Midlife: A Philosophical Guide
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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.
It's also why I'm not inclined to agree with things like perceived inequality as being the root of all misery.
But the Old Testament only has three books of laws (Numbers and Deuteronomy, with a few in Exodus), out of 39. Genesis and Exodus give the origin story of how Israel got to be God's people. Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy give the expectations that go along with being privilege of being the people God chose to glorify his name in the earth. There are blessings for obedience, and punishments for disobedience. The rest of the Old Testament is struggling with those laws, namely that God keeps his promises when Israel obeys, but Israel has a strong pattern of disobeying, and God keeps his promises of punishments, too, ultimately kicking them out of the land he gave them. You have some wisdom literature on what a wise, godly life looks like, where is God when you're suffering. A number of the characters get pretty upset with God at points: Elijah says "I thought this amazing miracle would turn Israel back to You, but they're just trying to kill me, wtf?"; Jeremiah says "God you set me up the bomb: if I prophesy people hate me and if I don't prophesy the word burns inside of me until I do"; Job says "I was punished for being innocent, surely if I could bring my case to God he would judge me innocent". And God responds. Then there are people like David, who realize that God doesn't want the sacrifices that the law demands, God really wants a contrite heart. Likewise, Micah says God doesn't want sacrifices, he wants people to act justly.
The Old Testament clearly showed that Israel (and by extension, the rest of us) are incapable of keeping the law, which the teachers of Israel in the New Testament summarized as basically "love God, love others". The New Testament shows God fulfilling his promise from the prophets to solve the problem of people not obeying the law by changing our hearts. This he does through Jesus dying to pay for our failure to obey, and then giving us God's spirit, to change us into people who think the way he does and value the way he does. In the process, we are freed from all the rules and regulations, so Paul says that the follower of Christ is enabled by God's spirit to keep just one law, which is both simpler and harder: "love God, love others".
All that is to say, I don't think the Bible says "accept things because God said so", except arguably in 3 out of the 66 total books. American Christians (maybe others, too, don't know) say that all the time, but not the Bible.
is it really happiness if you just "tricked" yourself to it?
If you just changed your goals to something else when you realize you cannot achieve your originally planned goals, is it really "winning"?
And if you give up on your dreams, and accept your current circumstances, is that just called despair rather than acceptance?
There are always things that you can't control. It's best to adjust your worldview to accommodate that, or if the unexpected does happen, you won't adjust easily. Speaking from experience.
For myself, my first career was wrecked by new technology. Now I am 40 years old in an entry-level SWE position alongside 22 year olds working under people in their late 20s or early 30s. Not only would none of these people accept me as a source of knowledge but they can hardly bare to give me the time of day. I am very proud of my contributions to the team and I don’t hold it against them, but the makings of dignity are taken for granted far too often.
Someone dear to me could have started SWE at 38 but felt as you do and quit. More than 12 years later they would be a veteran at the job but instead today still are looking in from the outside saying 50 is too late, regretting their decision and making excuses just like they said at 38. Wrong then, wrong now.
12 years from now you will probably kick yourself for worrying about what worries you today. I am proud of you for making a change; stick with it! Few industries consider you senior after 3-5 years.
So we're effectively recreating, from scratch, much of the philosophy developed thousands of years ago. What you're describing is, in its fundamentals, identical to Stoicism. I'd highly recommend Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations." [1] It's a collection of the writings of Aurelius, a Roman Emperor who is oft regarded as one of the greatest leaders of society. Stoicism is most fundamentally about accepting the fact that there are many things one cannot change. The only thing we can change, about many things, is how we let it affect us.
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The most interesting thing about the writings is that they were never intended to be seen by anybody other than himself. So it's effectively a collection of post-it notes from a great philosopher-king to himself pondering his own existence, mortality, meaning, and inability to change things. It's also quite insightful to appreciate that perhaps the most powerful person on Earth at the time struggled with the exact same issues that affect us all.
He wanted to change society for the better, but ultimately even a man in his position was unable to move a mountain no matter how much he tried. His life was filled with external perceived successes and internal failures. He not only failed to ultimately better society, but could not even better his own son. Aurelius is regarded as one of the greatest leaders, his son Commodus - one of the worst.
When Aurelius died, he was deified and praised. After his son Commodus was assassinated at the age of 31, he (Commodus) was declared an enemy of the state, his name stricken from record, and public imagery of him destroyed.
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[1] - https://files.libertyfund.org/files/2133/Aurelius_1464_LFeBk... #That book includes two introductions which provide extensive context and other information which is quite important to understanding a fair amount of what is said. Aurelius' writings themselves begin on PDF page 59, which is page 25 in the book's ordering.
