Midlife (Kindle highlights)

To some extent, the backlash against the midlife crisis was an overreaction to a caricature. (p. 16)
Adjusting for income, marital status, and employment, Blanchflower and Oswald found that the level of reported happiness by age had the shape of a gently curving U, starting high in young adulthood and ending higher in old age, with an average nadir at forty-six. (p. 18)
How should we think about the lost opportunities, the regrets and failures, the finitude of life and the rush of activities that drive us through it? (p. 26)
Call it the first rule for preventing a midlife crisis: you have to care about something other than yourself. If nothing matters to you but your own well-being, if you are utterly self-obsessed, not much will make you happy. (p. 34)
You can choose to immerse yourself in things you might come to care about and so begin to change your life. (p. 34)
It is only if human life matters in itself, apart from its effects, that there is any point in altruism. There is value in acting on behalf of others only if there is value in other activities, too. Hence the paradox: if altruism is the only thing that matters, nothing matters. Life is not worth living. (p. 36)
Hence the second rule: in your job, your relationships, your spare time, you must make room for activities with existential value. (p. 48)
It is not just hobbies that have existential value. You can find it at work, too, or in relationships with others. (p. 49)
Work can have existential value. The same is true of friendship. (p. 49)
Midlife is the time to take up golf, the most existential of all activities, or salsa dancing, or playing piano. Instead of feeling let down by the mundanity of our adjustment to middle age, we should see things the other way around. Our idle pastimes are more profound than we may have thought. (p. 50)
When you play Monopoly with friends, or read a book for pleasure, you have a share in the life of the gods. (p. 50)
Yet if you lose touch with existential value, if you find no place in your life for the activities of the gods—ones that make life worth living to begin with—you risk a midlife crisis not unlike John Stuart Mill’s. If you have the opportunity, you should make yourself immortal, some of the time. (p. 51)
The pressures of work and family are so consuming they obscure the possibility of doing anything else. If this is your life, you need to make room for activities with existential worth. They may be less important than doing your job or making the sure the kids are fed, but they have value of a different, irreplaceable kind. (p. 51)
Midlife is missing out. (p. 54)
I look back with envy at my younger self, options open, choices not yet made. He could be anything. But I am condemned: course set, path fixed, doors closed. (p. 56)
That we cannot have everything we want, and what we have does not subsume or compensate for what we don’t, is a consequence of incommensurability. It follows from the diversity of values in human life, from the fact that there are so many different things worth wanting, worth caring about, worth striving and fighting for, too many ever to exhaust. (p. 60)
To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it, a drastic limiting of horizons. (p. 62)
There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an inexorable side effect of the richness of human life. (p. 62)
So tell yourself this: although I may regret regret, desire that no desire go unfulfilled, I cannot in the end prefer to have desires that could be fully met. The sense of loss is real; but it is something to concede, not wish away. Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive. (p. 62)
So, more advice from philosophy, if not another rule. Tell yourself this: while there are reasons to change one’s life—frustrating jobs, failed marriages, poor health—the appeal of change itself can be deceptive. Because there is value in having options, you will miss having them: an argument for nostalgia. But the value is easy to overrate. It is silly to think that having options could make up for reaching outcomes you would not prefer, considered alone. Think twice before you wreck your home. Is it the space inside you hate, or the fact that it has walls? (p. 70)
What connects nostalgia with missing out is not that there was a time when we could have everything, but that there was a time before we had to commit ourselves and thus confront our losses. (p. 73)
You can’t have it both ways, knowing who you are but not who you are not. (p. 75)
If, like me and Wordsworth, you are nostalgic for the indeterminacy of childhood, when almost anything was possible, tell yourself that what you long for is akin to retrograde amnesia. It would require a similar dissolution of the structure that gives meaning to your life. Its appeal is delusory. Beside this we can put two prior maxims: that you cannot be saved from missing out except by an appalling diminution of the world or your response to it; and that the value of having options is too limited to justify throwing your life away. (p. 75)
