This is a rather unusual topic for a philosopher to write about. I can think of no other philosophical treatment of middle age. how did you find him?
The answer won’t surprise you. my interest in the subject stems from my own malaise around middle age. tenured professor in a good department, I was at that point in my academic career where you stop climbing and hit a plateau, and I realized I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t really have a picture of what comes next. my idea was to use the judo move of thinking about midlife as a path through the uncertainty of midlife. I looked for philosophers who had written about this and you’re right, there aren’t that many.
You are reading: Books about midlife crisis
And you ended up writing a book?
yes. I ended up writing Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, a book on midlife crisis, or The Many Midlife Crises: The Many Challenges of Adjusting to Midlife.
Before we get into the five books you’ve chosen on this topic, could you give us an idea of when you think middle age begins because, in itself, it’s a pretty controversial topic?
when the phrase “midlife crisis” originates, found in a 1965 essay by elliott jacques called “death and midlife crisis”, it refers to people in their mid to late thirty. It’s probably true that the image of middle age has changed so that now when we say “middle age,” we mean at least forty or maybe fifty.
But really, a lot of the questions I’m interested in about midlife are pretty general, coming both before and after. it’s about accepting the fact that you have a substantial past that you can’t change and that limits what you can do with your future. you might start worrying about this in your twenties or thirties. but I think the forties and fifties now seem to be the epitome of middle age.
And the cliché, particularly for men in this midlife period, is that you make some kind of radical change as a kind of compensation for feeling powerless about how life is going. So, you go and buy a Harley Davidson, or you quit your job as a philosophy professor like I did, and you start a new life. Is that the kind of issue you’re worried about?
up to a point, yes. The midlife crisis idea originated in the 1960s and really caught on in the 1970s with Gail Sheehy’s book, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, which sold around three million copies. the cliché of radical transformation is really cemented there. the question of how pervasive that phenomenon is has been questioned in subsequent social science. the current consensus stems from the work of economists. David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald have a series of trials over the last ten years in which they track reported life satisfaction by age and what they find is that it takes the shape of a gently curving U. it starts high in youth, bottoms out in forty, and ends highest in old age.
I think this work has changed people’s perception of the reality of midlife crisis and also their perception of what the phrase means. the phenomenon that interests me is not only the radical change that people sometimes embark on, but the idea of the forties as a period of relative difficulty in which levels of happiness and satisfaction are lower. the curve is smooth, but the gap between, say, youth and middle age, in terms of life satisfaction, is roughly the gap associated with losing a job or getting divorced. so it is significant. people are unhappier in middle age than before or after.
both men and women?
yes. in the studies of the last ten years, it appears for men and women. and have performed regression analyzes to rule out paternity. so, whether or not you have children, this is likely to happen to you. the studies come from more than seventy countries around the world. it shows up a little less in the developing world, but it shows up there, so it’s not entirely a first world problem. it’s more generalized than that.
The idea that there are some eras of humanity, so to speak, where you get to a certain phase and certain things are likely to happen to you is fascinating. obviously in childhood, when you’re developing emotionally and physically, you’d expect adolescence, the transition from childhood to adulthood, to be a pretty traumatic and significant time. but adulthood might simply be perceived as a long, slow process of decline rather than having discrete sections within it.
that’s true. and, in fact, the idea of middle age as a distinctive phase of life became popular only recently, beginning in the nineteenth century. this is getting into one of the books we’re going to talk about.
then let’s move on to your first choice of book. This is at our best: The Invention of Midlife (2012) by Patricia Cohen.
This is a cultural history of the idea of midlife as a distinctive phase of life: the idea that there are particular challenges associated with midlife. Cohen traces this idea back to the late nineteenth century, a time when, as the story goes, it was not associated with trauma or crisis. in fact, it was often associated with having achieved full competence and full mastery of life. it is in the early 20th century that the idea of midlife as distinctly challenging or problematic slowly begins to emerge.
does that mean that before the 20th century there were no mid-life crises?
