The Beauty of the Midlife Crisis
The phrase “midlife crisis” is often used as a joke. People use it to describe someone who somehow behaves out of character or does something ostentatious. In fact, a lot of people believe that it’s a myth, probably just an excuse for a balding guy to buy a new red convertible. But isn’t a “midlife crisis” what Dante alluded to in his famous Divine Comedy in the early 14th century.
“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray” — Dante Alleghari
I saw an article headed “How Modernity Invented the Midlife Crisis”. I don’t agree. Midlife crisis is not a recent phenomena. It is a rite of passage. What modern times have done is to make our lifespans longer. With the rise to the top of the food chain and advancements in medical science, we are living long enough that there’s a second coming-of-age. As we confront our mortality, many of us realize that the current trajectory that we are on will not lead to fulfillment.
Bhagvata Purana, the ancient holy scripture, has the story of King Yayati. Cursed with old age before his time, he was so distraught that he begged his sons to bestow their youth upon him. Prince Puru agreed out of deep love for his father. Yayati then spent the next 1000 years living like an 18 yr old would in Las Vegas. He finally came to the realization that pursuit of pleasures would never lead to any fulfillment and returned the remaining years of youth to his son. In today’s times, Yayati could of course no longer rely on his son being so obliging. He would probably have to make do with getting a red convertible and a girlfriend half his age.
A midlife crisis is us being at crossroads in life. We can take the easy road ahead and buy that convertible or download a dating app on our phone. But that will just fix the symptoms. Temporarily! Eventually, we will circle back to where we were. Or, we can tread the more difficult path and utilize this precious opportunity. We can introspect, reflect, break down mental and physical limitations and evolve into a completely different being. A crisis of emotions is what propelled Siddhartha into becoming Gautam Buddha.
Asking these questions in your 30s or 40s is not easy. We question whether we are invalidating our entire lives up till then. It is very tempting to just continue on the path we have been on and swat away the doubts and the dissatisfaction. There used to be a lawyer in America. He dabbled into politics for years but even his modest ambitions kept on getting thwarted. A crushing disappointment at the age of 40 made him withdraw from politics. He was so depressed that his friends removed all the knives from his house. He went back to practicing law, but introspected with brutal honesty. “I am not an accomplished lawyer”, he wrote in a document. He embarked on a course of self improvement and practiced law by the day and studied philosophy, astronomy, science, political economy, history, literature, poetry and drama till 2 am every night. He wasn’t happy with who he was so, he decided to change.
History is full of examples of amazing second acts. When Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, the company he had founded, he spent months in dejection. He reevaluated his entire life and literally considered options like entering politics.
In his famous 2005 Stanford speech, Jobs admitted he “really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.”
Jobs then went ahead to launch NeXT. he followed that up by launching Pixar Animation Studios. 11 years after they had fired him, Apple Computer, by now struggling, acquired NeXT. Soon after, they made him CEO of Apple again and he took them from one success to another, from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad.
Jobs further said in his Stanford commencement speech, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter into one of the most creative periods of my life”.
The more you are willing to break down, the more you can build back up. We all love the symbolism of the phoenix rising from its ashes. That’s just a fantasy you might think, but mother nature has a card up her sleeve. Butterfly is the quintessential phoenix. I used to think that a caterpillar turning into a butterfly is just like a baby getting it’s teeth. I had this mental model of a caterpillar stuffing itself with food, spinning a cocoon around itself, napping a bit, sprouting some wings and lo, we have a butterfly. I was utterly wrong! Inside the cocoon, a caterpillar completely breaks down. It’s entire body breaks down till imaginal cells (similar to stem cells) remain. From this mass of cells, slowly, painstakingly, a new butterfly body is formed. The old uninteresting “bug” had to completely destruct to evolve into the stunning beauty that is the butterfly.
But this is just how transformation can happen. When we break down all the beliefs that limit us, all the identifications that define us, we can can become someone better. Our friend, the lawyer, went back to politics later. He found a cause he cared about so passionately that he went back with the intention to improve the world. President Abraham Lincoln then went on to abolish slavery in America and become the hero that changed the course of history.
A midlife crisis is not a “crisis”. It’s a call to a quest. A quest to find out who you truly are and what makes your life meaningful. It’s not a “crisis”. It’s a call to an adventure.
