The Midlife Crisis

Or merely another liminal life period

We all grow older, and part of that is encountering transitional periods, like going from being a child to an adult, but our Baby-Boomer-dominated culture of the last five decades has been more occupied with the mid-life transition. For the boomer generation, arriving at “midlife” was a kind of crisis, a point where one realizes that youth has slipped away. The reaction is to attempt to hold on to, or attempt to recapture, some of that carefree vitality that defined the earlier transition from teenager to adult.

This crisis was a common subject in 90s media, which was filled with Boomer protagonists reaching middle age, but those stories reflected real-life people that I encountered. Boomers bought motorcycles and fast cars to feel dangerous and cool, took up Karate or some other physical activity to rebel against the decay of the body, and often got divorced so that they could sow their wild oats—again. Midlife was when most of my friends’ parents got divorced, with the dad usually ending up with a younger, hotter girlfriend after the couple nuked their domestic life.

The midlife crisis is not merely a Boomer phenomenon, however, and their permutation of the period, while definitive of their own youth-culture obsessed generation, is not typical of other generations. We’ve had two other generations reach mid-life since the boomers, and their reactions have been quite different—not so much a crisis as a realignment, and movement toward something else. Gen X and Y decided to be authors and artists, to start photography businesses and go deep into hobbies, as much as take up triathlons.

The midlife transition is a natural period, one where childbearing ends but not so much child rearing, where children become more independent, and the intensity of raising very young children slackens. At the same time, the life established in young adulthood becomes routine, familiar, and often boring. You have time to look around and ask yourself, “Is this all I am? Is this all there is? What do the next 30 years look like?” You can, at that point, either settle in “immovably” and accept the entropy of life, or rebel against it.

Consider how literature and media treat this point. The Hobbit, which readers here ought to all be familiar with, is about a (small) man in middle age (for hobbits), who is rescued from the entropy of a settled life by Gandalf, who sends him off on an adventure that changes his personal trajectory massively. That was published in the 1930s, when Tolkien himself was in his forties.

Fight Club (the movie – the book’s themes are a bit different) is actually about a kind of mid-life crisis as well. The conflict is about hating the entropy of the settled, comfortable, and meaningless corporate life. This feeling may be alien to younger generations who view it as bourgeois disconnectedness to complain about having a steady job, but to the single Generation X male, raised by women and lacking a family, there was a kind of early mid-life crisis; children often solve the problem of “I need to make an impact on the world” automatically. The same theme pops up in Office Space. The malaise of corporate work is the malaise of a life directed toward nothing in particular.

Instead of looking at the arrival of midlife as a crisis point, as it was for the Baby Boomers, it should instead be viewed as an opportunity. It’s a chance to re-align life, to prepare for the second half, and to use your resources toward good outcomes. You could buy a sports car and get a hair transplant, but you could also take your family on a pilgrimage to Rome, and the difference in those choices reflects the difference in values between various generations.

Writing a book is an excellent midlife activity, and I’ve generated a lot of content on how to go about doing it. Writing is a mental activity, and one which grows sharper with experience. Likewise, taking up fine art is a good shift. Music is as well, though our popular music is youth-obsessed because it is image-obsessed. For books and art, you are mostly judged by the outcomes, not your personal appearance. And these are things you can do competently into your old age. You can be good by any standard at these things as you get older, whereas with something physical like cycling you are really judging yourself by a modified standard. “Good for fifty” is what you must settle for.

For me, I’m not really having any sort of crisis, except perhaps taking a break from publishing books and focusing on solo guitar for a while. I might try another corrective surgery on my right ear—now is probably the time. I don’t need to try to be a shredded hunk on the beach; I just want to be fit enough to extend my good health as long as possible into my old age. I don’t need to pump out 10 books a year. The word processor will always be there when I want it.

I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.