I don’t know. When I was writing my book, I discovered that people look for examples of midlife crisis. people will point to dante in the dark wood. There’s even a book by a psychoanalyst that uses Odysseus as an example of a midlife crisis: infidelity, drinking, and rebellion that are finally resolved when he returns home. therefore, it is not very clear how far back the phenomenon of struggling with middle age goes back. The conceptualization of midlife as a distinctive phase and problem is relatively recent, but that doesn’t tell us how far back the actual phenomenon was.
is patricia cohen a historian?
is a journalist who draws on the work of historians and social scientists. Part of what’s fascinating about the way he tells this story is that there’s a connection between the idea of middle age as being particularly problematic and the increasing mechanization of the workforce, along with the influence of efficiency experts like G Stanley Hall, who entered factories and businesses and emphasized how to maximize productivity.
“My attitude toward the Socratic edict that the unexamined life is not worth living has always been skeptical. there are many people I know who are not interested in philosophy or philosophical reflection who seem to be much better off than many of my philosopher friends.”
which connects with a focus on youthful energy, vitality and stamina and thus spawns the beginning of the idea that by the time you’re forty you could be over the hill. you’re going to be competing with younger people who have the driving energy to get you out. And then we get to depression and middle age unemployment becomes a social problem in the United States. together these factors work to generate the problematization of middle age.
I can see how that works with manual or factory work, but not with the managerial class. a fifty-year-old may not be as mentally alert as a twenty-year-old, but that is more than made up for by the experience and power they have gained over a lifetime of working in a particular industry or business. you see that in the academy too. there is a sense in which some 20-somethings are absolutely brilliant but somewhat naive, less experienced, and haven’t had the range of exposure to different philosophical views that a 50-something would have.
You are absolutely right that the initial anxiety about being outdated comes from the manual work. it’s not associated with the busy executive having a mid-life fling, but with the unemployment of factory workers being replaced by younger, more efficient workers. The greatest extension of hilltop anxiety to collar workers comes later in the story, as Cohen tells it.
Is Patricia Cohen Just Diagnosing Midlife Ills As This New Phenomenon Of The 20th Century? or does she have some kind of prognosis or some kind of treatment for the condition she describes?
She doesn’t exactly have a treatment. her book is not self-help but cultural history. still, one of her strategies is to take an idea that seems natural and inevitable and use the fact that she has a relatively recent history to destabilize it and dislodge the feeling of inevitability. we have the idea that middle age is a period of malaise, but that is not how it has always been perceived.
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just as some writers have done for adolescence within history, which has been quite surprising, that the idea of adolescence did not exist before the 19th century, for example.
exactly. It’s not so much to debunk the midlife crisis idea as it is to argue that it’s culturally specific and therefore not inevitable. it might be possible to recover earlier middle-aged or middle-aged conceptualizations that are less debilitating. One of the things Cohen does is trace the work that has been used to push against the stereotype of middle age as a time of great difficulty. The interesting fact about the timing of his book is that it came out in 2012, just as the research on the u-curve was being published, but not really publicized yet. The social science he is picking up is an earlier cycle of MacArthur Network studies on successful midlife development in the United States. this was research that was done in the 90’s and was published around the year 2000 and was very optimistic about middle age as a time of competence and life satisfaction.
one of the things cohen is pushing for is not so much a therapeutic angle as evidence that maybe middle age isn’t as bad as the crisis stereotype suggests. Like I said, this comes before u-curve research, so the history of the midlife crisis idea has been up and down. first you notice, then the social scientists debunk it, and then the economists come back and say, “well, actually, we have all this data that suggests there’s some kind of widespread challenge here.”
So you’re suggesting that she’s a bit more optimistic about middle age than is appropriate given the evidence?
I think he’s responding to the evidence he had. But it is true that more recent research, assuming the u-curve holds, suggests that there is something to the idea of middle age as a particularly difficult period for people. and then there is a challenge to face. even if it’s culturally specific, it’s not just a cultural construct in the sense that it’s just a way of thinking that we could discredit and get rid of. corresponds to something that is really happening to people.
your second option is the summer before nightfall (1973) by doris lessing.
Around the time the idea of midlife crisis became popular in the 1970s, there was a spate of novelistic depictions of midlife crisis. summer before nightfall is emblematic and symptomatic; It is a canonical portrayal of the stereotypical female midlife crisis of the 1970s. It is about a forty-five-year-old woman with grown children and whose husband leaves for work for six months. she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but she turns out to be fluent in several languages and is hired by a global food company. she goes to istanbul and starts a series of adventures about which she is very conflicted and ambivalent.
