The demographic and cultural roots of the midlife crisis
royalsocietypublishing.org
royalsocietypublishing.org
In midlife we’re concerned with status and our outward appearance, which can hinder creative output. Then we get older and realize that we don’t care what anyone thinks about us, which can lead to more creative risk taking and accomplishments. Then we get even older and we find the truth: nobody is thinking about you (except you) so it’s not worth concerning yourself with status or outside validation.
In the midst of my own midlife crisis in the making I often find myself coming back to these types of concerns: How do I look to others? How do I compare to others? What am I missing out on?
Thankfully I’ve been able to, so far at least, keep any real crisis similar to what’s described in the article or otherwise from occurring. I try to remind myself of what Gilbert explained, that no one really cares about me so I should live my life without worrying to much about what they think.
I read a lot of books about creativity and most aren’t great, but I think “Big Magic” is a decent read. I also enjoyed the audiobook of “Creative Quest” by Questlove.
If it makes you happy, keep doing it. Don't let other people define your success.
This is often repeated, but it is so untrue that I don't get why well-intentioned people repeat it. Nobody thinks about me as much as I think about me, but some make decisions, be romantic, professional, based on what they think about me, that is my appearance, my status, my money, my family.
As usual, the truth is between the straw-man extremes, which are in this case "nobody is ever concerned about me" and "everyone is thinking about me all the time." Now, it is not that older people realize that nobody is thinking about them and they were previously mistaken when thinking otherwise, they simply become aware that people are not thinking as much about them anymore, since they starting to be (or are) out of the game.
At ~35 most people can fake it well enough that external validation is largely meaningless. Which quickly leads to a feeling it’s just fake and by 40 became disillusioned with work, disenchanted with relationships and detached from family responsibilities.
I disagree. I don't observe much difference in this sense, but I feel more free to be my authentic self without worrying about how that might be perceived by people who are not a meaningful part of my life.
I only recognise the meaning in "life begins at 40" since I reached it.
First, as always, there is a distribution of effects, which means that there is individual variation. We can reasonably assume that, _on average_, the older people are, the less they care about other people's opinions. The age after which these effects are noticeable is not immutable since the dawn of times, but depends on when people have kids, are expected to retire, etc. For example, I expect the age at which one cares less to be later in life now that three decades ago, when people at 40 were already considered way past their prime. I mean, for the generation of my parents, physical activity after they turned 18-20 was for wealthy people or "eccentrics".
Second, it depends very much on what is settled for the person or what is still fluid. If someone has a family or has reached of the "peace of the senses", they are already caring much less about the major source of frustration (much more than source of joy) and status-seeking behavior for most people: sex. If somebody has also given up on practicing sports (or any king of competitive hobby), put up the classic 40 pounds more at 40 years old, they care even less about others. Lastly, hormones change, testosterone in men visibly drops, women start getting into menopause. And then it depends on personality (see the point above about variation), there are people who are still combative in the status game at 80 and others who have given up at 21.
In synthesis, it is not that older means wiser and thus the "who cares what other people think" comes from a place of introspection (between us: sex is incredibly pleasurable), but more simply that hormonal changes, "giving up" (sex, competition) put people, sooner or later, on the bench of life: spectators, more than players.
You're saying this to indicate that anyone who disagrees with you is an outlier, but what you have claimed is completely un-relatable to me and I don't recognise it in (most) other people that I interact with.
Giving up on sport/fitness and normalised obesity is a uniquely modern phenomenon, and almost uniquely American.
Giving up on sex and competition is not something you can really accuse the Boomer generation of. You only need to look at the demographics of the US Presidential candidates, or any other elite career in 2020, to understand that status-seeking is most pronounced in that generation of men.
"You're saying this to indicate that anyone who disagrees with you is an outlier" - Not at all. People who disagree with me have a different view on the issue, different experiences. That there is variation is inevitable in every complex, non-deterministic process (like status-seeking behavior, feeling at ease with oneself). On the contrary, complex, but deterministic (like how many hands one has), have very little variation.
