Midlife

A Philosophical Guide

Kieran Setiya

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888474
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of adulthood and middle age, showing how philosophy can help you thrive.You will learn why missing out might be a good thing, how options are overrated, and when you should be glad you made a mistake. You will be introduced to philosophical consolations for mortality. And you will learn what it would mean to live in the present, how it could solve your midlife crisis, and why meditation helps.Ranging from Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill to Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as drawing on Setiya's own experience, Midlife combines imaginative ideas, surprising insights, and practical advice. Writing with wisdom and wit, Setiya makes a wry but passionate case for philosophy as a guide to life.

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIDLIFE CRISIS

According to poet and librarian Philip Larkin, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me).”¹ We can date the origin of the midlife crisis with the same precision. In 1965, psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques published the essay that coined the phrase: “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis.”² In dissecting the crisis, Jaques quotes a patient in his mid-thirties:

“Up till now,” he said, “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—far enough away it’s true—but there is death observably present at the end.”³

If you are reading this book, the odds are good that you relate to this moment. You know how you are supposed to feel, whether you feel that way or not. You have lived long enough to ask “Is that all there is?” Enough to have made some serious mistakes, to look back on triumphs and failures with pride and regret, to look sideways at lost alternatives, lives you did not choose and cannot live, and to look ahead to the end of life, not imminent but not so far off, its distance measured in units you now comprehend: another forty years, with luck.

You are not the first. We have contemporary models, like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who quits his job, buys a fast car, and lusts after his teenage daughter’s seductive friend.⁴ But there are much earlier ones. A partial history would cite the protagonist of John Williams’s luminous 1965 novel, Stoner, who at forty-two years old, with a failed marriage and stalled career, “could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”⁵ No wonder he embarks on the prescribed affair. It would cite the absurd man of Albert Camus’s 1942 Myth of Sisyphus, whose existential crisis is not timeless but comes “when a man notices or says that he is thirty.”

He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.⁶

And it would cite The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells, the darkly comic story of a bored shopkeeper whose abortive attempt at suicide makes him a local hero—he is credited with putting out the fire he started—and spurs him to begin life anew.⁷ The book was published in 1910.

If representations of the midlife crisis precede its naming in 1965, how far can we trace the thing itself? It comes as a surprise to learn that Jaques’s examples are largely drawn not from his clinical practice but from the lives of creative artists. He was struck by the frequency with which the age of thirty-seven, or thereabouts, brings either creative silence or transformation. By thirty-seven, Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) had written his most successful operas, from The Barber of Seville to William Tell; though he lived another forty years, he barely composed again. At the same age, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) set off on a two-year journey through Italy. His greatest works were written afterwards, infused by the classics, as in the tragedy, Faust. Even Michelangelo (1475–1564) took a breather in midlife, painting virtually nothing from age forty to fifty-five, then the Medici monument and The Last Judgment.

It may strike you as reckless to speculate about the mental history of artists who died several centuries ago. We are not done yet. No stranger to reckless speculation, Philippe Ariès, the historian who posited the modern invention of childhood, traced the feeling of personal failure at midlife to the experience of “the rich, powerful, or learned man of the late Middle Ages” who had luxuries of aspiration denied to the inhabitants of traditional societies.⁸ Think of Dante at thirty-five: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”⁹

Medievalist Mary Dove paints a very different picture in The Perfect Age of Man’s Life, citing the Middle English narratives Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which draw on Aristotle’s theory of middle age as the prime of life, the body being most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five, the mind at forty-nine.¹⁰ Others doubt that Ariès went far enough. In her 2002 book about the midlife crisis, Regeneration, psychotherapist Jane Polden takes as her paradigm the story of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.¹¹ Talk about a midlife crisis! Infidelity, drinking, the death of a beloved parent, and the need for some serious family counseling at the end. To be fair to Polden, she means it as a metaphor. The earliest text I have found cited as a genuine precedent for the midlife crisis is from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, around 2000 BCE: a dialogue between a world-weary man and his soul—though as far as I can tell what he is weary of is the injustice that surrounds him, not the inadequacies of his own life.¹²

