Yes, It’s a Midlife Crisis. So What?

Sometimes, these days, just getting out of bed in the morning is all I can ask of myself.

Jun 13, 2024

When I was younger, I remember the first time I heard the term “midlife crisis.” A friend made a joke about how his dad bought an airplane because he was “having a midlife crisis.”

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. What did buying a plane have to do with a “crisis?” I figured my friend didn’t know what the term meant. He said it like his dad had caught a weird disease… like it was cancer or something.

I almost felt like he was saying, “Thank goodness, my dad survived that midlife crisis, and to celebrate, he bought a plane.”

Huh?

None of that made sense at all. I’d heard of a crisis before: actually, multiple crises, but they were all bad things: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Savings & Loan Crisis, the Iran Hostage Crisis, etc.

So, again, what on earth did any of this have to do with my friend's dad now deciding to fly in his own plane from California to Seattle and back in an afternoon just for fun? What was the crisis here?

Aside from all that, why on earth did my friend’s dad (who was clearly FAR wealthier than I had ever imagined) buy an airplane? That seemed so random. He was my dad’s age: right around 40 years old, so that kind of made sense, I guess… was 40 years old “mid-life?”

How could anybody know what the midpoint of their life was going to be? Was my friend assuming his dad was only going to live to be 80? How could he even know that? That seemed too presumptuous and premature.

In the years since, I’ve learned what this bizarre term means. I recently read Dan Pink’s 2018 book “When,” where he describes where this term comes from.

Apparently, “midlife crisis” was coined by Elliott Jaques, a Canadian psychoanalyst in the 1960s.

“‘The central and crucial feature of the mid-life phase,’ Jaques said, was the ‘inevitability of one’s own eventual personal death.’ When people reach the middle of their lives, they suddenly spy the Grim Reaper in the distance, which uncorks ‘a period of psychological disturbance and depressive breakdown.’ Haunted by the specter of death, middle-aged people either succumb to its inevitability or radically redirect their course to avoid reckoning with it.”

In other words, you kind of just wake up one day and say:

“Holy sh*t, I haven’t done any of the things I wanted to do, and I’m going to die soon. What am I doing with my life?”

Except your life isn’t over yet, so you can actually do something about it. It’s a mixed blessing. You get the panic of realizing you’ve lost track of the path you started down, and you’re way, way off course—maybe even totally lost—and you panic to try to fix it.

But that still didn’t explain to me why men start acting like idiots. As I grew older, into my teen years, I heard people use the term “midlife crisis” a lot more, and I tried to understand all the nuance of what that entailed.

From what I gathered, having a midlife crisis could mean any one or more of the following:

Committing adultery and leaving your wife to go live with a girl in her late teens.
Buying a sports car, plane, or boat.
Moving to Europe or a random tropical island.
Shaving your head, growing a ponytail, getting a tattoo, and/or having your ear pierced.
Quitting your steady job and trying your hand at something really weird.
Taking a sabbatical so you can “find yourself” at some strange mountain retreat.
Learning to play the guitar, starting a rock band, and growing out your facial hair for the first time ever.

All of these sounded totally wacky to me. Why would any man do these things out of the blue, for no apparent reason, except for the fact that he’s reaching the magic age of 40?

That was SO strange. (Especially the ear-piercing thing: I think that’s the dumbest of all of them.)

But that was back then… when I was a teenager.

Looking at my life now, as I approach birthday number 39, things are quite a bit different.

As Bob Dylan said:

“I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”

When I was a teen, right before we moved from California to Colorado, my family had a “going away party” at our house to say goodbye to all the friends we’d known in the time we lived there. (I was about 15, so that meant all of my life, plus a few more years for my parents; maybe a total of 17-18 in all).

It was also combined with an early birthday party for my dad: he was turning 40. I remember looking at all the cards people left on the gift table. There was an overwhelming number of cards that mentioned his age, using phrases like:

You’re basically almost dead now.
You’re over the hill.
It’s too bad you don’t have any hair left.
At least you’re still in shape: round is a shape.
Congrats on making it this far.
When we said “six-pack,” we meant abs, not beer.

