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I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis. I would view that as somewhat of a failure. I had like 40+ years to figure out what I wanted my life to be like. Feeling the need to change course after so much time would be a little lame.
I was shocked by the cookie cutter midlife crisis I had upon hitting 40 despite thinking I was doing all the right things before that.
I wonder if the mid life crisis is a completely modern and secular malady. Thinking to my religious friends who have 5+ kids, a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community, it's very hard to imagine them going through one. Because they are too busy, but mainly because their life is oriented from the get-go around what is very meaningful to them
because they've outsourced most critical decisions to their faith. As Jung said, people don't have ideas, ideas have people. It's very easy to obtain meaning by getting in a sense hijacked by a very convincing set of beliefs.
I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis. I would view that as somewhat of a failure. I had like 40+ years to figure out what I wanted my life to be like. Feeling the need to change course after so much time would be a little lame.
I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis. I would view that as somewhat of a failure. I had like 40+ years to figure out what I wanted my life to be like. Feeling the need to change course after so much time would be a little lame.
I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis. I would view that as somewhat of a failure. I had like 40+ years to figure out what I wanted my life to be like. Feeling the need to change course after so much time would be a little lame.
Also how do you know what your 40 or 60 year old brain will think when you are 20?
If our brains thought the same things and had the same world view this would be evolutionarily a disadvantage. Just brain chemistry changes alone could account for a lot of decisions. At a crude level it makes more sense to be sex and love obsessed in 20s when the chance of having a good sperm, eggs and pregnancy is much higher.
Elder members of the group help genetic survival by providing wisdom, knowledge of a different kind than younger people (I don't believe "older people know better") but the blends of knowledge are great for survival.
The assumption that we are purely rational agents making informed choices is clearly false in general, and I think the opposite is true, in general.
And this doesn't even tough on the extra information you would have processed over 20 years or even the freakingly high speed of change of the world around us. Would you choose to learn about Machine Learning / Neural Nets in 2000? Or coding in 1980? Well you could if it is a passion, but it didn't look as promising as now right? So data changes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the stereotypical midlife crisis the Dad whose kids have all moved out? I don't think that has anything to do with modernity or secularity, it's more to do with a large change that triggers a revaluation of your life. That could happen to anyone.
I view the stereotypical midlife crisis as the dad/husband who decides to buy a sports car and act 25 again possibly cheat on his wife.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173931/mi...
I wonder if the mid life crisis is a completely modern and secular malady. Thinking to my religious friends who have 5+ kids, a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community, it's very hard to imagine them going through one. Because they are too busy, but mainly because their life is oriented from the get-go around what is very meaningful to them
> Thinking to my religious friends who have 5+ kids, a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community, it's very hard to imagine them going through one. I grew up in a church and will tell you right off the bat that neither church nor family prevents one. Googling will give you no shortage of Christian articles and resources around dealing with them. Nobody is immune to that sense of "everything looks peachy…
As an ex-church person: the "community" is pretty hurtful to a lot of people and isn't immune to high school clique / cult of personality type things, even if you discount other obvious harms (the experience of gay kids in church, women being told they can't teach, way-too-frequent abuses of adolescents by church authorities like youth pastors and priests).
Christian stuff in particular is also heavy on the shame and that is pretty bad for psychological safety & wellness. My mother in law was a divorcee and made to feel real bad about that even to this day. As a boy I remember growing up and self-flagellating for every "impure" thought that crossed my mind. "Rich spiritual life" is a pretty branding phrase for bankrupt ideology.
I wonder if the mid life crisis is a completely modern and secular malady. Thinking to my religious friends who have 5+ kids, a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community, it's very hard to imagine them going through one. Because they are too busy, but mainly because their life is oriented from the get-go around what is very meaningful to them
I thought the circumstances you describe are what leads to the typical midlife crisis. Not always, but people wake up and realize they're trapped in a life (kids, obligations, job) that sort of crept up on them, and feel like they need to let off some steam. A lot of (perhaps including the article's authors) modern "mid-life crises" are more what I've heard of as "quarter life crises" - you finish school, get a job,…
https://www.amazon.com/Passages-Predictable-Crises-Adult-Lif...
which factually points out that most people go through several crises in their adult life. As a rule of thumb you have one every seven years or so. I had one around 30, another in my early 40s, and another at 49. If you read between the lines in Freud you could also get the picture that a psychoanalysis would be likely to span the duration of such a crisis (say 18 months) and improve the outcome you get.
The author, Gail Sheehy, gave a talk at Ithaca College about a decade ago and actually said that she disowned that book for a few reasons:
(1) Passages is positive for divorce as a way that people who are evolving at different rates and in different directions to realize themselves. She realized later on that divorce is overall highly destructive.
(2) The paths that people take aren't quite so predictable.
(3) Passages was based on a study of graduates of an elite school, one thing that stands out is that none of the case studies consider serious deprivation, in fact you never once hear that somebody wanted to do X or Y but didn't because they couldn't afford it. In the sense that the experience of most people is "dark matter" you might want to read
https://www.amazon.com/Silences-Tillie-Olsen/dp/1558614400
In particular divorce might work out well for somebody like Bill Gates or Elon Musk who can trade in their tired old nag for a hot young thing but for most ordinary people and their families it's profoundly harmful.
Sheehy went on to write numerous more books on the same subject.
I wonder if the mid life crisis is a completely modern and secular malady. Thinking to my religious friends who have 5+ kids, a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community, it's very hard to imagine them going through one. Because they are too busy, but mainly because their life is oriented from the get-go around what is very meaningful to them
> a rich spiritual life and deep engagement with community
I kind of suspect this is one of the ways mid-life crisis manifests. That, and covert alcoholism.