How To Avoid A Mid-Life Crisis

Issue #2

TL;DR: Pay attention to the dreams that give you hope for the future, and the issues that make life grating and frustrating. Talk about them with other people now, so (1) you can fix the fixable issues, (2) be accountable to keep pursuing your dreams, and (3) let your dreams evolve as you go through life.

This will help ensure you don’t get blindsided by a sense that life didn’t deliver when you’re older, and feel some need to make a dramatic shift.

I have a perplexing fascination with mid-life crises. I’m 33 years old, and not in danger of having one (that I know of) anytime soon.

A few months back, I saw this late-seventies book shared on X and it gripped me. I just had to know what insights this lady had for the stage of life 10 years down the road.

Credit: Noah Kagan (@noahkagan)

A few days later my old, yellowed copy arrived and I read through it with the little reading time I could find during my daughter’s naps. I enjoyed it, but it also felt transgressive - like the sign of some character defect in me. “Nobody talks about this; certainly not at my age,” I thought.

Normally, that feeling would lead me to think I should keep this fascination to myself. But I’m trying to shift that default response, so I talked to my wife about it. Talked to friends about it. (And now the next logical step seems to be writing to strangers on the Internet about it.)

In most cases, it’s led to unexpectedly deep conversations. So I’d like to share what I’ve learned about mid-life crises:

What is a mid-life crisis?

My definition:

A stage of life where someone is struck by the realization that their life is both (a) more limited than they thought and (b) not meeting expectations in some major way. Usually they’ve been ignoring this truth, and it comes out either in an outsized reaction or a dimming of their life energy.

Nancy Meyer writes:

A developmental crisis is precipitated…when a man begins to feel that his old life structure no longer fits his newly evolving self—and this is exactly what happens at around forty.

— Nancy Meyer

“How then to cope with the frustrations and fears so common at mid-life? How to cope with the doubts and depression? Instead of confronting them, a man often finds it more his style, to seek an external solution: make a major move, find another job, get a younger wife, leap into an affair—all options oriented toward action.

— Nancy Meyer

Why does this matter to me?

I really don’t want to have a mid-life crisis, but had very little insight into what leads to one.

At their worst, mid-life crises can dramatically shake up or break apart families. I’ve wanted to be a husband and father since I was a kid, and it strikes me as a very crappy outcome to work hard at building a family for a couple decades, only for my marriage (and potentially my relationships with my kid(s)) to disintegrate. ESPECIALLY if it’s due to some preventable crisis of mine.

Life has felt dramatically busier since becoming a parent in the last year. I used to feel I had vast amounts of free time, but that has dwindled while at the same time my sense of responsibility has shot up.

I can see how someone (me) could land in a situation where I just stay busy for 10 or 15 years with family responsibilities and lose sight of the trajectory my life is headed in, so in reading Meyer’s book, I wanted to know - how does someone get to the point of having a mid-life crisis, and how can I prevent one?

What leads to a mid-life crisis?

Meyer’s book is written for people currently coping with such a crisis, so there isn’t preemptive advice for people in their 20s/30s. It does paint a picture of someone in that crisis state, and some of the signposts to avoid:

Signposts

• Under pressure: work is stressful (but maybe not all that rewarding), financial pressures are strong with retirement and possibly kids’ college looming larger, maybe aging parents leave you with heavy responsibility to both parents and kids.

• Lack of encouraging and dynamic primary relationships

  • If your marriage isn’t thriving, it may be more of a semi-peaceful coexistence with lots of minor squabbles and annoyances, and not something that brings a lot of life and encouragement (though I suspect fewer of these types of marriages still exist today compared to the 70’s).

  • If you have Kids in their teen years, they may be at their most unappreciative and rebellious stage. I can’t speak from experience, but based on the book, it seems like this shift can be really challenging for parents as kids focus on asserting their independence.

  • Friends - maybe you don’t have any lol? Honestly, seems like a number of people in this stage are lacking close relationships with other friends outside of their family.

• Physically depleted - simply put, the signs of old age and decline are more present, and this is tough to deal with. For example: dealing with unexplained health issues for perhaps the first time, sexual impotence, general tiredness from a busy life, and not being able to do physical things (without injury) that you used to do.

Three Ingredients

I would condense that down into three primary ingredients:

Weighed Down

The pressures of responsibility for managing a home, raising kids, and coping with work are weighing you down (and this seems to be a compounding effect - if the weight is very heavy, but short-term, this seems potentially less damaging that just long-term low grade weight).

Lethargic

There’s very little pouring into you to bring vitality and energy to your life. Perhaps your job isn’t exciting, your intimate relationship has settled into a somewhat stale “life partner” phase more focused more on responsibility than thriving connection, and (if you have teenagers) your kids are at an age where conflict and separation are more normal. Either bring vitality back to one of these things or find a hobby or community that enervates you and brings that energy back.

Emotionally Under-resourced

Many people don’t have the emotional awareness or support network to deal with the first two challenges in a nuanced way, or address them before they become big, and it’s more likely to create a kind of pressure cooker.

I’m paraphrasing here, but one of the interesting points Meyer made was that men (probably more true in 1978 than today) are used to just taking decisive action but not really working through feelings, which means a sudden crisis of meaning is more likely to result in some kind of overstated reaction rather than thoughtfully processing those feelings and letting life evolve over time in response to your changing needs.

How to prevent a mid-life crisis:

My biggest takeaway is to solve the last problem (being emotionally under-resourced) and the rest will take care of itself:

You should have a regular practice of reflecting on your life dreams and desires, especially those that don’t line up with your current trajectory and lifestyle.

