Don’t Call It a Midlife Crisis

On the etymology of a term, grief (again), and the wisdom of Bob Odenkirk.

Recently, I got interested in the midlife crisis. It seems to be a concept that is either directly involved in the coaching work I’m doing at the moment or lurking somewhere just off stage. So I started doing a little bit of reading.

Now look, I’m one of those people who never quite got over existentialism. And I would categorize myself as somewhat “crisis prone” (mostly of the what does it all mean variety), so it’s not the first time I’ve noodled on this idea. I could tell of a handful of quarter-life crises, a midlife crisis or two (and I’m sure there are more coming), and I expect these times of rumination will continue to arrive until the Grand Poobah rolls around.

But this time my interest was less in the timing and the symptoms and the experience of the thing and more in the origin of the idea.

There’s something I don’t exactly like about this term - midlife crisis. First of all, it makes it seem like a hill you climb and once you’ve climbed it you’re done, transformed, all your questions answered. Secondly, it makes it sound like it’s out there waiting for you, this self-fulfilling prophecy - the prediction of the event that leads to the event of the prediction, and all that.

I’ve also noticed that digging into the origin of a term almost always changes your perception and understanding of it. (A great recent example of this was Leslie Jamison’s article in the The New Yorker on imposter syndrome (another term I have a problem with)).

So, where did this term come from?

Well it took almost zero effort to learn that “midlife crisis” originated in a paper written by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques. The paper is entitled, ever alluringly, “Death and the Midlife Crisis” (1965).

A few things I find interesting about this paper:

Jaques’ theory emerged by studying “the creative work of great men.”

He observed in these “great men” that middle age (~35 in his estimation) seemed to be a creative inflection point where 1) their creative output stopped (or they died), 2) their creative output started (intrigue!) , or 3) their creative output changed dramatically in some way (see Picasso’s return to order).

For example, it wasn’t until the age of 33 that the French painter Paul Gauguin quit his job as a stockbroker and dedicated himself fully to his greatest interest.

Feelings of grief and loss crept into the work.

Becoming more aware of mortality, Jaques believed, the artists’ work shifted from “impulsive creativity to sculpted creativity - from radical desire and impatience to a more reflective and tolerant conservatism.” The artist grapples more directly with their limitations and their limited ability to achieve all they’d hoped.

Describing one of his patients, Jaques said, “He began his adjustment to the fact that he would not be able to accomplish in the span of a single lifetime everything he had desired to do. He could achieve only a finite amount. Much would have to remain unfinished and unrealized.”

The paper was perhaps fundamentally a personal narrative.

When Jaques presented the paper to the British Psycho-Analytical Society, a key patient to whom he refers is a 36 year old man who says, “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight—far enough away, it’s true—but there is death observably present at the end.”

He was later reported to have said that he was the 36 year old patient. He was grappling with his own understanding of mortality, undergoing his own creative re-evaluation; he was writing about his own midlife crisis.

Another funny that thing happens when you start focusing on a term/idea is that you start to see/hear it everywhere (courtesy of the frequency illusion).

For example, last week Bob Odenkirk was on the podcast Talk Easy talking about his new show “Lucky Hank.” In the show he plays the chair of an English department at a liberal arts college who’s going through…a midlife crisis.

BUT Odenkirk takes issue with the term - YES! - he says:

I don’t like the midlife crisis description […]. Midlife crisis is so generic. Is there something else we can call it? […]

We all have inflection points in our lives. We have these [times] where you’re steaming along and everything is in its place. And the way you behave towards the world and the way you think about who you are to other people, it always fits, it fits, it fits, it fits.

And then there comes a day (or a week, or a month, or a little time period) where maybe it all changed. And it takes […] a little while to realize ‘I’m not who I think I am in the world anymore, because the world changed.’”

As it happens, evidence is mixed about the occurrence of The Midlife Crisis.

Some studies have shown that it is likely only experienced by 10-20% of people, and that those who score higher on the Big 5 trait neuroticism are more likely to experience it. Other very large studies have shown that happiness consistently maps a U-shaped pattern in relation to age across cultures, and that it bottoms out in the mid-to-late 40s.

Is it a crisis? Is it an inflection point? Is it a re-evaluation - or an evaluation for the first time?

Perhaps it’s just an ongoing evolution, an assessment of what’s happening now in my life and how I understand myself in relation to it.

What’s interesting about the research as well is that it suggests these crises may be less directly related to death and more related to life events - to change - which can be unsettling and confusing, and there happens to be a lot of change in midlife because there’s a lot of life in midlife.

Relationships, work, kids, aging parents, physical health, the list goes on; all grappling with the thought maybe I’m not exactly who I think I am in the world anymore because my world changed.