Thought Shrapnel

I’ve Laura Hilliger to thank for pointing me towards The Gray Area podcast, which takes “a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas.” So it fits hand-in-glove with what I discuss here on Thought Shrapnel.In this particular episode, host Sean Illing talks with Kieran Setiya about middle-age, mid-life crises, and generally takes a philosophical look at what’s going on when people reach their forties. Being the ripe old age of 44, this is absolutely in my interest zone.What follows is my transcription (via Sonix.ai)

Sean Illing (SI): One of the things about life that appears to be hard is middle age. And you and you wrote a book about midlife crises. How do you define a midlife crisis?

Kieran Setiya (KS): Actually, kind of like the self-help movement, midlife crisis is one of those funny cultural phenomena that has a particular date of origin. So in 1965, this Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliot Jacques, writes a paper, ‘Death and the Midlife Crisis’. And that’s the origin of the phrase. And he is looking at patients and also, in fact, the lives of creative artists who experience a kind of midlife creative crisis. So it’s people in their late thirties. I think the stereotype of the midlife crisis is that it’s a sort of paralysing sense of uncertainty and being unmoored. Nowadays, I think there’s been a kind of shift in the way people think about the midlife crisis, that people’s life satisfaction takes the form of a kind of gentle U-shape that basically, even if it’s not a crisis, people tend to be at their lowest ebb in their forties. And this is men and women, it’s true around the world to differing degrees, but it’s pretty pervasive. So I think nowadays, often when people like me talk about the midlife crisis, what they really have in mind is more like a midlife malaise. It may not reach the crisis level, but there seems to be something distinctively challenging about finding meaning and orientation in this midlife period in your in your forties.

SI: Well, I’m 42. I just turned 42. It sounds like I’m right in the middle of my midlife crisis.

KS: You’re, you know, not everyone has it, but you’re predicted to hit it. Yes.

SI: Yikes. Well, what is it about midlife that generates all this anxiety and disturbing reflection?

KS: I think really there are many midlife crises. It’s not just one thing. I think some of them are looking to the past. So there’s there’s regret. There’s the sense that your options have narrowed. So whatever space of possibilities might have seemed open to you earlier, whatever choices you’ve made, you’re at a point where there are many kinds of lives that might have been really attractive to you, that it’s now clear to you in a vivid sort of material way that you can’t live. So there’s missing out. There’s also regret in the sense of things have gone wrong in your life. You’ve made mistakes, bad things have happened, and now the project is, how do I live the rest of my life in this imperfect circumstance? The dream life is off the table for most of us. And then I think there’s also things that are more present, focused. So often people have a sense of the daily grind being empty, and that’s partly to do with so much of it being occupied by things that need to be done, rather than things that make life seem positively valuable. It’s just one thing after another, and then death starts to look like it’s at a distance that you can measure in terms you kind of really palpably understand. Like you, you have a sense of what a decade is like, and there’s only three or four left at best.

SI: The thing about being young is the future is pure potential. Ahead of you is nothing but freedom and choices. But as you get older, life has a way of shrinking. Responsibilities pile up. You get trapped in the consequences of the decisions you’ve made, and the feeling of freedom dwindles. That’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with.

KS: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, part of what’s philosophically puzzling about it is that it’s not news that in a way, whatever your sense of the space of options was when you were, say, 20, you knew you weren’t going to get to do all of the things. So there’s a sense in which it’s kind of puzzling that when at 40, even if things go well, you didn’t get to do all of the things, that’s not news. You knew that wasn’t going to happen. What it suggests, and I think this is a kind of philosophical insight, is that there is a profound difference between knowing that things might go a certain way, well or badly, and knowing in concrete detail how they went well or badly. And that’s something that I think we learn from this transition that we make in midlife, that the kind of pain of just discovering the particular ways in which life isn’t everything you thought it might be, even though you knew all along that it couldn’t be everything you hoped it might be. That suggests that there’s a certain aspect of our emotional relationship to life that is missed out. If you just ask in abstract terms, what will be better or worse, what would make a good life? And so I think philosophy needs to kind of incorporate that kind of particularity, that kind of engagement with the texture of life in a way that philosophers don’t always do. I mean, I think there’s another thing philosophy can say here that’s more constructive, which is part of the sense of missing out has to do with what philosophers call incommensurable values.

