The Mid-Life Crisis

[00:00:00]Hey folks, David Stewart here. Hope you guys are having a great day. Let's talk about midlife crises. The dreaded midlife crisis. I don't feel like I'm going through one, but I think they're natural. I think there's a long precedent for them. And I want to talk about them a little bit today, especially how we see them in literature as well as mass media. So, if you grew up in my generation, you're probably associating a midlife crisis with the baby boomer generation because this was a really common thing that they did.

[00:00:31]They reached their 40s and they did things like buy a sports car or divorce.

[00:00:38]They get a divorce from their spouse and date someone else, try to relive youth, they buy a motorcycle, they uh take up guitar, they do things that are associated with youth. And I think that is an expression of how the baby boomers did it. And this is something I saw not only in real life. I I knew lots of people that did this as a child, but also the boomers express this themselves through their media. Many sitcom episodes revolve around a character reaching a certain age, usually 40, 45, something like that, and reflecting on their life and realizing that their youth is gone and they don't want their youth to to be gone. And so they start doing a bunch of crazy things to recapture their youth before they accept the reality that they're not 25 anymore.

[00:01:23]They can't relive those days and they really don't want to and they sort of accept that their life is good the way that it is and kind of move forward from there. That's the standard way that you'll see like a midlife crisis plot.

[00:01:34]Whether you're looking at the Simpsons or you're looking at like um Home Improvement or or any of these shows where characters start to have a a wonderment about whether their life is all, you know, the life that they experience is all there is. Now, the thing is, baby boomers were one generation. Now, we've had Gen X that have reached middle age and passed it.

[00:01:55]and my generation too, those of us born in the '8s, is this is the same sort of crisis that I see people having? And the answer is no. But it's the same comes from the same spirit. So because our generations had this more extended period of youth where in in your 20s, you often weren't getting married, you were um doing adventures, you were trying out lots of different things, you were living a pretty chaotic life. And certainly my 20s were very uh were very chaotic compared to probably the baby boomers who settled in a little bit earlier I think than uh my generation did. And so the midlife crisis I think tends to be about self-actualization and making an impact in the world. That is uh baby boomers went and got a car and took up karate and millennials and Gen X they start writing novels and doing things like that. Now I started writing novels a long time ago. So, that's not really part of my midlife crisis. Really, if I'm having a midlife crisis, it's like I'm just going to take a break from writing novels for a while and do other things. Um, but it comes from the same spirit, which is knowing that you're you're halfway through your life and that the other half of your life is looking in front of you, you can uh start to feel like you missed something along the way. And I think that was the baby boomers. The baby boomers um a lot of them settled into domestic life pretty early by our modern standards.

[00:03:19]And so when they reached middle age, they felt like they had missed something about youth and that might have fueled some divorces. I don't think that it fueled as many as people would like to believe because it's a complex thing when something like that happens. But uh you know may have fueled that it fueled people uh going out and buying new things, taking up new hobbies that they associate with youth and um the cycle goes around. And I don't think it's all that new. You can look at lots of historic pieces of literature and you find that people in middle age start doing different things. Uh they maybe reach the end of their childbearing or child rearing years and they turn to other endeavors whether it's going to be some academic pursuit or you know they become a scientist or they uh like in Bilbo in the Hobbit they go on an adventure they start doing things that are more adventurous. So Bilbo is 50 in the Hobbit. That's a middleage period for hobbits and he gets whisked off to an adventure. So he gets sort of rescued from this stillness of the domestic life that gets settled into and gets to experience a transformation halfway through his life. So it's not unprecedented and it's found in lots of our literature and I think it's really born from this these transitionary periods these liinal periods that we have in life. We have a transitionary period from our childhood to our adulthood, right? And that has gotten longer, I think, for my generation. The 20s, living in your 20s was considered a really kind of irresponsible time where you were expected to to go out and do lots of different things and then kind of somehow end up in a settled situation. Whereas previous generations, I think, settled a little bit earlier than that.

[00:05:01]So we have a longer liinal period there and so the the following liinal period is going to look a little different but the next one happens when you reach the end of your childbearing years if not your child rearing years. So the end of childbearing years, which would be, you know, once you get into your 40s, fertility drops, you stop having kids as a couple, and then your children are older, they're more independent, and then with that extra time, because young children are extremely time inensive, you're like, well, what do I do with my life? It's a really, really common um experience. So many of my friends that are maybe a little bit older than me, a little further on, they have this like, is this all there is to life? Is this all that I am? Am I just a mom? Am I just a dad who works a corporate job and goes home and sleeps at night and puts his kids to bed or whatever? Like, is this all there is to life? And so, you start looking for things outside the self to um provide additional meaning. I think for the boomers it was recapturing youth. I think for Gen X it is doing something important in the world like I'm going to write a book. Um, so many people I encountered uh as an indie author were people in their 40s and 50s, people that were looking to take their time and make an impact with a book.

