rate of return,") for 30 years, it'll give you about 3.7%, not 5%.
The devil's in the details. 2m doesn't convey much. 2m in what? 401k? Then it's inaccessible until 60. If not, then all earnings are going to be taxed and need to account for that. And is that 2m including primary residence or excluding primary residence? Also need to bring in mortgage into consideration..and if you do retire, given that health is tied to work in US that adds extra complexity..
capital gains tax at 15% would mean that if you sell 4% of your holdings a year your post tax income is 3.4% or $68,000. That's around $80,000 pre tax which is surely enough to live a middle class lifestyle in the right location if you can figure out the health care situation. Seems to me the questions are 1. How do you get insurance? and 2. Will the historical market conditions that allow for 4% yearly withdrawal while keeping up with inflation continue?
Well, I live in the UK so the insurance thing is a luxury, not a total essential. Also while $2m is almost certainly more than enough for me to live off I won't have to - because I can still work part time if I want to.
And given it's mid life, well sadly it's only got to last me for 40 years, optimistically.
I like 2m ballpark as well. Pays off standard school debts, can purchase apartment or modest house, car, other middle class expenses, live with less fear of healthcare-expense induced bankruptcy, and have flexibility to work less. All without a dime spent on opulent living.
Where's the savings sweet-spot at 35 for the security of not having to work anymore to avoid homelessness and hunger? $2M seems a little low, but not a million miles away.
Retiring at 35 you should be able to get away with a 3.25% SWR [0], which'd give $65k/yr from $2M. But a) that'd be mostly long-term capital gains, which have lower taxes than regular income and b) you wouldn't have to save for retirement. So you'd probably end up with the spending power of someone making ~$80k salary
At 35 I have somewhat limited liquid savings, but decided this year to just stop taking a wage and selling my time in totality. I’m quickly building up the passive income to survive/thrive through recurring subscription software. I’m surviving and I have complete control of my own time, and am figuring out how to work with others in ways that preserve that for them too (wouldn’t want to work with people entrapped in wage labor by my own control anyway). this feels much more certain and freeing than managing % returns on wage labor investment and “career”
You're weird if the possession of any amount of money actually solves a problem. I bring this up because I got advice long ago that if you think you need more money to be happy:
1. What you really want is what you can do with that money.
2. There's usually an alternative way to get nearly equal enjoyment for far less money.
To disagree with my comment, you'd have to argue that there is no alternative to getting hit with a big pile of money in order to deal with the problem of a bad job. Without even giving it much thought, I can list a few: change careers; get a better job; marry someone with a decent job, which will expand your employment options; start your own company; live a more frugal life and work fewer hours.
The important thing to take away from the advice is that everything I've listed is a realistic solution but getting the big pile of money isn't.
I see the logic in your initial comment. But getting a big pile of money is as realistic as much of what you listed here. How is "Just marry someone wealthy" more realistic than getting a pile of money (not to mention that that suggestion is merely a roundabout way of getting access to a pile of money)? What if I'm already married? There are many reasons the other suggestions are virtually as out of reach for most wage slaves as getting helicopter money.
I agree with sgt101 though. You're right about (1); I don't dream of $2M in the bank, but not having to work for a living, and have all the time in the world to pursue my actual interests.
But (2) I disagree with. I don't have $2M but I probably have enough to retire in a shit country and live frugally (before you judge me: I was born and raised in a shit country, but managed to get to a better place, literally and figuratively). I'd have all the time in the world to pursue my actual interests; but at the cost of living in a shit country, having to worry about my physical safety or other similar concerns.
With $2M though (or more realistically, with $5M, but the point stands) I could achieve (1) in the awesome country where I live now. So yes, in my case, $5M in the bank would absolutely solve the problem.
I'm not fully convinced this is true when the problem is burnout.
Burnout recovery *requires* you to stop working in the area that caused the burnout; but, many of us have golden handcuffs in our job's income, so multi-year relief from it - especially if it allows us to buy a house so we have security - may be what's required here.
A wonderful resource for the laid-off 45-year old coal miners, certain to solve their problems...
> "A few years ago, a man experienced a midlife crisis. He was professionally successful and had a rewarding family life, but still had a “hollow” feeling."
Just to spell it out, when you have a significant fraction of the population affected by societal collapse and economic insecurity, and with few if any future job prospects, that results in the kind of widespread 'depression' that isn't treatable with drugs, therapy, or self-help books.
A midlife crisis is not about being poor, fearing for your job, or worrying about societal collapse. It's about your existence, purpose, the meaning of life, etc. It applies to all walks of life.
This isn't the first time in human history a society has had problems. It's not even the first time last 50 years people have felt this way[1]. There is definitely philosophy that addresses living with uncertainty about the future and the certainty of death. Several of the Roman Stoics come to mind.
My survival strategy for mid-life has been to replace the ambition and balls that got me through my 20's and 30's with age appropriate acceptance of the MANY things I cannot control & don't have time to do, with a wisdom to focus on the FEW things that are likely to matter to me when I hit my 70's and beyond.
For example, I can't control the divorce that consumed a ton of time and money in my 40's, but I have prioritized recovering money & family in my late 40's and early 50's. I can't control a medical condition that somewhat limits what I can do from time-to-time, but I can identify alternatives that give me joy during those times.
I'm blessed with parents and grandparents who unwittingly failed to prioritize correctly IMHO. I paid close attention and intend to do it differently.