15 ms·

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

211 points by herbertl 4y ago

lapcat 4y ago
(2017)
- marto1 4y ago
  As in, it would've solved it in 2017. Good luck solving it these days :-)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tayo42 4y ago
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.
- wincy 4y ago
  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”.
  - heliodor 4y ago
    It's all about the culture of your location. In New York City, 35 is young and vibrant and full of life.
    - TuringTest 4y ago
      I came here to say this. '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'.
      - a9h74j 4y ago
        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.
    - Swizec 4y ago
      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. It's nice. Life is barely getting started.
      - foobiekr 4y ago
        A friend died at 51 not long ago. If you die at is age, you are already 68% of the way there. It's not barely getting started, it's behind you. More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.
        Swizec 4y ago
        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.
  - saghm 4y ago
    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.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    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.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    It's even worse when you take into consideration quality of life. For many people their last decade may come with severe medical issues. That's why you need to let go of this idea of some awesome 2 decades of retirement where you finally get to enjoy and do all the things you want. You'll be broken, half your friends are dead or dying, the kids won't visit, and you have no energy. I'm being intentionally brutal to make it as clear as I can. Whatever you want to do, do it NOW. During good years.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      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.
      - csomar 4y ago
        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.
- ultramegachurch 4y ago
  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.
  - bckr 4y ago
    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.
  - havblue 4y ago
    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.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    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
  - cedricd 4y ago
    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.
  - 4y ago
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  > 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.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    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.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      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.
- snarf21 4y ago
  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.
- alecbz 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis)
sgt101 4y ago
I'll tell you what would solve mine. About $2m.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  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.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    Agency & control over own time costs about this much in a modern economy if you don't want to compromise on housing or having a family.
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    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.
  - throw5399375930 4y ago
    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.
  - 4y ago
1970-01-01 4y ago
Philosophy would be a great name for a boat
- frankzander 4y ago
  Or a Harley
  - amelius 4y ago
    Or a toupee.
  - xcambar 4y ago
    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.
    - RankingMember 4y ago
      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).
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
    Does the Harley named Philosophy come with a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      Name your Harley Z.A.A.M.M.
yboris 4y ago
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/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ 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.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  > 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?
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    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).
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      > 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.
photochemsyn 4y ago
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.
- heliodor 4y ago
  The topic is midlife crisis. 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.
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- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVzkTd9R44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVzkTd9R44
UnpossibleJim 4y ago
People have time for midlife crises? ;)
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  I guess if you have time for it, you've made it :)
- a9h74j 4y ago
  Also this: Do other people have time for your midlife crisis?
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  well yes when not entrapped in wage labor
michalu 4y ago
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.)
alexashka 4y ago
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. Anyhoo :)
daoist_shaman 4y ago
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.
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lordleft 4y ago
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.
- kirse 4y ago
  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: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
  - teg4n_ 4y ago
- bryankam 4y ago
  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 https://kite.link/Fiction
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
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 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.
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  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.
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  - exolymph 4y ago
    This is also a huge theme of the Bible — possibly all religions?
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      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.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
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."
xhevahir 4y ago
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. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z
- irrational 4y ago
  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.
  - topkai22 4y ago
    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/carlson-guzzo-median-age-last-birth-fp-21-05.html 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.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    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.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
the school of life yootube channel has a lot of helpful videos for self understanding. 7 million subscribers.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
"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." Napoleon Hill
ramesh31 4y ago
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.
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xhevahir 4y ago
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 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."
dionidium 4y ago
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).
- efficax 4y ago
  once your kids are a little older you’ll have plenty of time to mid life crisis (just in your 50s instead)
- greedo 4y ago
  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.
- raister 4y ago
  Oh boy, you're in for a wild ride. I had my kid at my forties. 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.
deebosong 4y ago
I like this quote: 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.
drewda 4y ago
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.
fleddr 4y ago
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. Anyway, have a great day.
- mikestew 4y ago
  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.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    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.
    - arbitrary_name 4y ago
      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?
antonzabirko 4y ago
This is what happens when you're spiritually unprepared in life. You need to have a 'mid-life crisis' early-on and figure out the meaning of life then and there. Imagine the people who have these crises, now on their deathbeds.
nbzso 4y ago
I always had a clear baseline in life. Avoid self-inflicted suffering. 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:)
systematical 4y ago
> Feeling regret in this sense is better than feeling nothing. Yes and sleeping on a rock is better than sleeping on a pile of dung.
iancmceachern 4y ago
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.
freetanga 4y ago
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.
p5a0u9l 4y ago
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

