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Acceptance.

My survival strategy for mid-life has been to replace the ambition and balls that got me through my 20's and 30's with age appropriate acceptance of the MANY things I cannot control & don't have time to do, with a wisdom to focus on the FEW things that are likely to matter to me when I hit my 70's and beyond.

For example, I can't control the divorce that consumed a ton of time and money in my 40's, but I have prioritized recovering money & family in my late 40's and early 50's. I can't control a medical condition that somewhat limits what I can do from time-to-time, but I can identify alternatives that give me joy during those times.

I'm blessed with parents and grandparents who unwittingly failed to prioritize correctly IMHO. I paid close attention and intend to do it differently.

Acceptance is basically the one and only key to happiness - it's simple to say and hard to practice. But by practicing it even the most miserably ill and destitute people can be happy. It's also not a particularly new idea, going back at least as far as Buddhism.

It's also why I'm not inclined to agree with things like perceived inequality as being the root of all misery.

Something interesting seems to be happening in society. We set aside religion, a trend that accelerated exponentially starting in the 60s, but had no real ideological or philosophical foundation with which to replace it, so it simply created a vacuum for meaning. In my opinion that vacuum was largely filled by consumerism and hedonism. But of course those alternatives aren't really alternatives, because they give some flighting moments of pleasure, but offer little to nothing in terms of long-term satisfaction.

So we're effectively recreating, from scratch, much of the philosophy developed thousands of years ago. What you're describing is, in its fundamentals, identical to Stoicism. I'd highly recommend Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations." [1] It's a collection of the writings of Aurelius, a Roman Emperor who is oft regarded as one of the greatest leaders of society. Stoicism is most fundamentally about accepting the fact that there are many things one cannot change. The only thing we can change, about many things, is how we let it affect us.

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The most interesting thing about the writings is that they were never intended to be seen by anybody other than himself. So it's effectively a collection of post-it notes from a great philosopher-king to himself pondering his own existence, mortality, meaning, and inability to change things. It's also quite insightful to appreciate that perhaps the most powerful person on Earth at the time struggled with the exact same issues that affect us all.

He wanted to change society for the better, but ultimately even a man in his position was unable to move a mountain no matter how much he tried. His life was filled with external perceived successes and internal failures. He not only failed to ultimately better society, but could not even better his own son. Aurelius is regarded as one of the greatest leaders, his son Commodus - one of the worst.

When Aurelius died, he was deified and praised. After his son Commodus was assassinated at the age of 31, he (Commodus) was declared an enemy of the state, his name stricken from record, and public imagery of him destroyed.

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[1] - https://files.libertyfund.org/files/2133/Aurelius_1464_LFeBk... #That book includes two introductions which provide extensive context and other information which is quite important to understanding a fair amount of what is said. Aurelius' writings themselves begin on PDF page 59, which is page 25 in the book's ordering.

I've had this feeling in life that after middle age, it is most satisfying to adopt the mindset of a teacher. No more am I an explorer or barrier breaker. I am now a foundation, a home, a tome of knowledge and wisdom that should be used to help the next generation get a leg up.
I learned this full speed into a brick wall via an MS relapse in my last semester of graduate school.

There are always things that you can't control. It's best to adjust your worldview to accommodate that, or if the unexpected does happen, you won't adjust easily. Speaking from experience.

One thing I love about Tolstoy's War and Peace is how it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives. They feel adrift, then find some great cause to push them forward, exhaust the possibilities of that cause, and find themselves disillusioned when they discovered that they have not "solved" the problem of life. This happens over and over again to some of the central characters of the novel, Prince Andrei and Pierre.

This is not to disdain projects or causes. The older I get, the more I realize that life is a continually evolving question, and the task of living philosophically is partially about living comfortably with the ambiguity that that implies.

it describes how individuals can cycle through absorbing worldviews, philosophies, causes and projects across the arc of their lives

That is pretty much the theme of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, written many a moon before War and Peace. You have a king who cycles through everything he thinks he could possibly desire, attaining all of it, and realizes at the end the answer to the problem of life was... well, I'll let you figure out the rest:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...

