What do you picture when you think of the mid life crisis? For me? It's a silver Porsche Boxter driven by a skinny white guy with a distressed baseball hat on. Wait, maybe it's Clark W. Griswold driving his wooded station wagon down the highway towards WallyWorld. Ok so not a man in crisis, but he's starting to crack, right? Remember when Christy Brinkley drives alongside in her red Ferrari convertible? He flirts with her through the window as his wife and children sleep, later on he skinny dips with her in the hotel pool. The great American family road trip... practically derailed by a man desperate to.... recapture his youth? escape his adult obligations? simply give in to his boyish desires? National Lampoon's Vacation was released in 1983, that's a long time ago. What's the updated version? Does it look much different? Probably not.
After learning more about this very real phenomenon from my own personal experience, I started searching for an update to my antiquated picture of what the mid life crisis was. Is. In an effort to track down some alternative perspectives, I started with humanity's go-to educational tool; the Google search. A re-branding of the midlife crisis, as Pash Pakow puts it in his recent TED talk. Pakow's talk is told from his perspective as a marketing/branding specialist, so his short talk wasn't especially in-depth about what it all means. He does, however, give us good history. I chased down his reference to psychoanalyst Elliott Jacques in 1965 first using the term in a quarterly journal. Pakow later mentions the groundbreaking 1978 study done by a Yale Psychologist by the name of Daniel Levinson, published in book form called Seasons of a Man's Life. We will go waaaay down the rabbit holes in this book soon, but the moral of the story for Pakow, and my motivating take-home message from this talk, is that the crisis is indeed not isolated to turning 40, feeling your mortality or realizing your job is a dead end. These "dips" occur at different times for different reasons throughout our lives.
OK, now we're talking. Continuing my search, I find another TedTalk, thankfully this one is by a woman, Patricia Katz. As I'm sure this isn't just a male phenomenon, I suspect the female version is more interesting than our tired male stereotypical story. Her version of the crisis is referred to in this presentation as a “ Midlife Malaise,” courtesy of TEDxSaskatoon. Her crisis story was so wonderfully ordinary and thereby also exceptionally accessible. No steamy affairs, embarrassing antics or triumphant conclusions. Just a very real story of how one can make lemonade from this period of lemons. If you can get over the nerd-smug that is often ladled over you during a TedTalk, check these two out. You'll find another on the Quarter-Life crisis, which we know now is definitely a thing, and will dedicate some research on that part of the experience later in the blog, as well. We see this come up when we get into our in depth book report on Levison's Seasons.
Now, there is of course plenty of self-help material out there on concepts that are mostly about 're-inventing' yourself... or tips and tricks to starting new careers, hobbies, etc. And of course the ancient art of reviving sexless marriages, changing careers, etc. But I'm still really not finding anything that's giving me a more in-depth look at what the F is going on when it comes to WHY, at this supposed peak of our adulthood, we can't put a finger on what's going on?
The concept is still out there generally, I think we can all agree. Popular culture today still embraces the idea of a pathetic, lost middle-aged character. A recent example is the Paul Rudd miniseries on Netflix called "Living With Yourself." His character is in such a bad place that he literally empties his joint checking account of $50,000 on the promise of an improved self via a secret 'spa treatment.' Obviously jeopardizing his marriage on only a mysterious referral from a superstar co-worker. It's a pretty hilarious 5 part series that I recommend, but the point here is that Rudd's character is perfectly pathetic. He's desperate, he's a shadow of his potential self. He's unmotivated. Yet he's supposed to be starting a family with his wife. He was, supposedly, at one time very talented and successful at his job. I think some of us might be a little embarrassed to admit that the lengths of desperation these characters go thorough really isn't' all that far fetched. I mean Griswold commits what I'm pretty sure is felony kidnapping of John Candy to force his way onto the rides of the closed WallyWorld. John Candy. Dead or Canadian? Show of hands, who saw Uncle Buck? He held the throne of the fat man comic in the 80's until Chris Farley unceremoniously dethroned him via skits like the belly thrusting Chippendales dancer on SNL. In a van, down by the river.
But what happens next? We all just stay miserable into old age and live out our lives that way? Sure, it's very entertaining to see Clark Griswold and Rudd's character Miles Elliott spiraling out of control, but we rarely get to see how these characters resolve their lives. Griswold is still his same disillusioned self as he ages into Christmas Vacation years later. What's missing from these stories is the reason why I'm writing all this down. Eventually things resolve themselves. Eventually there are some epiphanies. Changes that are made. Structures are re-built after being torn down. It's not always a crisis, it's not always pathetic, but the more I research this phenomenon, the more common it seems to be. If I had known that there was a light, not a darker dark, at the end of the tunnel, the whole experience would have been much easier.
The final piece of this origin story is perhaps its most well represented. Whereas Levinson's study was a groundbreaking piece that started an entire sub-genre of adult psychology, the pop culture ate up the book Men in MidLife Crisis, authored by Jim Conway and published initially in 1978, oddly enough the same year of Levinson's book. I have yet to find references to each other in either book so it's safe to say that people were starting to recognize these patterns in parallel. Although Levinson's study was ten years in the making. Where Seasons reads more like a textbook, Conway's Men reads more like a self-help biography bestseller.
Conway's book is based on his experiences as a pastor, hearing first hand stories from people in his parish. Although at the time I'm sure the popularity of this book was well warranted, but today these stories are familiar. In addition the perspective is quite narrow, even the women's stories are in the context of their husband's crisis.
These books are older than I am. So they left me with a lot of questions. How has the internet and the way in which we communicate affected how adults move through these different transition periods? How much are the timelines in Levinson's book a factor of 70's Western cultural norms in business, education, job market, etc? The pure volume of data suggests these events are universal, but what does it look like when we reach beyond our borders to other cultures? There is a follow up Seasons of a Woman's Life, which I have yet to cover, what will that tell us? We've learned so much about our human biology in the last 40 years. What about physical changes in our bodies over time? Our personal experiences at those oh-so-important developmental years? What about our DNA?
What's your image? What do you think it looks like now? Is it just an accepted part of life? Its is an overblown cultural cliche? Comment below or write me at matt@mattswayze.com.
Next time: More on these two landmark books and an example of the new crisis...