In the previous part we introduced two landmark books that first popularized the phrase “mid-life crisis;” Men in MidLife Crisis, by Jim Conway, and Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Daniel Levinson. The former is often the work cited as coining the famous phrase, as it was a bestseller in its time. Or so they say, good luck finding actual best seller list data and statistics. Yet another example proving that I’m officially old because I can’t produce the right Google search to find this information. Although on page three of my search results, the Wikipedia entry on Merle Haggard showed up, can’t wait to check that one out. I’ve recently covered one of his songs, ‘Misery and Gin,’ so perhaps the Universe is telling me something. No, The Universe can’t talk, it’s not telling me anything. It’s just a concept, really. We’re still debating how old and how big it is. Did we start using that phrase because it sounded better than using ‘God?’ Makes sense to me.
Good segue, as Jim Conway is a Pastor, and the author of the aforementioned Men in Midlife Crisis. Each chapter in his book ends in a Bible verse. I puke in my mouth a bit as I write that. The Amazon.com introduction summary for the book includes the following passage; “Jim Conway writes for all men who face midlife and have thought about walking away from family, work, church . . . all responsibilities, and never coming back.” Ummmmm nah. I wouldn’t say he writes for all men. God had no part in my midlife crisis. I fought through to read as much of this book as possible for you, the reader. I suppose it’s my obligation if I’m going to claim any authority on the subject. But this is exactly the point. This is why I’m doing this. My life looked nothing like these traditional midlife crisis stories. I had a great job, I lived in a great neighborhood in a thriving city, wasn’t in a lifeless marriage, no self esteem issues, no teenage children… yet I was unhappy, I was lost. Conway’s book doesn't mean much to me because it doesn’t explain anything about our human conditions beyond the typical, relatively vague and high-level feelings of being lost, or wanting something more out of life.
It wasn’t until I read the second book on our list today, that I began to connect the dots about my life and human life in general. Well maybe Western life in the early 21st century, at least. Which happens to be where I live. In this Universe. The one that doesn’t talk.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, back to Conway. The book was originally published in 1978, updated and re-issued in 1997. In the introductory statement for the updated issue, Conway talks about personal computers and internet porn in the context that “U.S. morals are very different (than they were when the book was first written).” Ugh. Morals are different? You’re older, buddy. People haven’t changed their morals, you’re just learning more about how different they are than your own. He makes 1997 feel like 1897. Cringe.
No doubt mainstream media in the 70s (as well as Conway’s community and corresponding bias) pointed to a storyline in which folks started families in their early or mid twenties, held a long term job, and lived in the same town or even the same house in those ten, fifteen or twenty years since that initial settling period. I doubt I need to outline here the differences between today and 1978 when it comes to how we work, play, live, raise families and even how we communicate to each other. The American Dream and what that looks like is quite different.
Thankfully we have made some small steps forward since 1978 in the way of mental health moving into mainstream collective conscience. Anyone going through their crisis may be considering research on depression, addiction to drugs or alcohol, past and current relationships, childhood trauma and related behaviors, etc. Because we are slightly more educated by advances in, and acceptance of, psychotherapy, we have more tools at our disposal to not only understand the forces at work in our existing crisis, but we can find solace and guidance in communities that have a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening.
Today Conway is the President of LateLife Hope, a ministry focused on the baby boom generation, as stated on his LinkedIn profile. No doubt conway has provided very beneficial guidance to his community in the past 50 years. Today, however, unless you are in that community of Christian boomers, I doubt there’s much value in digging too deep into his book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that this book helped shine a very big light on aspects of adult life that probably had been buried. Where Levinson is a deep-dive textbook, Conway’s situations and descriptions are easily accessible; a fantastic first step in our journey. I’m simply saying that it's not necessary to read this book because today’s world as his stories have already made their way into our common culture.
Although the diversity of stories and characters we can follow in our modern media streams has greatly expanded since Conway’s time, many narratives are limited to a perspective locked in a certain time or place. Can you think of many stories that follow our human experience over the long term? Homer Simpson has not aged into an elderly man. We will never know how he feels about retirement. Do sandwiches still run his life? Maybe he’s lost weight? Has Marge picked up her Yoga certification and teaches class three days as week to combat empty nest syndrome? Maybe we’d see Bart experience teenage angst or depression isn’t really miles apart from adult dead-end job angst? Maybe. What about the massive self help industry? Tony Robbins, where are you?