"Giving up on sport/fitness and normalised obesity is a uniquely modern phenomenon, and almost uniquely American." - I disagree. And I am not American, although I have been living in the US for years; I am from one the countries who are considered "healthy". We need to distinguish differences between cohorts (over time) and differences within cohorts over time, but I don't want to make this too long (interesting pub here that supports what I had written: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2019.1...). Up to the 80s, adult sports for hobby basically did not exist outside of the wealthy and the (yes, in this case) outliers. There are data and anecdotes, let me use the latter here. Among my grandparents' social circle (the vast majority not being among us any more), there is not a single one who did any sports after they were 18-20. So we might not even see a drop in activity, because the activity never started. In my parents', there were a few here and there, some who played tennis (well off people), some runners, some playing golf, the boxer, the judo guy (for women, outside of maybe some dancing, zero sports I remember about). When I started training with weights in the early 90s, gyms for adults were far and few in between. Now, in 2020, there are more gyms and activities for adults than ever and participation in adult sports activities has never been higher (see publication above). Apart from the sick and the exception, when I look at photos of my parents and grandparents' friends (social media, old weddings), they are all fatter than they were in their 20s. In my home country, up to the 70s, calories were simply not abundant and/or not convenient (if you need to start from raw potatoes to have french fries, you are in for the long haul).
"Giving up on sex and competition is not something you can really accuse the Boomer generation of." - I have no idea where this is coming from, surely not from me. But if you ask, across every generation, the distribution of sex-seeking and status-seeking behavior shifts (and it is surprising I have to write this) with the age in the direction of less sex and less competition (related to Boomers, one hypothesis is that the variance increases with age. It might be, it should be tested). Now, if you ask me to make a prediction (which will be proven right or wrong, we'll see), for millenials the shift with age will be slower, more will use TRT, more will have kids later in life, more will feel healthy and competitive (not competitive at the neighborhood meeting) later in life. And yes, we read about the horny boomers, but rest assured they were much more interested in sex when they were in their 20s. Hormones are powerful! Then, if you and your social circles had different experiences and you are all having more sex at 50 than at 20 and you are more competitive in sports now that in high school, I am fine with it.
Upon examination it falls apart. You think about others, albeit not everyone you encounter but the people you care about. Why wouldn't they think about you? Either you're unique in that you're the only person who thinks about others or you're invisible to them.
And as you point out, your image in the mind of others translates into tangible results: money, sex, etc.
Looking at social media, we can prove the point further: some people are thought about much more than others.
That seems completely backwards to me. I've never been more comfortable with being myself, whatever I am, than now, in mid-forties. My midlife crisis is raging out of control, because I'm looking at things that are outside of my reach. Activities I'm too frail to do, girls I'm too old to date... It's more of a temporary Peter Pan syndrome than anything else.
Life runs past you really quickly, one day you wake up realizing it's still the 20-something you, just in a 40-something body. Midlife crisis is the process of coming to terms with the physical, temporal reality.
I don’t think any one person can claim an authoritative view on what the framing of the experience of it has to be like.
I wonder if the contents of your life are secondary to your semi-hardwired emotional state. I am naturally somewhat anxious and hate wasting a day; conversely, I have friends who seem totally content after 9 months of unemployment and video games. Maybe it does not matter what you achieve, boxes you check, friends or relationships you make along the way. At the end if you are an unhappy person it will not be enough, and if you are naturally content it will all seem ok.
I suspect that's how it will work for me. Being naturally somewhat anxious has given me a lot of practice looking back and iterating. The areas of my life I'm most comfortable with are the ones where I've done the most work thinking about who I am and what I'm doing with my time.
Yeah, regression to the baseline (happiness). Which is why trying to change your own life based on other people's dying regrets is utter stupidity.
Once you start seeing links establishing how to actually measure this stuff with technology, then the results will be more meaningful (easy to replicate experiments, easy to do things en masse more cheaply and quickly).
That being said I still have respect for the work being done. It should still be done rather than wait for better tech but the incentive structures for that field need to be drastically different to better reflect the quality of using that data to make decisions (maybe a generally agreed upon ban to feature it in “public” media/journals, more careful reporting by science journals to limit to the results of meta studies or major reversals of what might be orthodoxy, publishing lists like Math does of what are open problems and what are assumed to be the conclusion even if not proven yet, etc). There are reforms to be made but until that’s done these studies do more harm than good as people latch on to whichever they want that sounds good to them rather than what’s actual reality).
On a side note, I find it strange that so much attention is given to a person's final days and whether regret will experienced then. They should not count much more than any other series of days. In fact, they are the ideal time to feel regret since your problem will be soon resolved!
Honestly, COIVD made me confront and explore that very subject incredibly deeply--month's long trains of thought about past experiences--, despite previously being in therapy and generally considering myself quite introspective; it also coincided with learning about how many founders in startups have many commonly found mental health issues (anxiety is almost always there) that lend themselves to enduring startup culture's grind.
