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Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

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Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#71

Post by snarf21 »

tayo42 wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#72

Post by marginalia_nu »

HPsquared wrote: post #57
marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It satisfies the "social chimp brain" that you are in good standing with the community.

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.

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#73

Post by thegrimmest »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #56

Acceptance. 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…

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.

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#74

Post by saghm »

wincy wrote: post #4
tayo42 wrote: post #3

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.

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”.

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.

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#75

Post by [deleted] »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #59

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 lov…

[deleted]

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#76

Post by kelseyfrog »

thegrimmest wrote: post #67
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 mak…

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-7432...

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#77

Post by irrational »

xhevahir wrote: post #68

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 t…

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.

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#79

Post by yboris »

implements wrote: post #37
yboris wrote: post #10

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" https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ In my case I've…

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future has been compared to your link, though I haven’t read it (it’s out Sept. 1st).

The book is available now in the US: https://whatweowethefuture.com/

Received my copy in the mail yesterday :)

Re: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

#80

Post by RankingMember »

xcambar wrote: post #52
frankzander wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a Harley

I'm 38 and training for a motorbike driver's license. No Harley, nothing particular, I just always found it fun without ever taking the time to do it. The amount of comments I receive about midlife crisis is ridiculously high.

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).
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