“when the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ originates, found in a 1965 essay by elliott jacques called ‘death and midlife crisis,’ it refers to people in their mid to late the thirty ”
is a really cool investigation of the nascent feminism cultural moment of the 1970s through the lens of a middle-aged woman trying to turn her life around. Interestingly, the main character, Kate Brown, is the absolute focus of the novel and her family is incredibly peripheral and barely sketched out. then, there is a kind of inversion: she has been defined as wife and mother, but in the novel it is others who appear as schematic figures of “husband” and “adult children”. she is the center of attention. One thing I love about the novel is the way that, while it’s quite socially specific, it connects so powerfully to larger themes of poverty, social justice, and the meaning of life. it has moments where it ranges nicely from the particularity of kate’s situation to very deep and completely general questions about what to do with life and what makes it meaningful.
If, as you’re characterizing it, the midlife period typically involves people pondering what their own life purpose is and often taking charge and changing direction, that seems at least consistent. with a certain kind of existentialist thinking. about not accepting the roles that other people are projecting onto you, taking control of your own life, not being in bad faith or misleading yourself about the point of what you’re doing, and in fact, by committing to a course of action, defining Who are you.
absolutely. I think it’s very interesting that you connect this with the idea of not accepting the roles that you’ve been given, because one of the pivotal scenes in the novel is one in which Kate, after returning from an affair with a young man in Spain, he goes to the theater, and there is an extended meditation on the absurdity of people playing roles on stage. (I think she is going to see Turgenev for a month in the country). her as she watches, she looks at the audience, at these rich people dressed for a night out, and ponders the performance of social roles and what it would mean. to throw them away. it’s a bit clunky, but it works. and picks up exactly what you were pointing out: the existentialist sense of the importance of recognizing one’s own autonomy and not simply accepting given social roles. so the novel definitely has that as its theme.
your third option is another novel but from a very different type of writer. This is the information (1995) by Martin Amis.
yes. If The Summer Before Nightfall is a classic feminist midlife crisis novel, Martin Amis Information is the great non-feminist midlife crisis novel. it’s a novel some people find misogynistic, but it’s an incredibly funny depiction of the middle-aged struggles of a failed novelist whose friend is, he claims, unwarrantedly famous. The protagonist, Richard, ridicules his friend Gwyn’s bestseller as vapid and sentimental: “It would only be noticeable if Gwyn had written it with his foot.” the novel is funny in part because its hero is endearingly loathsome. It goes from farce to terrifying violence, but it has another existential question in the background. ‘information’ can be many things in the novel, but one of its meanings is the information that we are going to die. this is something we often absorb around middle age.
so that’s the dark truth we haven’t discussed yet regarding midlife. in a sense of being over the hill, we are running down the other side to the grave.
correct. information is a very effective evocation of that feeling. Part of the novel’s backstory is that Amis got this crazy breakthrough after firing his agent, Pat Kavanagh, the wife of his friend Julian Barnes, and then spending a lot of money on extensive dental reconstruction. this is one of those metonyms to deny one’s own mortality, the idea that when teeth decay, you can replace them all and make them look like new.
“the novel is funny in part because its hero is so charmingly disgusting”
this reminds me that julian barnes also wrote an excellent book that isn’t exactly about middle age, but about death, which calls for nothing to be scared of. In both cases, there is something about the sustained meditation on death for three hundred pages that is a kind of stoic mental exercise: think about death and do it while you read the information, chapter after chapter after chapter. it is an intense experience.
As an aside here, since we’re talking about death, there are different ways you could characterize middle age. one is the period when we are aware of our mortality and deal with it in ways that are sometimes surprising and transformative. Another way to characterize middle age might be the time when we are most in denial about the fact that we are no longer young. For many people, middle age is a time of cosmetic surgery, hair coloring, dental work as you say, gym classes, crazy eating regimens, and anything else that prevents the apparent aging of the body.
there is a wonderful passage about this in the information where, joking about orwell, the narrator says “looking in the mirror on the morning of his fortieth birthday, richard felt that no one deserved the look on his face”. Going back to Patricia Cohen’s book, one of the things she traces is the change in ideals, for example, from female beauty from a late nineteenth-century model in which the forty-year-old woman was the ideal to a growing valorization of youth as the model of beauty. I’m sure this contributes to the feeling that people in their forties and fifties have that they should aspire to be the best they were in their thirties. I think you’re right, there is a simultaneous awareness and denial of the inevitability of physical decline and death.
