Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

by Kieran Setiya

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am for myself only, what am I? And if not now, when? RABBI HILLEL

“That which is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary.

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

On this new interpretation, the midlife crisis is a predictable dip in life-satisfaction as one reaches middle age, not the tumultuous angst of the original myth. This is how we will picture the midlife crisis in the chapters to come. It is a phase of relative unhappiness that correlates with middle age. At the same time, the U-curve is not irrelevant to more extreme conditions. If average life-satisfaction is lowest at forty-six and there is a variation around the norm—a certain proportion of people being above average, a certain proportion below—we would expect emotional trauma to peak at roughly that age. That is what Blanchflower and Oswald saw. Looking at the incidence of depression and anxiety in a U.K. Labor Force Survey, they found that the likelihood topped out around forty-five, with a rate roughly four times that of teenagers and three times that of older adults. The chances of falling apart are significantly higher in midlife, even if the majority get by.

People were asked about their current level of overall life-satisfaction and about the level they expected to enjoy in five years’ time. Schwandt learned that younger people tend to over-estimate how satisfied they will be, while mid-lifers underestimate old age.

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, insists that the “whole interest of . . . reason, whether speculative or practical,” is encapsulated in three questions: “What can I know?”, “What should I do?”, and “What may I hope?”34 Here the universality of the questions comes out, paradoxically, in their first-person character, as questions for anyone.

philosophy has authority, it is the authority of honest persuasion. As in psychotherapy, you should accept only what you can confirm yourself. The difference is that the therapist is a philosopher and the patient is a hypothetical victim of midlife.

“it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”1 Forget the past, ignore tradition: the institutions of society must answer to the interests of everyone they affect. What does not make us happier must change.

The mystery is why. Why should the achievement of one’s deepest desires, one’s most profound ambitions, be a matter of indifference? What has gone wrong?

Mill reports two marked reversals in his thinking as his sentiments revived. The first is this: I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.8

Mill’s insight in this passage has a name: the paradox of egoism.

Butler held that a crucial condition of happiness is caring about things other than oneself. This doesn’t mean you have to be altruistic. What you care about might be baseball, or philosophy, or particular people, your friends and family, not humanity at large. When you care about something in this way, it is not just a means that you exploit for your own sake. Its flourishing makes you happy. And so the sources of happiness, though also of vulnerability, grow. That is Mill’s idea. I think it is a pretty good one. Call it the first rule for preventing a midlife crisis: you have to care about something other than yourself. If nothing matters to you but your own well-being, if you are utterly self-obsessed, not much will make you happy. In the basement of the U-curve, where satisfaction is hard to get, this fact is worth pondering. It is natural to respond by craving happiness more profoundly, setting it as your goal. The irony is that you need to do the opposite: you need to care about other things. This is not advice you can follow directly, since you cannot choose to love what leaves you cold. But it is not useless. You can choose to immerse yourself in things you might come to care about and so begin to change your life. Who knows, maybe reading about philosophy at midlife will inspire a new and abiding passion? I recommend it—though you may find other interests, too.

It is only if human life matters in itself, apart from its effects, that there is any point in altruism. There is value in acting on behalf of others only if there is value in other activities, too. Hence the paradox: if altruism is the only thing that matters, nothing matters. Life is not worth living.

What Mill calls the “other important change” in his opinions was that “for the first time, [he] gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual.”17 By this he meant the expression and refinement of human feelings in the appreciation of art.

Yet if you lose touch with existential value, if you find no place in your life for the activities of the gods—ones that make life worth living to begin with—you risk a midlife crisis not unlike John Stuart Mill’s. If you have the opportunity, you should make yourself immortal, some of the time.

So tell yourself this: although I may regret regret, desire that no desire go unfulfilled, I cannot in the end prefer to have desires that could be fully met. The sense of loss is real; but it is something to concede, not wish away. Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive.

Imagine there are three outcomes, A, B, and C, that you rank in that order. If you were to be assigned an outcome, you would prefer A to B and B to C. Now suppose that having options is important, as Paul believes: the existence of alternatives has final value, in addition to the value of the alternatives themselves. It follows that having B and C as options is better than just getting B, with no alternative. That sounds fine. What is odd is that, if A is only slightly better than B, and there is value in having options, it could make sense to prefer a choice between B and C to just getting A, even though you prefer A to either B or C, considered alone. The value of the choice is the value of B, which you will choose, plus the value of having options; if this value is greater than the difference between A and B, considered alone, having the choice of B and C is better than just getting A. But that is absurd! Who would prefer a choice between alternatives each of which is worse than A to getting A itself?

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.”

Part of what is awful about Sophie’s dilemma is that, whichever child she picks, she could have saved, even though one of them was bound to die. In this case, it is worse to be made to choose than to have no alternative.

