Crises of this kind come by degree; they rise and fall. Your life may be more or less consumed by amelioration, more or less awash with needs. There may be pockets of leisure in which to breathe. Or the crisis may emerge as demands on your time recede—perhaps the kids are growing up—and you realize the void, your days no longer filled by what must be done, though there is not much else to do. This is one version of the midlife crisis. Like Mill’s nervous breakdown, it is not nihilistic. It turns on the grinding necessity of work, not the absence of value from the world.