Love this! I too got the sense of growing through phases via fiction. And your comment is surprisingly similar to what I said about War and Peace recently here! https://kite.link/Fiction
Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life. Focusing on effectiveness on helping others is probably an important component as well.

I recommend looking into Effective Altruism - "a philosophy and community focused on maximising the good you can do through your career, projects, and donations"

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

In my case I've joined Giving What We Can ten years ago - giving at least 10% of my income to cost-effective charities. No matter how badly my day goes, I can always reflect on how nice it is that through my donations thousands of individuals have benefited greatly.

I've done this for over a decade, and "Effective Altruism" does NOT prevent midlife crises. There's more nuance to it. (In my case, my day job that paid VERY well involved things that are very much against my ethics. Even giving away 20% of the money to good causes didn't stop the guilt. So now I'm "retired" but mostly just wallowing in guilt of enabling horrific things while lying to myself about "making the world better" on the fringes.)
> Seems like a good way to avert a midlife crisis is to explicitly make helping others a non-trivial part of one's life.

Given this is a thread about philosophy, and this looks like the sort of thing that sounds so true nobody bothers looking too closely at whether it is, I feel compelled to ask why it is so?

Averting the mid-life crisis is overrated.

I'm 45. I'm at least halfway through my turn. I'm definitely feeling the mid-life blues. I wonder if I'm wasting my life slinging bits for companies that probably won't exist in 15 years. If I'm doing an acceptable job at raising my children. If I'm contributing usefully to humanity AT ALL. Pretty soon the merry-go-round is going to start spinning down for me and my utterly insignificant portion of the universal timeline is going to be over with. Christ, if that's not depressing, what is?

No, I would suggest that if one never experiences the mid-life crisis then they aren't performing their philosophical due diligence. The trick is to not let it consume you and end up fucking up everything good in your life.

Get depressed, re-evaluate your life, make some positive changes, stop obsessing with accumulating gewgaws, and start helping people - that's the good shit.

What you don't want to do is quit your job, abandon your wife and kids, and run off to a polyamorous colony in Thailand. Otherwise, it may turn out that your purpose in life was to serve as a warning to others...

This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Owe_the_Future has been compared to your link, though I haven’t read it (it’s out Sept. 1st).
I wonder if the "midlife" part of midlife crisis does some harm. Other then me not being in my midlife (well i hope lol, don't think i want to die at 60) a lot of those issue resonate. Shrinking of possibilities, empty feeling as i pursue things. Ive felt this way on and off since my 20s and have talked with friends about similar feelings.
> I wonder if the "midlife" part of midlife crisis does some harm.

As someone who more or less started a midlife crisis last year, this rings true. Among other things, there's a social double bind that lies at the root of this that must be examined.

On one hand, young people are framed as unable to understand themselves and that they must suck it up and act like adults. On the other hand, when those that do "suck it up" later end up in crisis, they are demeaned with, "You should have figured yourself out by now."

I yearn for a world where midlife crises are a cause for community celebration. One where we can say, "Tayo42, this is an important time in your life and everyone is here to rally around you while you navigate these feelings."

Instead we seem to socially allow for, but discourage people from self reevaluations - that there's a window in midlife for people to rediscover themselves, realign their goals, and sort out their lives, but instead of celebrating, we discourage it. And for what? So that we maintain the illusion of some sort of identity integrity?

Maybe I have something to learn here, but it would be hard to convince me that the current state of the social response to crises is anything but maladaptive.

At 35 I started calling myself “middle aged” and my coworkers around the same age looked at me like I was insane and then a rather uncomfortable discussion ensued about age and average lifespan in the US. Nobody in their 30s wants to think that they are in fact “middle aged” and it might be the time to have a “midlife crisis”.
Yeah, this hits home. I'm only 28 but can feel my life becoming more and more predictable and stagnate. At the same time, I'm too afraid and money-conscious to make any bold changes (e.g., quit my job, start a business, go back to school, live in a van for a year, do something weird with my life). This is an incredible source of anxiety and depression.

I've started therapy and have made some progress. If I can become less anxious about money, I think I'll be able to find sustainable happiness. But I know this will be a lifetime struggle.