I’d love to know what age people in California think is middle age. maybe seventy?
It’s fun. Talking to people on this subject over the last five or six years, I’ve learned that some embrace the label as soon as they can, while others staunchly resist it. when I hit thirty-five I thought, ‘yeah, middle age; that seems right’ and then when it’s suggested to friends that they might be middle-aged at sixty, they’ll say, ‘wow, I’m not so sure.’ So there is definitely a self-labeling issue that people often have strong feelings about.
Going back to the novel, he suggested that I point out certain key themes, more central with mortality, in our adjustment to middle age. Does the book contribute to our understanding or is it just mocked as some kind of self-obsession?
That’s a good question. the prose is stunning and brilliantly evokes a confrontation with mortality. whether it contributes to our understanding of it is much more difficult to say. In addition to being a meditation on death, a central theme of the novel is professional ambition. The core is Richard’s aggrieved vanity that he is not as successful as his friend. there’s something purifying about depicting the worst moments of people’s narcissism and vanity so frankly and brutally, and pursuing them so resolutely and hilarious. there is a certain therapeutic value in simultaneously hating and identifying with the novel’s central character. in the end, though, i feel like amis isn’t as interested in solving the problem as he is in rubbing it in our faces. and he does it exceptionally well.
It is interesting that in the books you have chosen you have not chosen a medical book. there could be a pure physiology of midlife. and your interest seems to be more in the lived experience.
I’m interested in both. the choices have in part to do with which books are the most fun to read and recommend. there is a book called how healthy are we? edited by orville gilbert brim and grew out of the macarthur network research on midlife that i mentioned earlier. contains lots of essays by medical and medical sociologists and psychologists. if you want an introduction to the state of the science around the year 2000, then that’s a very good book. but it is academic; it is not a popular exposition of the results of the social sciences, and while it is accessible, it is not an exciting read. A more recent survey is Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Reimagining of Life: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, which is well worth checking out.
Let’s move on to your fourth option. This is How to Live by Sarah Bakewell: A Montaigne Life in One Question and Twenty Attempted Answers (2010).
This is a bit of an eccentric choice, but I think it’s an amazing book. It’s about a lot of things, but one of them is middle age. Traces the long aftermath of Montaigne’s midlife crisis, which involved the death of his closest friend Étienne de la Boétie, then his own brush with mortality two years later when he fell from his horse and nearly died. . Montaigne retired from public life when he was around thirty-eight years old to become a writer. hers was a story of transformation, of saying in middle age, “I need to stop and reflect on everything.” And go if you think! Montaigne writes this legendary series of creative, original, open-minded, curious, and exploratory essays that have become iconic of what self-reflection can be.
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The book is about the many ways in which Montaigne tried to answer in practical terms the question of how to live. she ends up tackling pretty much any problem she might have in middle age. Whatever it was, Montaigne had something to say about it, be it mourning, religious turmoil, or kidney stones. somewhere he approached it in a humane and entertaining way. Bakerwell’s book gives you an incredibly lucid and engaging overview of that.
another of montaigne’s themes is sex. there are a lot of very honest and open discussions about sex in the book. and this is a topic that we have not touched and that must be relevant for middle age.
yes, that’s true. there are wonderful discussions of his anxiety about penis size, or rather his decided lack of anxiety about penis size, and about impotence, etc. Montaigne has this incredible tolerance and acceptance of the frailties of human life and this willingness to accept and embrace mediocrity in the sense that, yes, we should be jovial about the fact that life is not going to be the pinnacle of success that you could have imagined in youth. I think he is quite consoling.
but, like with martin amis, it’s easy to say when you know you’re a good writer. it’s easy to scoff at the pretensions of an ambitious and not very good writer when he’s hailed as one of the great British novelists, or it’s easy not to care about his social status when he’s a duke, or whatever Montaigne ever was, when you have your vineyards and you also happen to be a brilliant essayist with amazing psychological insights. And in Montaigne’s lifetime, he was a very successful author. So, there’s a slight sense in which to write about failure and how life went unfulfilled from those positions… it’s not like they didn’t keep any promises.