It does makes sense to wish for options, to resent the confinement of one’s position, even when things go well. There is no way now to be a poet or a doctor of the sort I once conceived. If I choose to go on with philosophy, it is not with those alternatives but with others more constrained. In that respect, the meaning of my choice is different from the meaning of my choice at seventeen. Something has been lost. Midlife is missing out not just on other lives but on the meaning for one’s present life of having them as options. Like the colleague quoted at the start, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills.

At the same time, there is a risk of being fooled, of mistaking a deficit that turns on the loss of possibilities for a defect in the outcome one is living. It is not wrong to lament the limitations of midlife, but it is a confusion to think that they justify radical change, trading in A for a choice between B and C, which makes things worse. The fact is that, absent the ingenuity of Reggie Perrin, your decisions in middle age cannot mean what they did twenty years ago; and even Reggie can’t reverse the passage of time. So, more advice from philosophy, if not another rule. Tell yourself this: while there are reasons to change one’s life—frustrating jobs, failed marriages, poor health—the appeal of change itself can be deceptive. Because there is value in having options, you will miss having them: an argument for nostalgia. But the value is easy to overrate. It is silly to think that having options could make up for reaching outcomes you would not prefer, considered alone. Think twice before you wreck your home. Is it the space inside you hate, or the fact that it has walls?

CONSOL...

We have one last thread to unravel, which brings together past and present, nostalgic yearning and frustrated wish. Our story began with the inevitable fact of missing out, by middle age, on meaningful desires. “You can’t have everything,” quips stand-up Steven Wright, “Where would you put it?”21 Nor is the fact of missing out news. It was true of me at seventeen that I would have to decide which to pursue—poetry, medicine, or philosophy—and I knew it. Despite my dad’s insistence, I would not be happy to read philosophy, or write poems, on the side. But though I was aware that something had to give, I did not feel the loss as I do now. A further cause for envy: my younger self was sheltered, somehow, from the ache of unsatisfied desire. At midlife, we are exposed. What explains this shift in perspective? Why does the affective cost of missing out increase, when it was fated from the start? An obvious change is that my losses were once future; now they are present or past. What were then lives I would not live are ones I am not living and never did. But while time’s arrow has its part to play in the midlife crisis, as we will see in chapter 5, the nostalgia of missing out is not,...

Writer Meghan Daum evokes this ambivalence in a recent essay: Now that I am almost never the youngest person in any room I realize that what I miss most about those times is the very thing that drove me so mad back when I was living in them. What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is ...

Afflicted with nostalgia, even as things go well, it is wise to recall the desolation of the playground: the uncertainty, confusion, hope, and fear. I submit that nostalgia for lost alternatives is distorted by hindsight. Looking back from a place of relative stability, I project into my youth a degree of assurance that comes from having a more or less secure identity. At the same time, I assume an open future, an ignorance of what is to come that shields me from unsatisfied desire. But the prospect is an illusion. You can’t have it both ways, knowing who you are but not who you are not. The upshot is a final bit of cognitive therapy. If, like me and Wordsworth, you are nostalgic for the indeterminacy of childhood, when almost anything was possible, tell yourself that what you long for is akin to retrograde amnesia. It would require a similar dissolution of the structure that gives meaning to your life. Its appeal is delusory. B...

If part of what protects you from regret, or mutes its force, is an asymmetry of knowledge—your comparative ignorance of the lives you could have lived—your tranquility depends on its persistence. In order to avoid regret, you must preserve a measure of oblivion. There is a corresponding threat. The more you know what you are missing, the more you learn what the alternatives would have been and what they would involve, the harder it becomes to let them go. Hence a parting word to the retrospective: be careful what you study, where you choose to train your eye. A little knowledge is harmless; too much can tax your peace of mind. Do not obsess about the might-have-beens: “where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise.”25

It is fair to say, I think, that the rationality of future bias is an unsolved problem in philosophy. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that the common response to My Past or Future Operations is irrational. On the other hand, it leads fairly rapidly to peculiar results. Imagine being asked, a week before the operation is scheduled, whether you prefer to have four hours of painful surgery on Monday morning or one hour on Tuesday afternoon. It’s up to you. Unless you are quite unusual, you will opt for Tuesday. If you are future-biased, however, we can predict with confidence that, as you wake on Tuesday morning, you will regret your choice. At that point, you are in Parfit’s scenario, wishing for the four-hour procedure on Monday over one hour later today. If future bias is rational, it is rational to make decisions you know for sure you are going to regret. Can that possibly be right?

If we could persuade ourselves that immortality is undesirable, we might be reconciled to death.