The moral of this prehistory is less the timelessness of the midlife crisis than the strength of its grip on our imaginations. It is all too easy to project our image of the crisis back into lives that are radically different from our own. The history I will tell in this chapter is not the imponderable history of midlife crises since the dawn of humankind, but the much more tractable history of the idea, from its inception in 1965 up to the present day. Even as its popularity soars, the midlife crisis has been haunted by the charge that it is a mere projection, that there is really no such thing.

RISE AND FALL

Despite some notable precedents—including psycho-analyst Edmund Bergler’s 1954 study of extramarital affairs, The Revolt of the Middle-Aged Man¹³—the midlife crisis was born in 1965. Its childhood was one of extra-ordinary promise and prodigious growth.

In 1966, Daniel Levinson, a psychology professor at Yale, embarked on a series of interviews with forty men aged from thirty-five to forty-five. He wanted to know if they shared his own midlife malaise. The result was a map of conjectured stages in adult male development, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, published in 1978.¹⁴ In the same year, UCLA psychiatrist Roger Gould published Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life.¹⁵ He, too, was inspired by his own experience, a depression unexpectedly caused by the realization of a long-held dream: Gould and his wife had bought their own house in Los Angeles. Why was it making them so unhappy? Faced with personal trauma, Gould had the social scientist’s response: he conducted a study, a self-assessment survey given to 524 people, male and female, aged sixteen to fifty. Like Levinson, Gould aimed to identify universal stages of development and growth, one of them the characteristic turmoil of midlife.

But it was 1976 that marked the coming of age of the midlife crisis, its cultural bar mitzvah. Two years earlier, journalist Gail Sheehy had talked to both Levinson and Gould for an article in New York magazine. She did not waste time. While they were pondering data, she wrote Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, based in part on her own interviews with adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties.¹⁶ The book was a huge hit. Since its publication, it has sold more than five million copies in twenty-eight languages, and in a survey of readers conducted by the Library of Congress in 1991, it was named one of the ten most influential books of the time.

Sheehy cited as her primary influence German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, whose 1950 Childhood and Society was one of the first attempts to analyze human life, from birth to old age, as a series of distinct and consecutive stages.¹⁷ Erikson had eight, each defined by its own conundrum: trust or mistrust during infancy, intimacy or isolation in early adult life, and in the second stage of adulthood, from thirty-five to sixty-four, generativity or stagnation. (“Generativity” was Erikson’s term for emotional investment in future generations.) The influence of Levinson and Gould was more contested. Gould sued Sheehy in 1975, hoping to stop the publication of her book. He felt she had stolen his ideas, and eventually settled for $10,000 and 10 percent of royalties. Not a bad deal, in light of future sales. But the impact of Sheehy’s book is not due simply to the fact that it came first. Sheehy had a knack for the memorable phrase—“the trying twenties,” “Catch-30,” “the Deadline Decade”—and a willingness to generalize that makes Passages read like a snapshot of American self-perception.

The snapshot is one in which the midlife crisis looms large. As we reach middle age, Sheehy argues, we have a sense of time running out. For women, the thirties and forties are a crossroads. Most had no college degree in 1974; their children were growing up and leaving home. They needed to imagine and begin a second life. For men, turning forty meant saying goodbye to impossible dreams, taming and rechanneling the ambition of youth. Whatever its fidelity, this narrative caught on. To the extent that things have changed, with greater equality in education, work, and family, the effect has not been to dislodge the stereotypes discovered or invented by Sheehy in 1976, but to make space for women to inhabit a stereotype once reserved for men: stalled career, fading youth, and listless marriage.