That’s certainly true. There is an irony in Montaigne writing about mediocrity when even in his lifetime he was celebrated as an author. and he was fine in other ways too. but his writings have as a backdrop that death could be imminent. his closest friend died in his thirties and he almost died, so there is a feeling that life is fragile and could slip away at any moment, and there is no way around it. there is an awareness of the vulnerability of the human condition.
“There is even a book by a psychoanalyst that uses Odysseus as an example of a mid-life crisis: infidelity, drinking and rebellion that are finally resolved when he returns home.”
no amount of wealth or success can make that go away, and that’s something montaigne is all too familiar with. it is also true that in his portrayals of other people, he is endearingly attentive. there is an openness and embrace of human individuality that makes you feel that the celebration of mediocrity or humanity in all its forms, successful or not, is not just for show. it is not a montage. that is also part of the beauty of how to live. it manages to be a celebration of montaigne many times as it explores the different strands of his work. There is something about the idea of the human individual as worthy of celebration that is very poignantly exemplified in both Montaigne’s essays and Bakewell’s book.
And all of this is framed by Montaigne’s midlife moment of retiring from public life to become a thoughtful writer. therefore, everything stems from midlife, even if it’s not explicitly midlife.
That’s right, yes. then he returns to public life, reluctantly, but his idea was to step back and let the farm run on its own. he wasn’t incredibly energetic as a landowner. he just let things float, which is a fact he has fun with in rehearsals. but, yes, the idea was simply to go read and think and meditate on life in the library of his estate. it was a reaction to his confrontation with death. it is also a meditation on friendship. there’s a deep sadness about the fact that he had this incredibly close friendship with the boétie, and they were only friends for four years and then the boétie dies. in a way, the essays internalize la boétie; Montaigne has this voice in his head that he’s talking back and forth that allows him to continue a virtual relationship with his friend. he is very touching.
your final choice is christopher hamilton’s midlife (2009).
This is one of the few books by a philosopher on midlife. I think it’s a really interesting and bold book. it appears in a series, called the art of living, of popular philosophical introductions to topics such as happiness, death, or failure. but it is not really a work of philosophical argument. it is the memory of a life examined. naturally, being a philosopher, the things hamilton relies on to examine his life are philosophical. The result is a kind of common book, citing Hannah Arendt and Joseph Conrad and T. yes eliot and woody allen, montaigne and nietzsche. In this sense, midlife is like another great memory that could have been on my list: Marina Benjamin’s Midway Pause, spanning from Edith Wharton to Colette to Carl Jung. it’s hard to talk about hamilton’s book without a spoiler, but the spoiler comes very soon, and that is that he finds out in middle age, i think he was thirty-eight, that the man he thought was his biological father actually isn’t . all the other members of his family knew about it, but they hid it from him.
“I feel there are very few examples of philosophers taking their own lives and trying to come to terms with them, especially in the recent Western tradition”
When he finds out, he has an identity crisis. in many ways, it is idiosyncratic. It’s quite a distinctive and unusual experience, it doesn’t happen to most of us, but Hamilton’s reflection on the importance of a sense of identity and the challenges of forming and maintaining one connects with larger themes. it is a really unusual book for a philosopher to have written and I really appreciate it. I feel like there are very few examples of philosophers taking their own lives and actually trying to come to terms with them, especially in the recent Western tradition. Mill’s autobiography is one. that’s an amazing example of a philosopher saying, “I had a nervous breakdown, let me try to figure out philosophically what was going on.” Christopher Hamilton’s book is like that. it is an attempt by a philosopher who has at his disposal the literature and tools of philosophy to discover how to cope with a very difficult experience of midlife.
Do you think there is more to reading the book than an individual’s autobiographical exploration of the particular things that shaped him? Is there something that is relevant to midlife for all midlife readers?
I think so. One thing Hamilton does that is in the spirit of Montaigne and Nietzsche is try out aphorisms. draw general morals about middle age. like all aphorisms, some seem to hit the mark exactly; some don’t. but there are many that I love. For example, he writes, “In middle age, most people understand, I think, how little of what really matters in life one can get by doing anything but waiting for it.” I think that is a great aphorism. I don’t know if that’s true, but it has the character of one of those Nietzschean aphorisms where you think, “That could be a profound insight into human life, or it could be completely one-sided.”
and could be darkly pessimistic, like waiting for godot.
yes. therefore, it is unclear whether it is advice for tolerant patience or a desperate feeling that action is futile and that you should not attempt to do anything.