Its specifically about creating a philosophical framework for how to decide what has meaning in our lives. Its about giving people the tools to decide what should fill that gap.
Stoicism is one option, that already suggests answers to that question.
Even before this, the renaissance was a period filled with a turning away from religion and of reintegration of older classical stories and ideas. Descartes and Newton, though religious, introduced a fully mechanical model of the universe which has been growing in strength ever since.
Even in the meditations Marcus Aurelius carefully considers the idea of the universe consisting of nothing but atoms and their motions
Why do we respond to meaning? Why do we seek it out? The difficulty in the search may be part of the answer: we need mountains to climb, both outside and inside ourselves.
Meaning is oxygen, and I'll continue optimizing for it.
And these questions aren't just an abstract search for meaning. Getting back to Aurelius, he and his son were given comparable power and wealth to do with as they personally saw fit. And they chose radically different paths. The path one chooses, in most of all things, is going to be a product of your own personal ethos, which in turn is going to be a product of how you view the world.
And thinking about such things can not only provide greater contentedness, but also help direct you in unclear waters. Why do you do what you do, and is it in line with what or whom you want to be?
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.
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%20...
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/
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.
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?
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).
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.
> there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware
I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context.
> I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others
We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.
The claim I made is broad, so it's not based on one experiment, but on numerous factors that point in the same direction. We are social creatures, and feeling like we are a part of a greater whole makes people happier. In the recent book Happy Money, the authors, two Ph.D. researchers in the area, describe experiments that indicate that spending money on others promotes happiness. Of the three components of Self-Determination Theory, one is "Relatedness", feeling connected with and caring others (contributing to a bigger whole). I'm happy to share more.
For all the things I've done that normal society considers "accomplishments" (learning to play piano, winning in competitive chess and sports, etc) none, I think, have been as good (for the world and long-term me) as the direct effects of my charitable donations to cost-effective charities. I'm 36 now, so maybe I'll have a midlife crisis in the future (I'm still young); even if I didn't have those accomplishment, I don't think I'll be able to wallow in "I've not accomplished much" when I know I prevented many many people from getting malaria (and all the negatives that accompany it).
So I'm pretty sure that "mitigate" can happen, even if not "prevent". And the phrase you use "necessarily follows" might mean you're being rather stringent, but that seems to me too-high a filter to accept good advice ;)
Years of evolution have wired into our brains that we're supposed to be interacting and working with others.
In general, I think a lot of existential crises are caused by having some psychological need not met, and so making sure psychological needs are met seems like a reasonable approach for preventing/addressing them.
Another part of this claim that's not super obvious to me is how/why _helping_ people specifically is important, as opposed other ways you can have people in your life.
Received my copy in the mail yesterday :)
If you want to save or improve 10 lives, do that. It doesn't matter if there are millions of people still starving. You still made the incremental change that you wanted to
Definitely something to consider. For a long time, I justified my actions with a combination of "well, I'm doing good with the money", "if I didn't do this, someone else would so quitting doesn't accomplish anything", and "unlike a narrative protagonist, I don't have the capability to change the world".
Going out to a remote country and helping people directly yourself, while you live with them and are integrated with their lives, might give you a sense of connection and meaning[0], but EA would likely dictate that this is a pretty ineffective use of your time, since you're probably much better at things like $YOUR_CAREER than you are at directly helping people in remote countries with their problems. So you should instead do $YOUR_CAREER, make money and donate it to people who can help others more directly, with perhaps a less personal touch (more "mass distributing mosquito nets", less "helping individual families with issues").
[0]: Of course if you're completely ineffective, you might not feel good about it. But I think the level of effectiveness required to make you feel good is much, much lower than the optimal levels of effectiveness that EA is shooting for.
I'm 45. I'm at least halfway through my turn. I'm definitely feeling the mid-life blues. I wonder if I'm wasting my life slinging bits for companies that probably won't exist in 15 years. If I'm doing an acceptable job at raising my children. If I'm contributing usefully to humanity AT ALL. Pretty soon the merry-go-round is going to start spinning down for me and my utterly insignificant portion of the universal timeline is going to be over with. Christ, if that's not depressing, what is?
No, I would suggest that if one never experiences the mid-life crisis then they aren't performing their philosophical due diligence. The trick is to not let it consume you and end up fucking up everything good in your life.
Get depressed, re-evaluate your life, make some positive changes, stop obsessing with accumulating gewgaws, and start helping people - that's the good shit.