That anxiety and restlessness is fuel that gets you to keep pushing to the next milestone when everything else is failing all around and its an incredible source, but the question then becomes: at what cost? For me being unhappy was just the cost of admission to apply my skill set to an immense complex problem; seeing incredibly sad things like currency collapses and Society's wrecked by hyper-inflation fucking sucks but it became my norm, what came after in that journey was an even higher cost altogether.
Failing to address that critical psychological factor is why I think burnout is also so common, you lose sight of the what and why you did something, which often starts as simple as thinking it was simply 'cool and interesting' thing to do with one's limited time and not simply testing how many times can you can endure going beyond your mental and psychological limits before it completely adversely affects your health in a way you that you may never actually recover from.
Which I think is something that is never discussed in founder/startup culture until after someone like Tony Hsieh dies and most just scratch their heads and try to figure out 'why?'
I can't say I'm completely over this either, as I think some ambition still lingers depending on the project ideas, but I've been forced to have to make sure I don't take on 'too much' and solely focus on one path now after being too many burnouts from doing 2-3 at any given time, but also realizing the value of the skill set you've gained as a result of your experiences. And having confidence in that instead of being obsessed with keeping up with every new update and knowing you can bring yourself up to date as needed.
I've also started to take advice from the cautionary tales that I previously ignored or that I simply didn't feel apply to me. Everyone is susceptible to these consequences and the only waste of time is to not at least consider how it could occur to you and try to learn from their mistake(s) to avoid repeating the same.
I was that unemployment and video games friend... I was satisfied at the time. Now I'm married and 'more' mature and look back at all the opportunities I had and wasted.
A perpetual cycle of shifting identity as we change internally and externally. I think it's a good thing to have and understand, but can be overwhelming as well.
I have zero evidence of this, it's just kind of based on my own observations. It's helped me to not be so hard on my self though when I find my tastes, interests, and identity changing over time.
--Houellebecq
Could it simply be that a focus on career and modern nuclear families provide less satisfaction for the middle aged? That might explain the diminished patriarchal/matriarchal aspects for men and women.
Either not having them, the kids not meeting their mothers expectations or the kids never wanting to see their mothers again once they grow up.
Unlike a dog, the child usually behaves in unanticipated ways...
> In like manner we are told again that, in Spain, when he was at leisure and was reading from the history of Alexander, he was lost in thought for a long time, and then burst into tears. His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. "Do you not think," said he, "it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?"
I think, at least for a lot of men, that a huge cause of the mid-life crisis is the death of boyhood dreams. Many of us dream of accomplishing great things. And it seems we have our whole life before us and limitless opportunities. However, by the time we reach midlife, we realize that time is running out, our physical prowess is on the way down, and we will never accomplish all that we have dreamed.
[...]
>Alexander the Great was psychologically of the same type as the lunatic, though he possessed the talent to achieve the lunatic's dream. He could not, however, achieve his own dream, which enlarged its scope as his achievement grew. When it became clear that he was the greatest conqueror known to fame, he decided that he was a god. Was he a happy man? His drunkenness, his furious rages, his indifference to women, and his claim to divinity, suggest that he was not. There is no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world as raw material for the magnificence of one's own ego.
I do wonder though if there is an additional component for folks in tech careers. If you stay heavily invested in the technology aspect of it, you might start wondering how much longer you can keep up with you folks in learning about the latest technology. If you move to the management track, you might feel less secure about your job and your ability to get a new position, especially as your former strong suit, the tech knowledge, atrophies. I moved to the manager track and sometimes interview folks for manager positions who are 10-15 years older than me and have been struggling to find a job for a very long time. Their tech skills are entirely outdated and I ask myself if that's me in 10 years.
And now that I’m 30, I hate how much suffering I endured the last decade. Questioning everything every step. Wondering how long it’d go. Wondering if there was ever a payoff to anything and not just another stepping stone. Wondering if I was as strong as I used to be. Constantly thinking to myself, I was stronger then. I was better then. I was smarter, faster, etc. Somehow I feel like I peaked near high school and it’s been a decline since.
But, likely, it’s more that I just haven’t had a path as easy or clear since then. Thus, ambiguity leads to more ambition which leads to more suffering which leads to more feelings of inadequacy.
It’s a great time...
It's not just wishful thinking for him: he felt that he didn't really figure out who he was, didn't really start self-actualizing en force before 40. Having known him a few years, it's clear to me that he genuinely has a very balanced and happy life, one with a family that he loves but also with his own goals and small pleasures, his own meaningful friendships, etc.
So I guess: I would tend to agree that the midlife crisis is a trap constructed by our western culture, and one that it's very possible to simply pass by. I think you just have to never stop working on yourself and asking (and listening to) what your needs are. Keep a balanced life of relationships, and pursuits, and self-care, and - yes - some accomplishments too. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't get complacent, but don't burn out either. Be in it for the long haul.
