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The Roots of Midlife Crisis

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#31

Post by roel_v »

byEngineer wrote: post #4
ilaksh wrote: post #2

Basically "midlife crisis" is a way for people who are married with families to put down anyone having more fun or experiencing more freedom than them.

I'm married with family. It is something else: You need to turn yourself into a corporate-or-other slave to pay off the mortgage, cars, save for kids' schools, etc. Absolutely no wonder that in "poor" countries they are happier. Living in constant stress about the job, with huge financial obligation, not even seeing your kids and spouse except for weekends and a week vacation a year -- compare this to my parents gene…

Yeah, that's why people are flocking to communist countries, to the point where the commies have to build walls to keep people from coming in. Oh wait no, it seems those wall are to keep people in, you know, just so they don't accidentally wander off out of utopia.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#32

Post by dragonwriter »

sliverstorm wrote: post #23
byEngineer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm married with family. It is something else: You need to turn yourself into a corporate-or-other slave to pay off the mortgage, cars, save for kids' schools, etc. Absolutely no wonder that in "poor" countries they are happier. Living in constant stress about the job, with huge financial obligation, not even seeing your kids and spouse except for weekends and a week vacation a year -- compare this to my parents gene…

compare this to my parents generation in communistic (then) Poland -- no debt, guaranteed jobs, free housing. Do your parents tell you how much they miss that? My parents aren't from Soviet-era Poland, but I've never heard a citizen of the Soviet Bloc wax nostalgic about their time there.

> Do your parents tell you how much they miss that? My parents aren't from Soviet-era Poland, but I've never heard a citizen of the Soviet Bloc wax nostalgic about their time there.

I've heard of (but not heard myself) lots of people in post-Soviet Russia doing so, and its been frequently cited as the basis for support for many of the most powerful politicians in Russia since shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#33

Post by GuiA »

johngalt wrote: post #27

A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due. Someday I'll go back to school and get my masters, someday I will move to X place I'd prefer to live at, someday I will visit my old friends or relative, someday I will take the time to spend with my kids. All the things you promise yourself to get through the workday. Then in the span of about 5 years, those options all close at once. Too old to meani…

This sounds spot on. At 25, I find myself thinking these thoughts. Someday I'll finish this project. Someday I'll take this trip. Someday I'll spend a full week at my grandparents.

And I'm realizing, as you aptly said, that the mere act of telling yourself "someday" is enough to comfort you that it will happen, that you shouldn't worry about it, until it's too late.

My grandfather fought in WW2 in the French resistance, leaving his family at the age of 17 to live in the wilderness for 3 years, stealthily blowing up Nazi trains and doing various things like that. He got a fairly prestigious military decoration for it at the end of the war. He never really talked about it when we were kids though - he probably wanted to keep us blissfully ignorant.

For about 2 years, my cousin and I talked of taking a few days to sit down, ask him questions about it, get him to share his story - and film the whole thing and produce a short oral history documentary out of it. We kept putting it off because I live in the US, she lives in Switzerland, my grandpa lives in France, and occasions were rare.

Then he died last February. Despite a few surgeries, he was in fairly good health at 88 (still drove around, gardened, fixed stuff around the house, etc.). On a Monday morning he felt unwell, on the Wednesday morning he was gone.

I'm trying to minimize those "somedays" now so they don't hit me in the face 100x when I'm 45. And yet it's always so easy to just say "someday".

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#34

Post by mturmon »

csommers wrote: post #19
mturmon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I'd like to follow up on finitude. No matter how successful you are, how much you figured out what you wanted and how well you did it -- there will be something within the sphere you've committed to that is left untried. Eventually it sinks in that some of those somethings will always be left undone. There will be no time for them. This feels like a loss, and letting go is hard. One other side to this, e…

On the flip-side, I find that "letting go" aspect to be somewhat...freeing. Being able to acknowledge that there are things you won't be able to address in this lifetime is reassuring to me, as it allows me to focus more on the things that "immediately" matter.

Definitely. Time can be merciful, despite its usual appearance.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#35

Post by toyg »

mikeash wrote: post #25
dominotw wrote: post #8

Articles on 'happiness' are a staple on HN. We see Western fixations – such as obsessive individualism, technological fanaticism, and economic intoxication – as the height of human progress. Analyze everything with the scientific method regardless of the problem at hand( Mapping happiness to curves and parabolas. really?). We have tuned our minds into advanced scientific grooves but have an underdeveloped psychologic…

What's wrong with applying the scientific method to happiness? It's the best technique available for figuring stuff out. Do you have a better idea?