As to the prevalence of the crisis, Sheehy is non-committal, though she writes in general terms and clearly expects her readers to identify with her interview subjects. Others have been less reserved. In the preface to a neglected classic of midlife mythology, Barbara Fried’s The Middle-Age Crisis, published in 1967, psychology professor Morris Stein wrote that the “crisis is ubiquitous”:

Each of us goes through it in his own way, experiences it with greater or lesser intensity, and emerges from it more or less reconciled to the years ahead. It is a “natural” developmental crisis, and it is unavoidable.¹⁸

Scare quotes apart, the picture is one of social or biological fate. We are programmed for the midlife crisis, men and women alike, and the question is not whether but when. We had better be prepared.

By 1980, the idea of the midlife crisis was thriving, with a secure and prominent place in popular culture. It had become an idea that needs no explanation, the object of wry humor and knowing remarks. If you weren’t having one yourself, you could read about the midlife crisis in countless novels, from Something Happened by Joseph Heller to Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark.¹⁹ You could even play the board game. In Mid-Life Crisis, released in 1982, players choose whether to aim for stability, accumulate wealth, and manage stress, or declare a midlife crisis, racing headlong into bankruptcy, divorce, and nervous breakdown.

So much for perception. What about reality? The truth is, it was hard to know. We had the studies by Levinson, Gould, and Sheehy, but little systematic data. Easy to find anecdotal evidence of the midlife crisis if you ask around, but hardly scientific, and doubtless distorted, now, by the understandable tendency for people to explain themselves in socially salient terms. The idea of the midlife crisis is ready to hand, a tool for understanding and describing oneself to others, a tool especially attractive for its power to excuse what would otherwise be outrageous behavior. What do you expect? I’m having a midlife crisis!

The most significant challenge to the status quo began in 1989, with the establishment of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, directed by social psychologist Orville Gilbert Brim. The network brought together a team of thirteen researchers from a range of disciplines: psychology, sociology, anthropology, and medicine. Its major work: a vast study called “MIDUS”—Midlife in the United States—conducted primarily in 1995. MIDUS involved a survey administered to over 7,000 people aged twenty-five to seventy-four, with a forty-five-minute phone interview and a two-hour questionnaire. The survey instrument employed to analyze the data had over 1,100 items. This was big. And despite some predictable banality—according to one revelation, “physical health ratings become more negative over the midlife period”; who knew?—the MIDUS survey radically changed the social scientific orthodoxy. The result was that, around 2000, at the apt age of thirty-five, the idea of the midlife crisis was having a midlife crisis.

What did MIDUS say? In a 2004 collection, How Healthy Are We?, which Brim edited with two colleagues, psychology professor Carol Ryff and Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, the results were carefully summarized, and the outlook is bright. “For the most part,” we are told, “findings revealed a positive portrayal of aging: older adults reported higher levels of positive affect, combined with lower levels of negative affect relative to young and midlife adults.”²⁰ It gets better: “age was negatively linked with major depression, with older adults showing less likelihood of this disorder.”²¹ The story is one of stability or improvement from youth to middle age and beyond. When the results were first made public, in 1999, the Washington Post ran a special section titled “Midlife without the Crisis.” In the New York Times headline, “New Study Finds Middle Age Is the Prime of Life.”

A follow-up study, led by Cornell sociologist Elaine Wethington and administered to 724 of the original participants, looked specifically at psychological turning points. Just 26 percent of those over forty reported having had a midlife crisis, with roughly equal proportions of women and men.²² Hardly prevalent or pervasive. And even the figure of 26 percent was found misleading. Subsequent analysis revealed that those answering the survey used a highly elastic definition of the midlife crisis, applying the term to any period of difficulty in the relevant years. In other words, shit happens in midlife, with kids and parents, work and health. If you call it a midlife crisis, just because you can, then the midlife crisis afflicts about a quarter of all Americans. But it may have nothing to do with awareness of mortality, the finitude of life, regret about the past, lost opportunities, or failed ambitions—let alone with chronological age.

Other studies appeared to confirm the MIDUS verdict. In 2001, Margie Lachman, professor of psychology at Brandeis University, edited...