Physical activity sometimes causes those physical troubles. Injury can turn an athlete into very much not an athlete.
"We have commanded people to honour their parents. Their mothers bore them in hardship and delivered them in hardship. Their ˹period of˺ bearing and weaning is thirty months. In time, when the child reaches their prime at the age of forty, they pray, “My Lord! Inspire me to ˹always˺ be thankful for Your favours which You blessed me and my parents with, and to do good deeds that please You. And instil righteousness in my offspring. I truly repent to You, and I truly submit ˹to Your Will˺.”[1]
People seek all kinds of qualities in a therapist. “Older and wiser” is not a ubiquitous appeal.
Here at 22 you can be a psychologist, which is a different thing. They have a lot of work - intelligence tests, emotional support, advice about social stress. But they don't do therapy.
There are - of course - higher levels of training and certification, but that gets you in front of people and diagnosing.
I think it does require keeping an inventory of dreams and assets, if-this-then-that style, but I don’t think that has the form of a midlife crisis. Those are less calculated in nature and manner.
As typical, this is probably amplified by social media. Look at people's Twitter bios and look at how many describing words they use. Artist. Musician. Writer. Livestreamer. Some of these people got started when they were not even teenagers. As a result it's difficult not to feel as if you haven't found the words you'd be comfortable putting in your own bio. Why label yourself as such and such if you don't feel like you deserve it yet? (At least not to the extent that you see people's best selves being portrayed in their feeds.)
But of course, ignoring comparisons to others, if those people found themselves there at some point, there would probablybe no reason not to write those words describing themselves. I end up believing I can only "find myself there" by deliberate action, not casually following a passion until you happen to arrive where you want. Everybody says memorable accomplishments require hard work.
Here's one way to try reframing it for now: I see the point of life as maximizing happiness for myself and others. So if I'm setting rigorous expectations for myself that don't actually contribute to that purpose in any way, and in fact partly sabotage it by making me miserable, there's no logical reason to hold those expectations in the first place.
What do you or anyone else gain from "deserving" to put titles for yourself in your Twitter bio? Do those activities if they make you happy; if they don't, then don't waste energy on them. And certainly don't do them just to say that you did.
That's it.
Can confirm!
But not in the way people usually think, being younger is awesome while being 40 is not as much.
But I am completely self aware and don't think anymore that I am missing something like I did before.
It doesn't really has to do with 40 as a number, it has to do with the moment one starts accepting himself and lives life the way it was supposed to be lived.
Of course things change with age, but as someone that still is a night owl and still sleeps like a baby and can't easily wake up early in the morning, there is also the fact that you get treated like an adult with their own personality and accepted for that (or not accepted but you learned to not care that much and to move on)
Daily activities are boring compared to what I did not long ago, but they are also more fulfilling and I spend most of my time with people I've been knowing for a long time, that I trust and love and that I can count on.
So, if you ask me, middle life crisis was worse at 30 than at 40.
When I'll be 50 I'll know more, but until now everything has been better in terms of accepting those things that would depress me or make me angry 10 years ago.
As someone who is mid-50's, everything turned around at 40. Health, physique (was at the gym 4 days a week), job (quit a loathed job and found one I liked), relationship (got a well-needed divorce). I feel like I wasted my 20's being anxious and my 30's being married to someone I didn't love.
“Anderson's analysis shows that those born in 1891 could expect to inherit from their parents at the age of 37, while they still had children at home and when their oldest child was ‘at best only just entering the labour force’. By contrast, those born in 1946 could expect to wait until 56 before both parents had died, that is well after their children had left home, leaving middle-aged parents in the second half of the twentieth century vulnerable to economic constraints, particularly when they were sandwiched between caring for children and caring for elderly parents.”
Very well put. I feel most popular content about {categorized mental dynamic} has gone through a sort of natural selection of ideas, where they evolve to appear as very sound explanations to a general, population-scale public forum. But they equivalently become pointlessly broad brushes when applied to problems whose natures arise from nuanced and unique individual lives.
And just because an idea has alluring memetic “aha! that explains it!” power, it doesn’t mean it’s true, particularly regarding mental states. I do believe there will someday be a generalizable-yet-customizable framework for understanding, but at the moment, there's definitely a systemic correlation between the distribution of an idea and its vagueness (like medium articles about productivity)
So I find it’s most helpful to have an in-depth discussion with another human (familiar with the situation if possible). As a bonus, you can then incorporate knowledge from your own relationship with that person, perhaps an understanding of how they think too, and thus get a more complete picture.
