How to Have a Midlife Crisis: Kieran Setiya, Updike and Faith No More
In the 1982 board game Mid-Life Crisis, players navigate a labyrinthian board and draw “zap” and “crisis” cards, inflicting difficult experiences on themselves in the areas of “money,” “stress,” or “divorce.” The game is a bleak satire of yuppie self-regard and a lot of the humor doesn’t translate out of context. Anyway, there are two distinct strategies that players can use to win. One is to minimize the impact of the zaps and crises and avoid taking on psychological stress, financial expenses, or martial rifts they can’t sustain, emerging from the game with the least damage. The other is to shoot the moon and rack up so much stress that they self-immolate, having such spectacular midlife crises that they suck up all the attention in the room.
Life is, of course, messier. When we hit the existential friction that comes around the 40-year mark, we may choose one of these plans, or try to split the difference, for unconscious psychological reasons, without really understanding what we’re doing or why. One purpose of philosophical inquiry is to help us break our patterns and revise our life scripts so that, if we’re going down in flames, we can at least do it on purpose.
In his densely packed and thoroughly entertaining book Midlife, MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya drives at the timeless essence of the modern midlife crisis, sharing playful thought experiments and philosophical frameworks for making sense of the regrets, FOMO, and existential angst associated with the years between about 35 and 50.
Near the front, Setiya deconstructs the concept of the “midlife crisis.” The name originated in a 1965 essay by the psychologist Elliot Jacques. Most of Jacques’s examples were taken from the arts: Rossini, Goethe, Michelangelo, and others whose careers transformed, for better or worse, near the middles of their lives. The journalist Gail Sheedy later popularized the idea in her mega-bestselling book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Like many well-publicized notions with roots in the ‘60s, the stereotypical tale of a midlife crisis – a wealthy, successful man upends a stable but somehow unsatisfying life in a last-ditch attempt to cling to his youth – is most readily associated with the baby boomers, who reached middle age in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The components of the midlife crisis are certainly interesting to me, and not just because I’m right on schedule for one. For his own scorched-earth midlife crisis in the early ‘90s, my father threw his family into chaos and warped my emotional development in ways I haven’t fully processed. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of resources for making sense of it, unless you count Joseph Heller’s grim Something Happened, Updike’s Rabbit books, weepy Hollywood dreck such as City Slickers and Grand Canyon, and the lead single from the best Faith No More album (great song, not a big help).
Now that I’m into my 40s, it’s a different world. The old-fashioned midlife crisis isn’t financially feasible for most of us – it’s hard to buy speedboats and coke when you’re overspending on rent and groceries. The material and reputational stakes of regressing to adolescence are much higher, at least for narcissistic white guys. (Think you could stomach watching American Beauty now?)
Much of the underlying existential friction of middle age, however, remains the same, and that’s what Setiya focuses on.
Using the example of philosopher John Stuart Mill, a young overachiever who crashed early and got some of his best work out of it, he divines two rules for avoiding the worst sort of a midlife crisis: a) care about something outside of yourself, and b) pursue activities that are rewarding in themselves, not just for their anticipated results.
With that out of the way, further chapters suggest ways of rethinking some common gripes that bedevil the middle-aged, including regret over things one did or didn’t do, grief over unfulfilled potential, the inevitability of death, and the challenge of living squarely in the present moment. (This one, right now, which you just missed.)
Setiya connects dots among dazzling constellations of ideas. He invokes Plato’s mollusk, dissects a cryptic passage from Simone de Bouvier, compares Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with the adventurous British sitcom hero Reggie Perrin, makes fun of Epicurus, and draws parallels between the messages of Schopenhauer and the Buddha. For those of us prone to depression or anxiety when taking stocking of our lives and facing the end, he offers a range of new ways to think about such things. This is not nothing – indeed, I credit my ability to “zoom out” and “go meta” as a major component of my survival – but it’s not always enough.
In instances of debilitating, hardcore regret, Seityan concedes that philosophy may not be much help, and instead offers his sympathy. The book is full of self-deprecation, snarky asides, and second-guessing, which makes it rough around the edges in a way that’s charming enough to be worth the occasional frustration. Compared to a slick, TED-talking philosophical popularizer such as Alain du Botton, reading Setiya feels like hanging out with a cranky but deeply kind dad as he tinkers with thought experiments in his garage.
Reading Setiya feels like hanging out with a cranky but deeply kind dad as he tinkers with thought experiments in his garage
Life is not a game we can win. We all die in the end. Recognizing this is bound to bring us grief, so it’s best to mourn in advance, observe and reconfigure the way we talk to ourselves about it, and do our best to get a life.
Oh, since you ask, I’m no longer drinking myself to death, I’m near the end of an unpleasant divorce, I don’t plan to inflict myself on anyone as a parent, and I’m doing fine financially – mixed bag, could be worse.
Feature image from Faith No More’s Angel Dust which features the song “Midlife Crisis”
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