Being focussed on finishing projects and meeting deadlines has its downside says philosopher Kieran Setiya and advises a little bit of endless activity (like walking, talking, watching television) to be added to routine to avoid mid-life crisis.
Any time between the ages of 45-60, the mid-life crisis may occur and it could last for up to ten years in the case of men and about two to three years for women.
What defines the mid-life crisis? Kieran Setiya who teaches philosophy at MIT and is currently working on and has written books on the mid-life crisis says, “Psychoanalyst Eric Jacques published his paper, ‘Death and the Mid-life crisis’ in the year 1965. What he found was that even though his patients were happy and doing well, they suffered from some kind of malaise and futility, somehow connected with death. People who were doing pretty well and had been successful but felt their life was repetitive and futile.”
Setiya says, “There was this picture of having peaked about half-way through and that the upward trend of life had ended and now the downward slope had begun. Not death as such but in terms of, now I can measure how much life I have left in terms of meaning something…What I find puzzling is that the sense of futility is very elusive. It is not that people are doing things that are failing, it is not that they think they are worthless in what they are doing. It is not that they think all these are just means to an end and I am not getting anything that matters.”
If one was working on a cure for cancer or solving a mathematical riddle it does not seem futile, then why does this sense of futility occur? That, Setiya says is the puzzle that he is trying to solve. He says, “The sense of futility is not the sense that contrasts with being worthwhile…You could have a crisis, a Tolstoy’s crisis and think nothing is worthwhile, nothing is worth doing, or an annihilistic crisis…the puzzling midlife crisis is one in which you think this is all very much worth doing. It is not worthless. But, it still seems futile.”
As you sit up with the hope of understanding Setiya says, “My inspiration in trying to solve the mid-life crisis is an idea from Arthur Schopenhauer which I think is not quite right but is very close to the mark. He was famous for being pessimistic and famous also for an argument on the futility of desire, the hopelessness of desire. His argument was that if you want things that means you are in a state of not having what you want…that is very painful. So maybe you should get rid of that. And not have desires. But if you don’t have desires you will be aimless…you will be in a state of terrible boredom. So you have a dilemma, either you are totally boredom or you have desires and have to endure the suffering of not having them.”
Now, says Setiya that is where he thinks Schopenhaeur is not completely right. “Having a desire is not that completely painful. If you have the desire for a goal and that is giving meaning to your life, in a way, by aiming to complete/finish that project, what you are aiming to do is eliminate that project from your life and thereby to eliminate a source of meaning to your life. Pursuing projects has this paradoxical self-destructive property whereby things that are giving purpose to your existence are the very things in pursuing which you are extinguishing and thereby destroying the purpose.”
Setiya says, “We can start to get a handle on the way out by distinguishing between the activities in life: the telic activities which have a definite end when they are completed (like a project) and atelic activities which do not have a terminal end point like chatting with philosophers, going for a walk…the problem is arising in being excessively focussed on telic activities. The solution I think is to reorient oneself and become more fully engaged in atelic activities. Atelic activities are as much the end as the process…Atelic activities helps to avoid the kind of malaise that comes with mid-life crisis.”
Setiya, himself in midlife crisis says he has diagonised himself well, but is still to experience the benefits of the therapy he is recommending.
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