What you don't want to do is quit your job, abandon your wife and kids, and run off to a polyamorous colony in Thailand. Otherwise, it may turn out that your purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others...
'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'.
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.
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.
More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.
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.
It's crazy how much this can vary. I'm 34, but I'm female and from a family where multiple people have lived to be over 110. I've always estimated my 'mid life'/halfway mark to be about 45.
You are. Most people don't realize that until they're in their 40s.
It won't feel that way though, I understand.
My measurable physical stats are much better than they were at 26. Yes I notice junk food a little sooner and can't handle as much alcohol. But I can run a marathon faster, do better in the boxing ring, and can lift more weight with higher volume.
The main physical drawback that I can see are slower reflexes. That comes out in the boxing ring when going against people 10+ years younger.
> intellectual peak early to mid 20s.
Depends what kind of intellectual peak you measure. My focus is better and more intense. My ability to learn new stuff has greatly increased because I have a bigger vaster framework to hang new knowledge onto.
And I am infinitely better at solving difficult problems in a dumb easy way because I no longer care about showing off how smart I am. This not only makes my solutions easier to build, they're also easier to maintain so future me will have less work to do.
What I'm probably less good at these days is waxing poetically about the sort of very deep thoughts that feel deep to a 25 year old. And pointless brain twisty puzzles that I was never good at anyway.
I'd say these days, intellectually speaking, I'm more of a reliable orc that plows through problems with brute force, than an elf fleeting about using dexterity.
Coincidentally, I read an article in the Economist about male fertility that said 35 is when a man's sperm starts to become less effective. So, slightly less than full of life, I would say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love that you started therapy. Feel free to reach out to me (email in bio) if you want to chat about this in general.
Of course most people go through it the hard way (firing, divorce, etc...) But I don't suggest you do it now, but if you are not saving any significant money from your current job you might as well just leave.
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.
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.
The state-run, compulsory alternatives seem a poor substitute, and I'm not sure we're socio-biologically equipped to make the transition. The only way forward seems to be to identify the cause(s) for the dissolution of family and community as reliable networks and revert/fix them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-7432...
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.
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)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
Part of the journey is finding the path. Have fun :)
very debatable :)
I would suggest that meaning can be found, even if you are unable to transcend our human limitations in this insanely large universe. But I can tell that you are on a path of reflection of what a meaningful human life means for you, and that's exciting! I wish you the best!
(Don't read this as if I have it all figured out, because I most certainly do not)
"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Blaise Pascal
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
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.
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.
The amount of comments I receive about midlife crisis is ridiculously high.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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:)
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."
I've always been baffled by CS Lewis. Quite a mix of insight and rational incoherence.
To summarise alternatively, if you can’t get it in this life, don’t pretend you can, and instead find hope in the next. Given how little we know about consciousness and what happens to it, it’s not technically incoherent. Possibly not provable but not incoherent either.
I think my personal answer to (3) is slightly different but to each their own!
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.
Napoleon Hill
Yes and sleeping on a rock is better than sleeping on a pile of dung.
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.
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.
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.
To disagree with my comment, you'd have to argue that there is no alternative to getting hit with a big pile of money in order to deal with the problem of a bad job. Without even giving it much thought, I can list a few: change careers; get a better job; marry someone with a decent job, which will expand your employment options; start your own company; live a more frugal life and work fewer hours.
The important thing to take away from the advice is that everything I've listed is a realistic solution but getting the big pile of money isn't.
The problem is having to have a job at all.
You were so close.
Marry rich is the answer.
On the other hand if you find her/him, then you know they weren't after the money.
Of course, that's all predicated on a stable civilizational standard which is not at all guaranteed these days, due to issues like climatic instability, social strife, etc.
(I played with Schwab's annuity estimator and it basically refused to give me an estimate)
It suggests that for an annuity with a 2% annual growth (which at least maybe approximates "flat real rate of return,") for 30 years, it'll give you about 3.7%, not 5%.
And given it's mid life, well sadly it's only got to last me for 40 years, optimistically.
What are some of the investments that can give me this rate of return. Also, the principle needs to keep growing to account for inflation too yea?
Retiring at 35 you should be able to get away with a 3.25% SWR [0], which'd give $65k/yr from $2M. But a) that'd be mostly long-term capital gains, which have lower taxes than regular income and b) you wouldn't have to save for retirement. So you'd probably end up with the spending power of someone making ~$80k salary
[0] https://earlyretirementnow.com/2016/12/14/the-ultimate-guide...
> "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.
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.