If it is rational to be risk averse, to prefer good things you know to the uncertain prospect of better ones, it can be rational to prefer in retrospect decisions you should not have made. (p. 96)
So long as your actual life is good enough, and you are sufficiently risk averse, it is perfectly rational to be content with how things are, even though they could have been much better, and even though you still believe that they went wrong. (p. 97)
We live in details, not abstractions. If it is rational to respond more strongly to the facts that make something good, in all their specificity, than to the featureless, generic fact that something else is better, it is rational to be glad that I made a choice—to be a philosopher, not a physician—that I still believe is worse. What saves me from regret is not aversion to risk, the birth of a child, or an underestimation of philosophy. It is the amplitude of life, its unfathomable particularity, like the fastidious excess of a peasant scene by Bruegel. (p. 101)
Mistakes, misfortunes, failures: no one makes it to midlife without acquiring some of each. I am sure that you have yours. Some have been redeemed by risk aversion, kids, or luck. Others not so much. (p. 101)
Do not weigh alternatives theoretically, but zoom in: let the specifics count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived. (p. 102)
A little knowledge is harmless; too much can tax your peace of mind. Do not obsess about the might-have-beens. (p. 102)
You know from the inside what a decade means; those that remain to you can be counted on one hand. That can be a source of angst. (p. 105)
We have found our first respectable therapy for those who are gripped by fear of death, also cited, this time more credibly, by Irvin Yalom.17 Its efficacy does not rest on any mistake. But it is precarious. It turns on the conviction that there is no relevant contrast between pre-natal and postmortem nonexistence, nothing to break the rational symmetry in which one is a mere reflection of the other. (p. 113)
As Parfit would insist, however, the fact that you are future-biased, if you are, does not settle the decisive question, whether your attitude is ultimately rational. It explains how you feel, but may not justify it. Parfit contends that we should give up future bias, though it can’t be said that he presents a proof. One of his main points on behalf of “temporal neutrality”—giving equal weight to experiences past and future—is that it mitigates fear of death. (p. 115)
This is the point at which cognitive therapy fails: you can learn to live without attachment, but not by reading a book. (p. 125)
Meditation on prenatal nonexistence, the nothing before us, is itself no different from the nothing to come: it helps those less prone to future bias. They can see death as the merely disappointing image of the prior abyss. (p. 124)
Conceiving immortality as a super-power, an extravagant gift, not a sensible demand: it helps those whose love is more giving, wanting the best for themselves and others, less an impulse to preserve what matters, grief at the fragility of life. They can see excess in the desire to live forever. (p. 124)
There is insight in maintaining that attachment is not obligatory, that love is possible without it. There is a crack of light between two darknesses: avoidance of love and inescapable woe. That is where we should steer our ship. (p. 125)
The sense of repetition and futility, the emptiness of satisfied desire: I am not alone in feeling them. Maybe you have felt them, too, mired in the pursuits of middle age, one after the other, wondering what is next. We are textbook casualties of the midlife crisis, striving to achieve what seems worthwhile, succeeding well enough, yet at the same time restless and unfulfilled. (p. 128)
Some activities are “telic”: they aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and thus exhausted. (p. 133)
Other activities are “atelic”: they do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they have been achieved. (p. 134)
It is this engine of self-destruction that powers my midlife crisis and perhaps a part of yours. I have spent four decades acquiring a taste and aptitude for the telic, for achievement and the next big thing, for personal and professional success—only to feel the void within. Fulfillment lies always in the future or the past. That is no way to live. (p. 135)
This is how I diagnose my own midlife crisis. It is partly about regret and missing out and fear of death, but mainly a response to the self-subversion of the project-driven life. My affliction is chronic, not acute, masked by the whirl of activity: more papers to grade, meetings to organize, books to read. It is not that I take no pleasure in going for a walk or spending time with friends, not getting much of anything done. But the roots of meaning in my life are principally telic: they aim at terminal states. (p. 138)