[00:06:16]They really wanted to be an author. That was something that really appealed to them. And you know what? That is a great thing to take up in your midlife. It's a fantastic thing to take up in your midlife because you've gained knowledge and experience, which you know helps with writing. It helps to be knowledgeable and experienced and to have done lots of things and be able to use that to inform your work. That's fantastic. It's also something that you can do because the reality is our bodies our bodies decay. They age. They I can't do what I could when I was 25 and you can't either. However, you can still write, right? It doesn't require you to be strong and physically fit. Um, anybody can take up uh writing. So, it's a great hobby, I think, to take up in your 40s or 50s or when you find that you have a little bit extra time when your kids get older. That's a great hobby to take up or, you know, to pursue music or something like that. We we now associate especially popular music with um youth, the young. But if you're just looking to, you know, um for kind of self artistic fulfillment, music's a great thing to take up. Art is as well.

[00:07:26]People are usually not judging your art based off of how old you are. They're just judging for how how it looks. Same thing with your writing. They don't really care that you're an an old guy um doing doing art. They just want it to be good. That's what people want. So, I think those are great things to pick up in your midlife. And that's a really good way to view that transitionary period is that's an opportunity to to expand the self, to do new things, to reach out into the world beyond just your children. Children are an automatic way that you impact the world. So when you have children, that's like your automatic legacy is your children. And so once you get to the transitionary period where they're more independent and they need you less, how else do you affect the world? Well, I think writing is a great is a great undertaking to to look at. Same thing with uh music or art. I think those are great ways to spend your time to do something artistic because now you have this experience that you can express out there. Physical fitness is an important one though too and I so I've noticed this is that people when they get to middle age and I guess this is true for art as well. Um they either accept accept where they are and where things are going or they rebel against it and that's the midlife crisis. I guess they have a crisis where like I can't accept this is the normal and I'm going to change things. So, for as far as the physical body goes, you know, your body decays, you get weaker when you get older. It's you you don't recover from injuries as quickly. You uh lose strength. You it's harder to lose weight. It's harder to be lean. Um you know, you have moles and stuff from skin damage. There's all kinds of things that happen with aging. And so, when you get to be middle-aged, you can either go down two routes. You can just sort of let your body decay and kind of manage the decay or you can fight against it.

[00:09:22]You can uh do your best to improve your physical fitness to say to stay strong, to stay active and prolong your healthy years as long as possible. And it's an input output thing. The more exercise you do, the better you work out, the better your nutrition, the longer you're going to feel good into your old age.

[00:09:41]And so for me, that's really where like my fitness goals uh are at this point.

[00:09:46]I'm not looking to be the super shredded hot guy on the beach. That's probably not going to be me. I'm older at this point, but I would like to be healthy for as long as possible so that I can enjoy the life that I've built. Um because when you get to your 40s, what tends to happen even with my generation is that you've settled into a career usually by 40s and you've had your career a while and you settle into family life. You've been married a while and hopefully you can keep the security of those things. You don't dissolve your family. Some people do and that's unfortunate. Um and you don't abandon your career, but instead you find another way to to self-actualize. Um, so I think for physical stuff, yeah, you want to kind of rage against the dying of the light. And so that's why people have these big kind of obsessive uh physical crises where they're like, I'm going to lose all the weight. I'm going to take up jiu-jitsu. I'm going to do all these different things that uh young people do. And I don't think there's anything specifically wrong with that.

[00:10:46]It's more just from the outside people see that as like this guy's trying to recapture youth rather than um trying to prevent trying to look into old age as like I'm going to go into my old age with like the best possible body, the best setup for what I can do. Jiu-jitsu may not may not really play into that because you could get injuries and things when you're older, right? But a good fitness regimen will probably, you know, serve you a lot. So I think instead of looking at the midlife crisis as indeed a crisis, I think it's better to look at it as a transitionary period where you have opportunities to look to the future. What are you going to be doing when you're old? How are you going to be affecting the world once your children get older? Um how are you going to um how are you going to make an impact on other people beyond your children? What are you going to do with your life once that timeintensive period of raising small children starts to loosen up? I think that's an opportunity. That's not a thing like, oh no, I'm wasting my life for something like that. Raising your children is not wasting your life.

[00:11:52]That's one of the best investments you could possibly make and it's one that will pay dividends when you get older and you have somebody who's who's in your corner looking out for your interests, somebody who's going to help you to make those decisions when you get older and it gets harder to take care of yourself. um and you know and all that sort of thing. So, I would love your opinions on it. I've seen some of the worst midlife crises before where people have like abandoned their family and done horrible things to try to recapture some spark of youth where like they're terrified of continuing to live in that same situation for a long period of time. But I don't think you have to like blow up your life. I think you can change a couple of things and it's natural and normal. And I guess that's my point. It's good to look at those sort of transitionary phases as opportunities, right? When you get to be an adult, you look at it as a huge opportunity hopefully like I I can do all these things. Uh there's all these things, all these paths are open to me.

[00:12:45]And once your children get a little older, then it's like all these paths are opening back open. What what paths can I go down? What new things can I do?

[00:12:52]What what sort of things can I put into my life to like continue to make it fulfilling and wonderful hopefully? So, leave me your thoughts. I'd love to read them down below. What do you think of the baby boomers versus like Gen X um midlife crisis? What do you think? How do you think those are different? I'd love to read them and I'll check you all next time. Have a great great day.