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Impress your 80-year-old self
Two kinds of midlife crisis
The usual midlife crisis grows from fear: fear of a door permanently closed, a road not taken, a season past. It answers with action that chases feelings from the past, the fast cars, young attractive romantic partners, fancy things, status symbols, and limited responsibilities that an 18-year-old would find impressive.
The reverse version starts from the same fear, the same anxiety, and the same grief over time lost. Its response points forward. It builds deep relationships, a healthy, fit body, a grounded, peaceful mind, earned status, and meaningful responsibilities.
What it looks like
One man in his mid-30s noticed the shift a year before he had a name for it. He looks forward to a 4:30 a.m. reading and writing ritual and an 8:30 p.m. television show with his wife. He stopped spending to impress an audience that was never watching, and saving and investing gave him the real freedom those symbols only imitated. He treats health as a long-term investment, and he stopped avoiding hard conversations, since time doesn't heal anything in relationships.
Living by season
A lot of that would sound boring to his 18-year-old self, but that self is a relic of a past season. The task is to live the current season and compound toward the ones to come. George Santayana's line fits: being interested in the changing seasons makes for a happier mind than being hopelessly in love with spring.
How did the midlife crisis get its name?
Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coined the term in a 1965 paper titled "Death and the Mid-life Crisis." He had studied the careers of many famous artists and noticed that their work often changed sharply around age 37. He tied that shift to the point where a person first takes their own mortality seriously. The phrase reached a wide audience through popular books in the 1970s, including Gail Sheehy's "Passages," published in 1976.
Why do status symbols stop satisfying?
Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described the hedonic treadmill in 1971, the tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness after a gain. In a 1978 study, Brickman and two colleagues compared lottery winners with a control group and found the winners did not report being significantly happier. New cars, new homes, and new rank all become ordinary once they are familiar. The same study found that people with serious accidents rated their daily pleasures lower than the controls did, but not nearly as low as most people would predict.
Why does regret grow over roads not taken?
Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec studied this in a 1995 paper in Psychological Review. In the short term, people regret actions that went badly more than chances they let pass. Over the long run, the pattern flips, and people's lifetime regrets center on what they never did. Part of the reason is that a failed action can be explained and absorbed, while an untried path stays open to endless imagining.
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