The idea that, you know, if you’re choosing between $50 and $100, you take the hundred dollars and you don’t have a moment’s regret. But if you’re choosing between going to a concert or staying home and spending time with your kid, either way, you’re going to miss out on something that is sort of irreplaceable, and that’s pretty low stakes. But one of the things we experience in midlife is all the kinds of lives we don’t get to live that are different from our life, and there’s no real compensation for that, and that can be very painful. On the other hand, I think it’s useful to see the flip side of that, which is the only way you could avoid that kind of missing out, that sense that there’s all kinds of things in life that you’ll never get to have. The only way you could avoid that is if the world was suddenly totally impoverished, a variety, or you were so monomaniacal you just didn’t care about anything but money, for instance, and you don’t really want that. So there’s a way in which this sense of missing out, the sense that there’s so much in the world will never be able to experience, is a manifestation of something we really shouldn’t regret and in fact, should cherish, namely, the evaluative richness of the world, the kind of diversity of good things. And there’s a kind of consolation in that, I think.

SI: So is that to say that FOMO is is always and everywhere a philosophical error, or is it actually valid?

KS: In some ways, I think it’s a philosophical insight. In a way, I think there’s a kind of existential FOMO is part of what we have in midlife, or sometimes earlier, sometimes later. But I think that sense that it really is true that we’re missing out on things and that there’s no substitute for them. That’s really true. The kind of rejoinder to FOMO is, well, imagine there weren’t any parties you didn’t get to go to. That wouldn’t be good either, right? You want there to be a variety of things that are actually worth doing and attractive. We want that kind of richness in the world, even though one of the inevitable consequences of it is that we don’t get to have all of the things.

SI: One of the arguments you make is how easily we can delude ourselves when we start pining for the roads not traveled in our lives. And, you know, you think, what if I really went for it? What if I tried to become a novelist or a musician, or join that commune, or, I don’t know, pursued whatever life fantasy you had when you were younger? But if you take that seriously and consider what it really means, you might not like it because the things you value the most in your life, like, say, your children, well, they don’t exist if you had zigged instead of zagging 15 or 20 years ago. And that’s what it means to have lived that alternative life. And I guess it’s helpful to remember that sometimes, but it’s easy to forget it because you just you’re imagining what you don’t have.

KS: This is, again, about the kind of danger of abstraction that, in a way, philosophy can lead us towards this kind of abstraction, but it can also tell us what’s going wrong with it. So the thought I could have had a better life, things could have gone better for me. It’s almost always tempting and true. But when you think through in concrete particularity, what would have happened if your failed marriage had not happened? Often the answer is, well, I would never have had my kid or I would never have met these people. And while you might think, yeah, but I would have had some other unspecifiable friends who would have been great and some other unspecifiable kid who would have been great. I think we rightly don’t evaluate our lives just in terms of those kinds of abstract possibilities, but in terms of attachments to particulars. And so if you just ask yourself, could my life have been better. You’re kind of throwing away one of the basic sources of consolation. A rational consolation, I think, which is attachment to the particularity of the good things, the good enough things in your own life, even if you acknowledge that they’re not perfect and that there are other things that could have been in a certain way better.

SI: This is why I always loved Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati, this notion that you have to say yes to everything you’ve done and experienced, because all the good and bad in your life is part of this chain of events. And if you alter any of those events at any point in the chain, you also alter everything else that followed in unimaginable ways.

KS: I mean, I do think there’s a profound source of affirmation there. I think my hesitation is just that. It’s not that all the mistakes that we make, or the terrible things that happen to us, are redeemed by attachment to the particulars of our lives. It’s that there’s always this counterweight. At the very worst, we’re going to end up with some kind of ambivalence. And that’s better than than the situation of mere unmitigated regret. But it’s not quite the full embrace of life that a certain kind of of philosophical consolation might have given us.