Yes he does, but he won't write it because he knows he'll be laughed out of the room. I bet it's God or something equivalent.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#36

Post by LordKano »

johngalt wrote: post #27

A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due. Someday I'll go back to school and get my masters, someday I will move to X place I'd prefer to live at, someday I will visit my old friends or relative, someday I will take the time to spend with my kids. All the things you promise yourself to get through the workday. Then in the span of about 5 years, those options all close at once. Too old to meani…

I had what can best be described as a pre-midlife crisis. The summer before I turned 30, I was in a relationship in which I was not happy, my career had stagnated and my younger sister had just graduated from college.

It felt like someone lit a fire under me. I went back to college, changed my career trajectory and ended the relationship. I spent 6 of the next seven years in college. I picked up two AS degrees, a BS degree and an MS degree. I roughly tripled my income, I enjoy my job and I'm now engaged with three children.

"Someday" can happen but only if you make it happen. Don't wait for it, figure out what you need to do to make it happen and then do that. For me, the big incentive to get out there and make it happen was my angst over that digit on the left changing.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#37

Post by panzagl »

elpachuco wrote: post #30
melling wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? People's views do change. “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” ― Muhammad Ali

So if I thought that at 20 religion was a farce and I still think that at 50, have I wasted my life. In the mean time I have learned and discovered lots about the universe. Have I still wasted my life. And also, I still dislike having kids the same as when I was 20 as I do now that I'm 50. I guess I wan't to know what point are you exactly trying to make? People may never change their mind about having kids and yet s…

I don't think he meant you personally.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#38

Post by b_emery »

Being in my early 40's a lot of this article resonates with my thinking as it was a few months ago. The piling up of setbacks, aches, the 'is this all there is?'. One day, I was on the porch, trying to wrestle my kids into the car, and a neighbor, in his 80's, health conditions (who was walking laps around the neighborhood for exercise), asked me how I was doing. I said 'surviving'.

"Surviving?" he said, "you're living!" with a raised fist.

Seeing myself through the eyes of someone much closer to the end has given me some very valuable perspective. Sometimes I think of myself as an 80 yr old man, and think about what it will be like. Makes me pretty damn glad to be alive now, and pretty appreciative of what I do have. Crisis averted.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#39

Post by heygiraffe »

projectileboy wrote: post #29
guylhem wrote: post #6

TLDR : "the age U-shape in life satisfaction is driven by unmet aspirations that are painfully felt during midlife but beneficially abandoned and felt with less regret during old age" Basically, most people hope they will do great, but instead fail miserably in their expectations and finally even let go of the hope. Thoreau said 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them…

FWIW, I'm married with three kids and I really like my wife and kids. I certainly don't think it's for everyone, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand on the assumption that everyone who has a family is miserable (although I admit I may be an outlier...?). I say this only because you might deprive yourself of something you may enjoy.

I believe studies have generally shown married men, on the whole, to be happier than unmarried men. I'm not sure about women, nor about how children affect things.

Regardless, you are not an outlier. Huge numbers of people with families are happy about it. It's fashionable for men in their 20s to talk about marriage entirely in terms of loss of freedom, but that doesn't mean their ideas are in accord with reality.

Re: The Roots of Midlife Crisis

#40

Post by heygiraffe »

johngalt wrote: post #27

A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due. Someday I'll go back to school and get my masters, someday I will move to X place I'd prefer to live at, someday I will visit my old friends or relative, someday I will take the time to spend with my kids. All the things you promise yourself to get through the workday. Then in the span of about 5 years, those options all close at once. Too old to meani…

> A midlife crisis is simply when all your 'someday' bills are due.

I'm sure that's an important component of it. But it is not the whole story.

For example, incidence of clinical depression peaks in the late 40s. This page has a graph:

http://www.medicographia.com/2010/10/the-timing-of-depressio...

(I've seen more detailed graphs, but I can't find any right now.)

Also, I read about a study that showed that predictions of husbands having extramarital affairs could be made more accurately based on the age of the wife than on the age of the husband. The authors hypothesized that husbands looking elsewhere for sex, was, in part, a natural response to the wife going through menopause. (I can't find the study now.)

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