Yeah, we need hope, we need something to look forward to, we need something to be passionate about. In early life, we assume that a spouse and job and kids and a house will be just that. Once we get there (midlife or not), we often find it unsatisfying, so the "crisis" is to go looking again. From the outside, the person having the "crisis" already has the "perfect" life so it looks like foolishness.

The big takeaway for me was that expecting life to ring perfect based on my wisdom at 20 is pure silliness. I now know what I know, I can only go forward. So what gives me satisfaction and hope now. Then I (try to) execute on that.

I think generally these things might just be called existential crises, and it just so happens that people tend to experience one at around 40.

I've also been having one for the past 3 years (the tail of my 20s), which I've been kinda labeling my "quarter life crisis" (which isn't really mathematically right but seems to align with popular usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis)

To me, the crisis comes from having exhausted the low hanging fruit of accomplishing what society expects of you and the feelings you get from youthful joys of sex/food/whatever.

There's a switch that needs to be flipped, from 'I want to feel good', to 'I am doing what needs doing'.

You know what needs doing. You know what needs to stop too. Not to feel better, it won't feel good at all, but it needs doing.

It's irrational - who says anything needs doing? Nothing needs doing, we're all going to die, we only live once, etc. Yup! Needs to be done anyway, or you distract yourself. Those are the two options :)

I'm distracting myself right now! I haven't flipped the switch, I'm still hanging on to feeling good, but with every year, with every month, the flip of the switch just makes... so... much... sense. It's destiny, really. Doing, or distracting.

Anyhoo :)

A great way to spontaneously trigger a midlife crisis, no matter your age, is to watch Youtube videos about the universe, the origin of life, etc.

You'll get this inspirational rush of how amazing everything is, how vast the universe, how incredibly unusual for life to exist and for us specifically as a species to exist. And the advanced state we're in, able to do almost anything.

And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.

You're not exploring anything, you're not celebrating life, not producing any meaning. You just sit there, like a robot, pissing it all away. Not depressing enough? Your existence is actually the top 10% of humanity.

Anyway, have a great day.

And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.

Beats the hell out of scratching out a subsistence living. That ain't gonna afford me much of any opportunity other than scratching at the ground and hoping the locusts don't eat it. Anything beyond that, and we're just arguing about the degree of technology that we're comfortable with. That doesn't sound nearly as noble, I suppose, but I always thought Thoreau was kinda full of it anyway.

So you do you, but I'm smack in the middle of midlife, and I'm having no crisis at all.

> You're not exploring anything, you're not celebrating life, not producing any meaning. You just sit there, like a robot, pissing it all away.

I would suggest that meaning can be found, even if you are unable to transcend our human limitations in this insanely large universe. But I can tell that you are on a path of reflection of what a meaningful human life means for you, and that's exciting! I wish you the best!

(Don't read this as if I have it all figured out, because I most certainly do not)

And then you realize that you're using this incredible and very temporary opportunity to sit in a chair for most of your waking hours, for decades in a row.

"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." --Blaise Pascal

Part of being human is embracing both of these realities though. We can get satisfaction from spending 4 hours perfecting some small nuance in code to make it run smoothly and we can feel awe pondering the vastness of the universe.
I'm looking at journal articles about how age correlates with happiness and this sentence doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in the state of research:

This paper is the mirror image of Blanchflower (2020b) that examined unhappiness data and finds comparable evidence using twenty different measures for an unhappiness curve that maximized with controls at age 49 compared with a zenith of happiness estimated in this paper at age 48.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-020-00797-z

I started reading this book in a bookstore. In the intro, I recall him mentioned how he felt a blandness of middle age starting in his late 30s -- soon after he got tenure in his faculty job at a university.

As a "recovering academic" myself, it sounded more like the very particular rat-race of "tenure track, emeritus, and die" had disappointed him more than anything about midlife in general. So, I put the book back on the shelf.

Philosophy would be a great name for a boat
My strategy for beating middle age: I just had my first kid at 40 and my next one is due just after I'll turn 42. I don't think I'm going to have time for midlife navel-gazing. "What is the point of all this?" is a question that stopped having meaning when my son was born.

Historically, people entered this difficult stage of life at just the moment they were finishing raising their kids. I have to wonder how that changes things, now that older parents are much more common (or, on the other hand, now that so many more people don't have kids at all).