Are social acceptance and romantic life-forces any different at 14 than 40? Probably. But you can feel alienated, lost, restless or bored at any age of your adult life. Decisions about how we make money, where we live, what pills to take or who to love; don’t these things come in and out of focus at any age; perhaps as a result of some catastrophe or victory? I’m not saying that one size fits all in addressing these issues in our lives, but surely there must be some sources out there in our beautiful interwebs that can help connect these dots of our life phases.
That’s where the other book in our post today comes in; Seasons of a Man’s Life. It is dense, it feels like I’m reading a textbook. I think I’ve been reading it off and on for….a year? More? Definitely not a page turner, which I’m sure you’re surprised to hear. Seasons is a summary of a study of over three years by Yale psychology researcher Daniel Levinson. I’m sure you’ll think that I’m completely bonkers when I say that this book is what really motivated me to ask more questions and share its effect on me. Where Conway’s book gives endless examples of a midlife crisis without much accessible discussion on its causes or effects; Levinson speaks to the stages in life and what we go through as we grow generally. He takes his survey of 40 men over months and months of interviews and makes inferences as to how their stories are connected. What are the various processes happening to these guys? How do they change? How do they stay the same? How do we react, pivot, stir the pot?
Levinson states that the “Mid-Life Transition” occurs, roughly, between the ages of 40 and 45, and was only a discovery OF the research; they did not begin with a hypothesis that there was some well defined transition at midlife. They could not find one physical or social event that triggered this time (such as “empty nest, puberty, menopause, etc.) Instead, their biographical approach yielded three areas of study:
1) Biological and psychological functioning
2) Sequence of the generations
3) Evolution of careers and enterprises.
The book’s findings build up from the biographical studies of the 40 men, not down from a predefined conclusion. When introducing the various adult lifecycle tasks and periods, Levinson states, “When we used the concept of life structure in writing the biographies of our 40 men, we made a remarkable discovery: the life structure evolves through a relatively orderly sequence during the adult years. The essential character of the sequence was the same for all men...it consists of a series of alternating stable (structure-building) periods and transitional (structure-changing) periods. These periods shape the course of adult psychosocial development.”
I was initially floored by the obviousness of such a conclusion, and it is quite easy to immediately apply this to my own life and hypothetically, as well. After all, can one really go through one stable phase for an entire adult life? Isn’t that how we view it when we are young? Surely one must cycle through periods, stability can only last so long. How long can a soul be at rest? And life is not so complex that we can’t package our few overarching events, drives, needs, into high level ‘structures.’ These concepts we will surely rethink from time to time. We may confront them head-on, or even work through slowly. It may take a long time to get over it, to make a change, but we will move on. We must, what sense would it make for us to be locked in limbo?
Perhaps you, the reader, is more aware than I, perhaps you could see these cycles coming in your adult future. But for me, simply understanding that the breaking down and the building up of these structures is a normal cycle was quite illuminating. All 40 men in the study experienced these phases beginning and ending. The haze cannot last forever. It must not.
Of course, there is an inherent variance in the years at which these periods occur, as well as their durations, but the simplicity of it caught me off guard. Periods of stability and periods of change. OK sure, maybe we are getting vague here, pretty high-level, I admit. But later in the book there is plenty of discussion around the details involved in each.
Levison walks us through…. Ok, so doesn’t walk us through, it’s really slow, like walking in sand, climbing a muddy hill? Like I said it’s dense. Naps were taken.
Anyway. The study subjects, when they were in their 20’s, they discussed separating from their families, the first time living on their own. They transitioned into making their first paycheck, paying rent and bills, dating other adults that you didn’t meet at a keg party. Some of them transitioned quickly into their own place in the adult world. Some didn’t stray very far from home, and kept family ties strong. Some struggled to find work, some took the military path, or grad school. We can see here, even in this early phase of life, how there might be a variety of paths, but we are all trying to build the structure of worklife, family life, purpose in our social structure, etc. These basic structures will be revisited throughout our lives; they will be contextualized in our common experiences at different ages. These structures, as you might imagine, morph again in our 30’s, they hit again at around 40. Levinson doesn’t use the term Mid-Life Crisis. He calls it “Mid-Life Transition.”
Just scratching the surface here, we are going to return to Levinsons’ book time and again and try to work through some experiences and stories from today’s world, see if they hold up. It’s too much to unpack here, but I’m excited to talk to others, test these structures that Levison so dutifully lays out. We can find out if these phases still swing back around like they did for his subjects and if they create a “crisis,” or just a “transition.”
Shoot me an email if you have a story to tell. Up next we are going to look at songs that may be from the perspective of the mid life human. Any come to your mind? Let me know!
Comments