The Two Choices That Keep a Midlife Crisis at Bay

I hate that we’ve built an internet nobody wants. I’m tempted to give up on tech and go become a potter.

One thing that’s interesting is the author talks about midlife crises at 58. That’s not midlife, midlife is something like 35-40. I started joking about midlife crises at this age at work and people get very uncomfortable and weird about it. I suppose I brought into focus the fact that we’re not as young and permanent as we might think, despite at 58 deluding ourselves into thinking that’s “midlife”. My uncle has terminal cancer and he’s 65.

It's fair to say my friends and family would probably say I've been in the midst of a midlife crisis. I'm not sure I'd characterize it that way but I also think it's a fair way to do so.

This provided a nice little tidbit of advice but in general it seems a bit off, at least in my case.

I think what's caused the "crisis" isn't so much some fear of losing youth -- I feel fine, and don't see any decline for a bit of time yet. I'm probably more physically fit than I've ever been. Sure, my probability of death goes up year by year but it always has, and there were downsides to my youth as well, as the article is pointing at.

The problem as I've encountered it is more in struggling societal structures around change. If you get to a certain stage in life, and decide something is really not working for whatever reason, it's hard to turn course. Even if you want to, there seem to be a lot of prejudices about it, and when there's not, there's a lot of "rails" that make lots of assumptions about where you're headed and where you should be. That is, people go to college at a certain age, obtain a job of a certain type at a certain age, and move up the ladder in predictable ways, and so forth and so on. If you go off that path for whatever reason, it seems difficult to "get back on the rails" because society just isn't structured around those things. If it's not prejudices related to age or stage, it's just implicit assumptions that are made about age or background, or assumptions people have about what happened and so forth and so on. No one likes to deal with things that are "different".

There's exceptions to this -- I know of people who have made significant fulfilling life changes later in life in part because of great programs for this kind of thing -- but they're rare and limited geographically.

Articles like this I guess seem to miss the boat, because for at least some of us it's not so much about how we perceive ourselves as much as it is feeling typecast by society, or dealing with all the obstacles that get thrown up, even if unintended, by age- and career-related assumptions that are everywhere.

I'd say it's agism but that's only part of it: it's broader and about personal change in general, or about why people leave something in search of something else. It's like agism, survivorship bias, fundamental attribution biases, and institutional blindnesses all wrapped up in one.

I think Marx got it right: You’re only as old as the girl you feel.

I'm paywalled, and too lazy to bypass.

Is it basically health and ability to be active? Exercise and healthy living pays its dividends with heavy compounding interest every year after 35.