There is a crack of light between two darknesses: avoidance of love and inescapable woe. That is where we should steer our ship.

You are not what you plan to get done. And the activities you love need not be projects. Atelic activities, ones that do not aim at terminal states, have value, too. There is pleasure in going for a walk, just wandering or hiking, not to get anywhere, but for the sake of walking itself. Walking is atelic: unlike walking home, it does not aim at its own completion, a point at which there is no more to do.

At the same time, when I try to wrap my mind around the no-self view, I can see why Buddhists believe that it is life-transforming. If I do not exist in anything like the way that I supposed, the meaning of death is utterly changed. I will not cease to exist, after all. Instead, I have to face the fact that I was never there. To accept that fact is to let go of myself, to grieve in advance, relinquishing attachment. A similar change might undermine self-obsession—how can it survive the absence of a self?—and thus transform the character of desire.

At the risk of embarrassment, let me admit how close we are coming to the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle, Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual guru, in his 1997 blockbuster, The Power of Now: If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what.” See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it. Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.32 Yes to the “how”: to the value of doing, not just what you aim to get done. Yes to the practice of attending to the atelic, to the process of engagement as such. But no to the overreach implicit in that final sentence. Tolle treats living in the present as a panacea, a cure for every ill: “In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. . . . You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now.”33 If only it were true—if it did not matter what the present holds, only that you be open to it. But that is wishful thinking. Here is Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a stone to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down to the bottom, again and again and again for all eternity. Albert Camus wrote, in The Myth of Sisyphus, “[one] must imagine Sisyphus ha...

In the hollow of the U-curve, life can seem oppressive, arduous, bleak. Chapter 2 proposed two rules of midlife crisis prevention. First, as we learned from the paradox of egoism: you mustn’t be too self-involved. The obsessive pursuit of happiness interferes with its own achievement: “Those only are happy,” Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”1 Second, you should make room in your life for existential as well as ameliorative value, for activities that do not answer needs we would be better off without, but make life positively good. These range from the trivial—playing games with friends—to the profundities of art and science. Even if things go well, midlife is missing out. You recognize the paths you will never walk, the lives you will never lead, and look back with nostalgia at the liberty of youth.

Some words of advice, set out in chapter 3. First, while the feeling of loss around midlife is real, ask yourself what the alternative would be. Missing out is a consequence of the plurality of values: only a drastic impoverishment in the world, or your response to it, could shield you from dismay. Second, do not over-estimate the value of having options. Options matter, but not enough to compensate for outcomes you would not prefer, considered alone. Don’t be fooled by the allure of choice, like Paul O’Rourke and the Underground Man. Third, while it makes sense to envy your younger self, free from the pain of missing out, do not forget the cost. Not knowing what you will not do entails not knowing what you will, a vertiginous loss of identity.

This advice falls flat when you regret what you have done or what has happened to you, when you wish you had a second chance. But as we learned in chapter 4, there are ways to reconcile yourself, without illusion, to the failings of the past. First, there is new life. Where those you love would not exist except for your mistakes, you have reason to be glad that those mistakes were made. Second, there is risk aversion. When you imagine starting over, keep in mind the many ways things could have gone, the vast uncertainty, weighed against the history you know. Is it worth the counterfactual risk? Third, there is attachment to particulars: the intricate fabric of what matters in your life. It is this plenitude you should place beside the abstract verdict that things could have gone better. If midlife is ...

Chapter 5 took on the finitude of human life with philosophical tools. First, there is the attitude of temporal neutrality: giving equal weight to past and future gains. If you adopt this view, the deprivations of being dead are no worse than those of being as yet unconceived. Second, to want the benefits of immortality is to want what lies beyond the human condition. It is like wanting the ability to fly: a power it makes sense to envy but whose absence you should not mourn. What is left is attachment to yourself: a recognition of worth and the wish that it be preserved. Thus, half a notion for approaching middle age. Can you separate attachment from concern, grieving your own mortality in advance, giving up the need to persist forever, while saving the desire for a better life? The most elusive challenge of midlife is not to cope with the past or the future, but with the emptiness of the present, the sense that satisfaction is deferred or left behind, that one’s relentless striving is self-destructive. Our final chapter traced this malady to a structural flaw in the pursuit of projects. Projects are telic: they aim at terminal states. To engage with them successfully is to com...

I am still working on my midlife crisis, though I think I see the way through. I need to escape the telic mindset, to cultivate a more atelic orientation. I need to learn how to be in the moment. It’s an outlook you can put to selfish use. But as it fills the emptiness of everyday life, it refuses, too, the anxiety of inconsequence in utopian schemes. It is a source of energy, focus, fullness, striving for whatever is worth striving for, to know and prize the fact that you are striving for it now.