Emotional Resourcing

On my wedding day, my father-in-law finished his toast with this gem of a line:

“…and may some of your dreams come true. Reality.”

In the backdrop of the idealistic wedding day, Allie and I scoffed at the line then, but as time has gone on, I’ve come to love it more and more.

I’ve found that in adult life, dealing with life dreams changing—moving out of reach or coming into view—is a vital skill, and I think one of the most important for preventing a mid-life crisis.

Adulthood surprises us in many ways; unfortunately, many of these are not welcome surprises. Maybe you’ve had one or more of the following experiences:

• You started your career with big plans to “make a difference,” but now you’re at the bottom of the totem pole with very little influence, and the day-to-day work kind of sucks.

• You can’t wait to become a parent, but you and your partner struggle to conceive for years.

• You feel like your day-to-day is just doing adult life tasks, paying bills, and you feel stretched extremely thin financially, emotionally, and mentally.

• You developed unexplained chronic illness and it’s now a struggle to get out of bed each morning. You feel like you’re spending all your time either working or recovering enough to power through another workday.

• You’ve always wanted to travel and finally got to take that big trip you’ve always wanted to take; but you had a nightmare of a time trying to get there, got pickpocketed, and then spent half the trip recovering from food poisoning.

• You started a career that was deeply meaningful - maybe religious work or work for a non-profit, but you’ve become disillusioned, and no longer want to be there but don’t see a way out.

Definitely if you’re in your 30s or beyond, you probably have at least a few of these kinds of scars.

When I go through hard experiences like those, my initial response is just to shoulder that load, learn to accept those issues as my lot in life, and carry on.

But this is exactly why this book was so useful.

The danger of a mid-life crisis comes in because as we hit these small to large snags throughout life, the dreams that gave us hope sit in the background. They’ve given us a quiet hope, and sometimes we don’t recognize when they’re moving further out of reach. If we don’t stop to recognize that, we’re likely to lose ourselves in the day-to-day stuff of life, and the risk is greater that one day we’ll wake up and realize certain dreams that were a major source of meaning seem totally unattainable.

But, if we take the time to cope with our dreams, and give space to let go of them, allow them to change, or replace them altogether, we can preserve that sense of hope.

To do that, I’ve found two practices vital: (1) solo reflection, and (2) community support.

Solo Reflection

My experience with a young daughter is that the solo time to reflect, think, maybe read, is one of the easiest things to sacrifice completely. It’s WAY on the back burner. But back to the mid-life crisis book, Meyer highly recommends having both the physical space and time to reflect:

Have a retreat at home. Every man should have a place in his house—besides the bathroom—where he can be alone. He should have a place for privacy, a space of his own, where he can have the leisure to think and “to meet himself.”

— Nancy Meyer (emphasis mine)

If you can’t justify taking some time to sit and think, combine it with something else - go for a walk and allow your mind to wander. Or take up running for one of your workouts and forgo listening to music. Give yourself a question or two to ponder, and just see where your mind takes you. Here are some possible questions that could provide some rich exploration:

• Is there anywhere in life I’m just going through the motions? If so, why? What about that isn’t energizing?

• What in life do I dread or feel restless in? Why? Am I stuck there?

• Are there any dreams of mine that feel out of reach? Do I need to let go of them, or double down? (If you have any you need to let go of, give yourself time to grieve those. Depending on what it is, this can be a long process).

• Is there anything in life I really want but am not getting? What could I do to get more of that thing?

Make it a priority to reflect on where your life is delivering or not delivering, and what you can do to better reach those dreams of yours.

Working with Others

I’ll put this as simply as possible: have someone you can talk to about your problems!

I’m a huge proponent of accountability groups for just this reason. It’s not normal to just talk about our problems or our dreams in a meaningful way, and having a group that exists for just this purpose gives you permission to think through the things that really matter to you, and gives you the support and encouragement to take the important actions you need to reach those goals.

Look for a small group of people (or even one other person) you can talk to about the things you want out of life, and ask them to be a listening ear for you, as well as encourage you to turn those wishes into concrete goals and actively work towards them. A good accountability group should provide:

• Listening - you should be heard as you work through your issues and wishes, and your group should add to the discussion with questions and comments that help you clarify your own perspective (and you should offer the same in return)

• Inspiration - if you’re flat out stuck, the group should offer ways to go around to get unstuck.

• Accountability - if there’s something you need to work on, the group should offer healthy social pressure to make sure you’re doing the work.

If you don’t know who to ask, consider asking a family member or partner - it’s someone you already know and could open doors for a deeper connection with them.

Committing to a practice like this won’t change things overnight, but it will help build a personal culture of dealing with your dreams and setbacks head on - confronting those wishes that no longer seem feasible, adjusting where needed, and prioritizing the actions you need to realize the dreams that are attainable.

You’ll limit the likelihood that you’ll be surprised by life not meeting expectations down the road, and staying committed to this over time will help you improve your life so the other two ingredients of a mid-life crisis (weightiness and lethargy) have far less room to develop.

In Sum

My hope is that by being aware of these potential warning signs, and having some of these tips in mind, it will help you build your life and family so that it’s thriving and fulfilling for the present, but also thriving as you do cross the threshold into mid-life and beyond.

If you have thoughts on mid-life crises, or tips on how to avoid them, I’d love to hear your perspective. Drop a comment or reach out on Twitter or via email.