After such discussions, I inevitably think, “Wow, no way that nuance could have been pinpointed in society’s general discussion of this topic.”
Some of the (IMO) most productive conversations I’ve had with friends re: our psychology and life reflections, I feel would be torn to smithereens or ridiculed by “modern” popular understandings.
"All this is denied me in this stale marriage to an elderly, sickly, complaining, nagging wife. Let's get rid of her, start life all over again with another woman."
Even if a person doesn't consciously have the thought, there is a biological drive to reproduce. Even if a person expresses the desire to be childless, that biological urge may be pushing for a younger mate who might be fertile.
That leads to the anxiety. Trying to do impressive things and to display wealth, no matter how useless, is a biological urge. It becomes time to buy the fast car or take up hang gliding. When sanity and resource limits pull back on that, the emotions don't go so well.
The most violent instance I've seen (as opposed to experienced) was within a culture that has very high respect for elders. A 20-something guy's dad beat him repeatedly with a log (3" diameter with the rough bark on doesn't really count as a stick) because the 20-something said something mean to his (the 20-something's) wife. The 20-something needed some kind of reprimand, but I wouldn't accept that kind of violence in trade for higher "respect" for elders.
There's no doubt we're in this awkward generation where our parents were probably treated with corporal punishment, but still want to inflict onto their kids this which they were exposed to as a kid despite this no longer looking good/being legal. Even the anti-child-abuse book "For Your Own Good" by Alice Miller wrote "The former practice of physically maiming, exploiting, and abusing children seems to have been gradually replaced in modern times by a form of mental cruelty that is masked by the honorific term child-rearing". Of course the book pretty clearly covers the dangers of corporal punishment or any kind of attack on a child's self-worth. The point is to push through this awkward abusive phase and bring our species out the other side more self-aware by not continuing the cycle of abuse/neglect.
Isn’t it the whole point to create a powerful memory that instills lasting fear and influences all future decisions?
Corporal punishment is lazy, short-sighted parenting that is a "chronic, developmental stressor associated with depression, aggression and addictive behaviors" [1]. Honestly, I'm shocked this is being supported on Hackernews, of all places.
Maybe you're right that Western parents are caught between an era of corporal punishment and not knowing how to parent alternatively. Does that mean reverting to violence against children? Absolutely not. Surely it means understanding how to communicate with your children better.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2896871/?_escap...
Corporal punishment of children was outlawed in the US in 1969. That is two generations ago.
Here's an fairly solid statement that should suffice:
"By 2000, research was proliferating, and the convention had been ratified by 191 of the world’s 196 countries, 11 of which had prohibited all physical punishment. Today, research showing the risks associated with physical punishment is robust, the convention has been integrated into the legal and policy frameworks of many nations, and 31 countries have enacted prohibitions against the physical punishment of children.1 These three forces — research, the convention and law reform — have altered the landscape of physical punishment.
The growing weight of evidence and the recognition of children’s rights have brought us to a historical point. Physicians familiar with the research can now confidently encourage parents to adopt constructive approaches to discipline and can comfortably use their unique influence to guide other aspects of children’s healthy development. In doing so, physicians strengthen child well-being and parent–child relationships at the population level. Here, we present an analysis of the research on physical punishment spanning the past two decades to assist physicians in this important role."
Of course, that only works with parents who don’t resort to slapping their kids’ bottoms like it’s nothing (after a while you become accustomed to it as a kid, it doesn’t scare you anymore), and also parents who genuinely love their kids and who have a close and warm relationship with said kids, that way when the kid sees that he has upset his parents he knows he did something bad even before the slap (and in that way avoiding it altogether).
Trying to only use reason with kids who are 4 or 5 years old won’t work.
It's not hard. You just talk to them. It takes a little bit of patience and self awareness. Sometimes they're still gonna fuck up. But then, so are you.
Has everyone on this thread forgotten about non-physical punishments?
These should take the form of natural and logical consequences whenever possible.
Make sure the kid understands what's expected of them, and how they failed to meet the expectations. Then, if needed, reinforce this with natural consequences (when it makes sense). Classic example is taking away possessions or privileges when they're misused.
Punishments can certainly be arbitrary or disproportionate (which tends to spark resentment - and possibly the mental baggage you mention) so it's important to do it thoughtfully. Done right, it's effective and non-traumatizing.
Btw, corporal punishment isn’t a great alternative to dissing your kids. Both are terrible and should be avoided.
Just because some people beat the shit out of kids in Asia doesn’t mean Asia got it right.