Premature Mid-life Crisis

I wrote this piece some years ago, before I was 30. I'm now probably in what could be called an on-schedule midlife crisis, but this article still seems relevant. I've updated it slightly to make it current with the times...

In this day and age, such as they are, everything is accelerated. Adolescents have sex before puberty, babies watch television before they can speak, and the stores put up Christmas decorations before Halloween. Presidential candidates begin their campaign four years ahead of elections, Florida and Michigan moved up their primaries to January, and I've heard that American fashion designers release their designs earlier to jump the Europeans. The only thing that seems not to have accelerated is the time it takes to graduate college, which doubles every ten years.

We're well aware of most of these changes and regard them with various measures of alarm, but the acceleration of one particular event has been largely overlooked, though it is very shocking indeed. That is, the mid-life crisis. The mid-life crisis, such as it is, was first documented in the late fifties. Isolated males among the American middle class began to report a condition of malaise. Having purchased all the middle class appliances, middle class houses, and middle class automobiles deemed necessary and sufficient for bliss in those days, these individuals discovered that they were in fact very far from bliss. They wondered to themselves, "What's it all for?", "What have I done with my life?", and "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" Their condition spread rapidly (perhaps transmitted sexually) to women in the form of the malcontent housewife and then to other sectors of the social-economic continuum. By 1975 it had become such an epidemic that it was simply assumed that everyone would suffer a mid-life crisis during his or her lifetime. Some solved the problem by finding new lovers, some by taking new jobs, some by replacing their middle class cars with fancy luxury cars, some by discovering God, and some by watching superhuman quantities of bad television. None of these tactics could actually cure the malaise, but they could distract the victim long enough for him to make it into old age, at which point he would become a miserable old bastard and metaphysical angst would all but dissolve in the face of severe arthritis and ill-fitting dentures.

As time wore on, the onset of the mid-life crisis, like everything else, accelerated. By the late seventies, turning forty would bring on dissatisfied brooding. In the eighties, even the thought of forty (which has often been documented in people as young as thirty plus one day) brought on shudders of depression. In 2008, we begin to wonder what we've done with our lives before we even reach thirty. You see, in the twenty-first century, we've been given the gift of sophistication. We know, long before we actually receive that dead-end management promotion, that we will one day receive it and that all the years leading up to it will have been wasted. We know, before even making a "life choice," that it will prove dissatisfying in the end. And so, we experience mid-life crisis long before the middle of our lives. Moreover, the traditional solutions, a new career, a new car, etc., are not available to us. We've barely begun our first careers and are still paying off that first car. God, of course, is always available, but one "blessing" of sophistication is that we recognize that religion is simply a tool for discovering meaning in life, and that recognition tends to emasculate God's persuasive power, such as it is. Hedonism is a more effective solution; sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll have always helped young people through the hard times. But sex and drugs are hard to get and sometimes have unpleasant side effects, and rock-and-roll just isn't that good. Moreover, hedonism gets old, and by the time you hit thirty, you look at your watch and think to yourself, "Well, it's time to get serious." Unfortunately, you can think of no fulfilling way to do so.  Children can provide a healthy distraction from the gaping maw of meaninglessness, such as it is. Indeed what could be more meaningful than the perpetuation of humanity? But children generally, though not always, have two requirements: 1) a spouse, 2) a career. The career problem has already been discussed (see above). I'll save the marriage comments for another column, but the relevant point is that we sophisticated young'uns know the divorce statistics. Like our careers, we have a good sense that our marriages are not likely to work out in the end, and so we're not in a tremendous rush to wed the first pretty face that comes our way.

As if all this was not bad enough, we young adults of the late twentieth century must endure the blessing of freedom of choice, such as it is. Once upon a time, when almost everyone in the world was poor and miserable and there were no such things as career counselors, a young person's employment options were limited at best. Young men would take on the professions of their fathers, which usually meant plowing furrows in the ground for ten hours a day. If they were lucky, they could choose from a limited set of options available to their social caste. Young women had the excellent opportunity to give birth to and then care for children their whole lives long (or short). In such cases, no one had any need of a midlife crisis because no one could choose the way that his or her life turned out. No forty-something Russian peasant ever said to himself, "I should have been a pediatrician." We affluent ones, however, have loads of choices. The middle class American credo is, "You can be anything you want to be." But what a terrible burden to bear? If I can be anything I want to be, then when I choose poorly, it's all my fault. With so many choices, you must be very careful to make the best choice. But what's the best choice? Any slight obstacle or depression we may encounter as we make our respective ways through this world will lead us to wonder, "Perhaps I should have done X instead?" Indeed, the choices we young adults have before us are positively paralyzing. I usually second-guess my dinner choices, let alone my life choices. And on what grounds are we to choose our careers? Should we pursue the ones that make the most money, that require the fewest hours, that we find most interesting, or that contribute the most to the societal good, such as it is?