If my problem is an excessive investment in telic activities, the solution is to love their atelic counterparts, to find meaning in the process, not the project. If your problem is mine, this solution will work for you. (p. 140)
Atelic activities are fully realized in the present, not directed to a future in which they are archived in the past. (p. 141)
When you cook dinner for your kids, help them finish their homework, and put them to bed—telic activities through and through—you engage in the atelic activity of parenting. Unlike dinner and homework, parenting is complete at every instant; it is a process, not a project. (p. 141)
The way out is to find sufficient value in atelic activities, activities that have no point of conclusion or limit, ones whose fulfillment lies in the moment of action itself. To draw meaning from such activities is to live in the present—at least in one sense of that loaded phrase—and so to free oneself from the tyranny of projects that plateaus around midlife. (p. 144)
The point I am making here is that it is not sufficient for meaning in life that one attend to the present, to the atelic activities in which you are engaged. It matters what you are doing, not just that you are doing it in the Now. (p. 153)
To live mindfully is to perceive the value of atelic activities, a value that is not exhausted by engagement or deferred to the future, but realized here and now. It is to resolve your midlife crisis, your sense of repetition and futility, of dislocation and self-defeat, by living in the halo of the present. (p. 154)
Meditating on your breath, your body, the sounds in your environment is a way to train your appreciation of simple atelic activities: breathing, sitting, listening. There is value in these activities, though not enough for a meaningful life. Attending to their presence is not an end in itself. It is a way to develop your capacity to be in the moment, so as to appreciate the atelic counterparts of the telic activities that matter to you. (p. 153)
First, as we learned from the paradox of egoism: you mustn’t be too self-involved. The obsessive pursuit of happiness interferes with its own achievement. (p. 155)
Second, you should make room in your life for existential as well as ameliorative value, for activities that do not answer needs we would be better off without, but make life positively good. These range from the trivial—playing games with friends—to the profundities of art and science. (p. 155)
First, while the feeling of loss around midlife is real, ask yourself what the alternative would be. Missing out is a consequence of the plurality of values: only a drastic impoverishment in the world, or your response to it, could shield you from dismay. Second, do not over-estimate the value of having options. Options matter, but not enough to compensate for outcomes you would not prefer, considered alone. (p. 156)
Third, while it makes sense to envy your younger self, free from the pain of missing out, do not forget the cost. Not knowing what you will not do entails not knowing what you will, a vertiginous loss of identity. (p. 156)
First, there is new life. Where those you love would not exist except for your mistakes, you have reason to be glad that those mistakes were made. Second, there is risk aversion. When you imagine starting over, keep in mind the many ways things could have gone, the vast uncertainty, weighed against the history you know. Is it worth the counterfactual risk? Third, there is attachment to particulars: the intricate fabric of what matters in your life. It is this plenitude you should place beside the abstract verdict that things could have gone better. (p. 156)
First, there is the attitude of temporal neutrality: giving equal weight to past and future gains. If you adopt this view, the deprivations of being dead are no worse than those of being as yet unconceived. Second, to want the benefits of immortality is to want what lies beyond the human condition. It is like wanting the ability to fly: a power it makes sense to envy but whose absence you should not mourn. (p. 157)
Projects are telic: they aim at terminal states. To engage with them successfully is to complete them and so to eliminate meaning from your life. The solution framed in chapter 6 is to invest more fully in atelic activities, ones that have no point of termination or exhaustion—activities like going for a walk, spending time with friends, appreciating art or nature, parenting, or working hard. (p. 157)
If you value the process, you have what you want right now; and your engagement does not drain its worth. (p. 158)
One thing we learn from the practice of meditation is how to attend to the present: to appreciate the value of the atelic amidst the glittering attraction of achievable goals. (p. 158)