One thing I've found in philosophy that's informed my thinking about happiness is the paradox of hedonism, which suggests that I'm better off not striving for happiness at all, at least not directly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism

That, and also Freud's sobering words, written to one of his patients: "Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness."

So many threads discussing with an engineering mind if 40 is half your life, a third, blah blah blah.

Truth is you don’t have tomorrow for granted. We could die today, tomorrow or in 90 years. Planning ahead so strictly is like wrapping a blanket around your head for safety in a firefight.

Don’t overplan, don’t quantify everything in life, relax, enjoy, smile and roll with the punches as much as you can. We only get one life.

For me, maybe for alot of people, COVID provided the impulse that revealed my own midlife crisis. It was all that time away from work and with family that forced me to begin coming to terms with how shallow my identity outside of work had become. I can never go back to my pre-pandemic self, and that's probably for the best. Even though my current role is great in compensation and substance, I still feel this malaise lurking. Acceptance is important, necessary, but, for me, not sufficient. I'm not sure what my atelics are. I'm not in crisis by any means, nor at risk of buying a Tesla or having an affair, or whatever else, but the struggle is real. Midlife blahs
I like this quote:

In this sense, Setiya believes, “Midlife” is about middle age, but middle age just represents a more acute stage of existential insecurity that is always present.

Makes me wonder, what does existential security look like, because the quote rings true.

I think "philosophy" can be substituted with any idea that serves as viable coping mechanism to stress. Any idea that impacts your life in such a powerful way transcends into the realm of spirituality.
People have time for midlife crises? ;)
I always had a clear baseline in life.

Avoid self-inflicted suffering.

To keep an open eye on my own internal biases, I always remind myself that in this very moment on this Big Blue Planet, there are millions of people starving and suffering, and I am really, really glad that I am healthy and alive.

>Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Reading Markus Aurelius Meditations also helps me a lot:)

These kinds of discussions remind of this passage from Mere Christianity by CS Lewis:

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful mar- riages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us. Now there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one.

(1) The Fool's Way. — He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is "the Real Ihing" at last, and always disappointed.

(2) The Way of the Disillusioned "Sensible Man." — He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. "Of course," he says, "one feels like that when one's young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the rainbow's end." And so he setties down and learns not to expect too mueh and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, "to cry for the moon." This is, of course, a mueh better way than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls "adolescents"), but, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably. It would be the best line we could take if man did not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow's end? In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our sup- posed "common sense" we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.

(3) The Christian Way. — The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hånd, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

Lots of comments seem focused on avoiding a "midlife crisis", I think its more that it can't be avoided, and what do you do with that reflection and realization. How to use it to better yourself, your life, your people.
This is what happens when you're spiritually unprepared in life.

You need to have a 'mid-life crisis' early-on and figure out the meaning of life then and there.

Imagine the people who have these crises, now on their deathbeds.

People need more philosophy in their lives. All of the modern "self-help" nonsense is just a reductionist, simplified shadow of what the ancients have had to say for thousands of years.
"Those who succeed in an outstanding way seldom do so before the age of 40. More often, they do not strike their real pace until they are well beyond the age of 50."

Napoleon Hill

> Feeling regret in this sense is better than feeling nothing.

Yes and sleeping on a rock is better than sleeping on a pile of dung.

Can, it can also screw you up even more. Rather ignored part of many "this can do x" articles. A great deal of philosophy is built on individual "thinkers" trying to find the truth in their own heads. A lot of them died pretty unhappy. Many philosophies when distilled down to masses resulted in genocides like French revolution. (This does not apply generally.)
(2017)
the school of life yootube channel has a lot of helpful videos for self understanding. 7 million subscribers.
I'll tell you what would solve mine. About $2m.
A wonderful resource for the laid-off 45-year old coal miners, certain to solve their problems...

> "A few years ago, a man experienced a midlife crisis. He was professionally successful and had a rewarding family life, but still had a “hollow” feeling."

Just to spell it out, when you have a significant fraction of the population affected by societal collapse and economic insecurity, and with few if any future job prospects, that results in the kind of widespread 'depression' that isn't treatable with drugs, therapy, or self-help books.