There’s a midlife wisdom that young people who chase after the things they think matter may be missing out on the things that really matter, things they’ll realize later and can’t be told now. .
yes. another thing hamilton is very good at is the constant struggle in many people’s lives between, on the one hand, the effort to achieve things and, on the other hand, the desire to stop trying; a desire for stasis and peace. none of them are really easy to let go of and at different times in life, one is more emphatic than the other. Hamilton does not write as someone who thinks life’s problems are solvable. the book is very much about how we still can’t rest and we have to constantly push ourselves but at the same time we want peace and relief from that. I weighed. the human condition is one in which you just have to fight with that duality.
that is not what the buddhists would say and not what montaigne would say at certain times. Montaigne wrote interestingly about this classic idea that to philosophize is to learn to die, to accept your own death and the possibility that you will no longer exist. Seems to me as potentially a good position to get into in middle age because it increases the chances that you’ll die very soon.
yes. I think you get this more agonistic picture of the human condition in Hamilton’s book. Ultimately, I don’t accept it and at least hope for something more, some intellectual and emotional image of life that allows us to rest more satisfyingly in the moment and not feel this constant push into the future. And I think, in different ways, you get that in the Stoics and in Montaigne’s idea of attention to the present. an underlying theme in all of his essays is simply paying attention to what is happening in the moment. that theme ties in with ideas of mindfulness that stem from the Buddhist tradition. So, there is a kind of convergence between the strands of Western and non-Western philosophy on the idea that there might be a comforting truth in some interpretation of the idea of living in the present. That’s something I develop in my book. but it must be said that hamilton is not on board. he is much more pessimistic about the human condition.
It’s interesting because the midlife crisis, as stereotypically described, is a time when someone drops everything to lead a simpler life. It is not about giving up everything to lead a more materialistic life. I keep doing philosophy in my midlife crisis and become a lawyer or a hedge fund manager. I go away and retire to a village in the country or leave things, instead of increasing the complexity of my life. I don’t know if that’s fair, but my opinion is that usually when people have a mid-life crisis, they tend to do something different that allows them to savor their sensory experiences, spend more time with their family, and get things done. that are worth more. . maybe they do charity work, or travel, or try to help people in distant lands. there is a sense in which the midlife crisis is a departure from the characteristic acquisitive and competitive rat race, rather than a leap into it.
That certainly seems right about a mid-life crisis of sorts. what you’re describing sounds pretty tight. there’s also the stereotype where you buy a ferrari, leave your wife and have an affair. there are ways to achieve a kind of liveliness in the present that are less healthy than retreating to your garden. but I think they have in common the desire to get away from the rat race and be absorbed in what you are doing at the moment. that could be driving your ferrari or it could be spending more time with your family.
with the case of ferrari, it may be that you want a status symbol or feel that you have never been able to get the things you want for yourself and this is your last chance. you always had a dream but your dream could never be fulfilled because you always had a responsibility with other people and now you are going to go for it.
many things are happening. one is the sense that life has been restricted – having to pay the mortgage and basically being subservient to the demands of family responsibility, etc. – and then wanting to do something that is only for one. the other thing about driving fast cars is that there’s a way in which, paradigmatically, it’s not goal-directed. you don’t buy the fast car to get to places more efficiently. the point is to be driving.
In your thinking about midlife and in your book suggestions in this interview, you’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the nature of midlife. Do you think that in itself is healthy? we are talking about a stage of life that is itself reflexive, so now a kind of meta-reflection is taking place. is that a good way to live?
My attitude toward the Socratic edict that the unexamined life is not worth living has always been skeptical. there are plenty of people I know who are not interested in philosophy or philosophical reflection who seem to be doing much better than many of my philosopher friends. More than that, I think the question of whether philosophical reflection is going to be consoling is initially open. when you reflect on midlife, maybe the results are comforting and maybe they aren’t. As it happens, and this appears in the book I wrote, I think philosophical insights can provide solace for some of the many midlife crises. but that’s how it happened. I don’t think it was inevitable from the start that reflecting on my life was going to be comforting. there are situations in which not thinking about it may be the best advice.
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