Philosophy of the mid-life crisis

[Nom De Plume]

The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis

By Joshua RothmanFebruary 3, 2018


Kieran Setiya’s book “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.”Photograph by Bernd Vogel / Getty

When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.
Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.
Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”
After Sheehy’s book was published, everybody seemed to be having a midlife crisis. Perhaps, Setiya writes, people married too early during the conservative postwar decades, then reëvaluated their lives as the counterculture flowered. On the whole, though, research on the frequency of midlife crises tends to be equivocal. Many long-term studies of well-being show that people actually get happier as they age. (This lends credence, Setiya suggests, to Aristotle’s view that we grow into a “prime of life,” with the body achieving its fullest development at thirty-five and the mind at forty-nine.) Other studies show that there is a “U-shaped curve” to life satisfaction, such that we’re happiest when we’re young and old and unhappiest in between. (There are even studies of great apes, conducted by zoologists, which show that they get sad in middle age.) “Shit happens in midlife,” Setiya writes, “with kids and parents, work and health.” He is drawn to the work of the German economist Hannes Schwandt, which shows that “younger people tend to overestimate how satisfied they will be, while midlifers underestimate old age.” According to this theory, we could avoid midlife crises by calibrating our expectations.
If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.
Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)
To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”
In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.
The secret to avoiding Schopenhauerian ennui, Setiya argues, is either to do things that are complete and atelic or to find ways of engaging with your projects atelically. Setiya cautions against the “false allure of early retirement,” since “there is nothing inherently telic about work”; instead of quitting your job, you might find ways to engage with it atelically, as a practice rather than a project. Certain middle-aged habits—golf, yoga, gardening—can help to create an atelic mind-set. Setiya recommends mindfulness meditation; buying a sports car may also be permissible, if it includes “a switch in focus from the value of getting there to the value of being on the way.”
Is it disappointing that “Midlife” arrives at the conclusion that “living in the present” is the solution to middle-aged unhappiness? A little. One might wonder if all that philosophy was really necessary. Setiya has the whole history of thought at his disposal. Drawing on Heidegger, he could have urged middle-aged people to find new ways of “disclosing” the world to themselves, perhaps by acquiring new or deeper skills. Adapting the work of Derek Parfit, he could have argued that selves are less real than we think, and that midlife crises are, therefore, about nothing. With Douglas Hofstadter, he might have concluded that it’s relationships that matter, since the patterns of thought and feeling encoded in our neurons will repeat themselves in the brains of the people we love, like musical echoes. Who knows what other intriguing suggestions Setiya might’ve come up with if he’d pillaged the history of philosophy with abandon? While reading “Midlife,” I yearned for such strange and counterintuitive ideas. But perhaps it’s right that they were missing. There’s something a little midlife-crisis about insisting on an entirely new way of thinking; maybe the answers are just the answers, and are actually quite simple. If that’s the case, then “Midlife” teaches a lesson about midlife: it’s sometimes best to go with the flow.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.Read more »

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[Black Orchid]

OMG that is long. I don't have the time now but will read it a bit later.

[sprintcyclist]

Whoever wrote that thinks too much.

[The Mechanic]

by the time he wrote that his MLC would have been over...

easier just to buy a motorcycle..

forget the women.. they are only trouble and bring you down... etc

[Black Orchid]

If a man is going through MLC I bet the woman would be more than happy for him to get a motor bike and then wave him off on his way

[The Mechanic]

If a man is going through MLC I bet the woman would be more than happy for him to get a motor bike and then wave him off on his way

like who has a MLC in their 30s anyways??

some of these people are not long out of uni and have never lived ...

great years in the 30s... I was still in the Army.. fit as a fiddle .... won an AFL grand finale with my Unit (34yo) mrs and kids were great... life was good

[Black Orchid]

I have a friend who went through a MLC when she turned 30. I never could understand it. Still can't.

I loved my 30s

[Rorschach]

I think it's a load of bull....

I haven't gone through it yet.... that's gonna put me in the over 120s at least before I die.

Honestly people assess and reassess their lives all through lives at many ages... they take up hobbies, change jobs, get married, get divorces, have children, remain single, don't have children, drive cars, ride motorbikes live in houses, apartments on small and large properties.... etc, etc, etc.... none of it has a set date and as for being a crisis... well that's just a matter of attitude.

[sprintcyclist]

I've had a couple of mid-life crisis.

maybe they are 1/4-life crisis ?

[The Mechanic]

I've had a couple of mid-life crisis.

maybe they are 1/4-life crisis ?

I think that sometimes you just go along in life and then realise that you need to do something different rather than the same old same old... whether its reinventing yourself or what... try to be a better person.. do things better for the environment... do something that you've always talked about or thought about... and make yourself/and others happy

I did a lot of online gaming at one stage of my life... every day after work I'd spend a few hours playing shootemup games... talking and yelling at people through my headset...

hours and hours on weekends as well... sometimes I'd get motion sickness...

then oneway I though... WTF am I doing?

im wasting my life away on computer games and its making me disengage and not learning anything new...

so I made a conscious decision to give it away and to be more productive...

I did more gardening to attract more bees and other pollinators... started growing some veggies ... travelling... weekends away... reading and studying... talking and fighting with you guys...

seeing the Flow Hive triggered that thought I've always had about beekeeping.. so ordered one, did courses and became a beekeeper as well...

a couple of times I went back and had a look at my old gaming sites only to find the same losers pissing their lives away... half of them didn't even have a job and they'd be online all day and all night... I didn't want to be one of those losers...

when my daughters computer was having troubles I gave her my gaming computer (desktop) and now I only have a laptop...

life is so much better and fulfilling...