211 points by herbertl 4y ago

lapcat 4y ago

(2017)

marto1 4y ago
As in, it would've solved it in 2017. Good luck solving it these days :-)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tayo42 4y ago

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.

wincy 4y ago
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”.
- heliodor 4y ago
  It's all about the culture of your location. In New York City, 35 is young and vibrant and full of life.
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    I came here to say this. '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'.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      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.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    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. It's nice. Life is barely getting started.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      A friend died at 51 not long ago. If you die at is age, you are already 68% of the way there. It's not barely getting started, it's behind you. More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.
      - Swizec 4y ago
        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.
- saghm 4y ago
  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.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  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.
- fleddr 4y ago
  It's even worse when you take into consideration quality of life. For many people their last decade may come with severe medical issues. That's why you need to let go of this idea of some awesome 2 decades of retirement where you finally get to enjoy and do all the things you want. You'll be broken, half your friends are dead or dying, the kids won't visit, and you have no energy. I'm being intentionally brutal to make it as clear as I can. Whatever you want to do, do it NOW. During good years.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    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.
    - csomar 4y ago
      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.
ultramegachurch 4y ago
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.
- bckr 4y ago
  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.
- havblue 4y ago
  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.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  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
- cedricd 4y ago
  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.
- 4y ago
kelseyfrog 4y ago
> 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.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  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.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    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.
snarf21 4y ago
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.
alecbz 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis)

sgt101 4y ago

I'll tell you what would solve mine. About $2m.

bachmeier 4y ago
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.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Agency & control over own time costs about this much in a modern economy if you don't want to compromise on housing or having a family.
- t-writescode 4y ago
  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.
- throw5399375930 4y ago
  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.
- 4y ago

1970-01-01 4y ago

Philosophy would be a great name for a boat

frankzander 4y ago
Or a Harley
- amelius 4y ago
  Or a toupee.
- xcambar 4y ago
  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.
  - RankingMember 4y ago
    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).
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  Does the Harley named Philosophy come with a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    Name your Harley Z.A.A.M.M.

yboris 4y ago

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/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ 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.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> 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?
- strogonoff 4y ago
  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).
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    > 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.

photochemsyn 4y ago

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.

heliodor 4y ago
The topic is midlife crisis. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
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marginalia_nu 4y ago
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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVzkTd9R44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVzkTd9R44

UnpossibleJim 4y ago

People have time for midlife crises? ;)

tiborsaas 4y ago
I guess if you have time for it, you've made it :)
a9h74j 4y ago
Also this: Do other people have time for your midlife crisis?
wahnfrieden 4y ago
well yes when not entrapped in wage labor

michalu 4y ago

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.)

alexashka 4y ago

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. Anyhoo :)

daoist_shaman 4y ago

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.

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lordleft 4y ago

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.

kirse 4y ago
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: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
- teg4n_ 4y ago
bryankam 4y ago
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 https://kite.link/Fiction

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

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 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.

thegrimmest 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- exolymph 4y ago
  This is also a huge theme of the Bible — possibly all religions?
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

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."

xhevahir 4y ago

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. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z

irrational 4y ago
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.
- topkai22 4y ago
  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/carlson-guzzo-median-age-last-birth-fp-21-05.html 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.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  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.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

the school of life yootube channel has a lot of helpful videos for self understanding. 7 million subscribers.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

"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." Napoleon Hill

ramesh31 4y ago

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.

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xhevahir 4y ago

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 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."

dionidium 4y ago

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).

efficax 4y ago
once your kids are a little older you’ll have plenty of time to mid life crisis (just in your 50s instead)
greedo 4y ago
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.
raister 4y ago
Oh boy, you're in for a wild ride. I had my kid at my forties. 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.

deebosong 4y ago

I like this quote: 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.

drewda 4y ago

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.

fleddr 4y ago

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. Anyway, have a great day.

mikestew 4y ago
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.
- fleddr 4y ago
  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.
  - arbitrary_name 4y ago
    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?

antonzabirko 4y ago

This is what happens when you're spiritually unprepared in life. You need to have a 'mid-life crisis' early-on and figure out the meaning of life then and there. Imagine the people who have these crises, now on their deathbeds.

nbzso 4y ago

I always had a clear baseline in life. Avoid self-inflicted suffering. 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:)

systematical 4y ago

> Feeling regret in this sense is better than feeling nothing. Yes and sleeping on a rock is better than sleeping on a pile of dung.

iancmceachern 4y ago

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.

freetanga 4y ago

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.

p5a0u9l 4y ago

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