On and on the jokes went. The impression I got was that, according to all these Hallmark birthday cards, a 40-year-old man:

Is getting fat.
Is getting old.
Is getting ugly
Doesn’t know how to dress.
Doesn’t know what to do with his life.
Is about to die.

The jokes and cards were… kind of funny, but macabre and hinted at something dark I couldn’t understand. Was getting older really so bad? Was 40 really all that old?

Here I am now, approaching 40, and IT ALL MAKES SENSE.

I guess a midlife crisis is just one of those things that you cannot possibly understand until you’ve gone through it.

Metaphors fail me here, although I think it’s kind of like the fear people have of root canals. I’ve heard many people refer to root canals as the worst thing that could happen to a person.

I’ve heard people say things like:

“Do you want to go to Betty’s party?”
“About as much as I want a root canal.”

People constantly refer to how unimaginably awful a root canal is.

And yet… when I was 33, I had a pain in one of my teeth that was so bad that when I went to the dentist to find out what was going on, and he told me, “You’re going to need a root canal,” I almost grabbed him by the shirt collar to pull his face closer to mine so I could shout at him:

“GIVE ME A ROOT CANAL, NOW! I WANT A ROOT CANAL! HELL, GIVE ME TWO ROOT CANALS!”

Until I actually felt the pain caused by the infection that required a root canal, I had no idea what a root canal was, how bad—or good—it was, and why you’d get one. But when I did, I understood.

The same goes for midlife. I had no idea what a crisis it was until I was there, in the thick of it myself. From my perspective, a midlife crisis is when you wake up in the morning and ask yourself questions like:

“Why do I hate my life so much?”
“How did it get so bad?”
“Is there any hope at all?”
“Should I even get out of bed today?”
“Is life even worth living?”

The fact is, right now, I’m in my late thirties. I’m closer to 40 now than I am to 30. I have a wife, whom I love, and five kids, whom I love.

I am alive, I am fed, I am clothed, I am housed, I am employed, I am married, I am a father.

I can’t complain.

And yet… my life right now is so outrageously expensive; it would be so shocking to any young person thinking of getting married or having kids that they would choose not to get married or have kids if they found out just how much it costs. Really, I don’t even want to say it out loud: my bills are mind-bogglingly huge.

My wife and I are approaching our 19th anniversary, and while we should be getting along better than ever after all this time, the opposite is true: we’re constantly arguing over what we like, what we want, how to do life, and what to do about the kids.

And the kids, while I love them, often seem like selfish jerks. They have no idea how hard I work to support them; they waste my money, break my stuff, argue with me, don’t listen to what I say, and when they do listen, they disagree with me. They’re rebellious and they often hurt my feelings and don’t even care.

The closer I get to 40, the more I understand what a midlife crisis is.

A midlife crisis is where you find yourself daydreaming in the middle of the afternoon, thinking: “What if I just disappeared? What if I ran away? I could go somewhere else and start a new life. I could buy a one-way ticket to Madagascar and never come back.”

You don’t hate your family, of course. You love your family. But you also can’t stop thinking about what you said you wanted for yourself when you were younger, and you’re realizing: “I don’t have any of those things.”

You realize that your life is absolutely nothing like what you’d planned.

If you’re somehow able to cheat cancer and not die early, and you miraculously make it all the way to 80 years old, your life is now half over, and you have nothing to show for it.

It’s been a decade or two since you moved out from your parents’ house and became an adult, and you’re just now reaping what you’ve sown and realize too late that you had some thistles in the seed bag.

You’re finding that the fruits of your labor—all that work you put in 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago—are not what you wanted or what you thought you would get.

You’re coming to the stunning revelation—for the first time ever—that parenthood is a one-way valve: once you go through that door, you can never go back. Once you become a parent, you can never unbecome a parent. You will never not be a parent ever again, for as long as you live, love it or hate it.

You still have thoughts to this day like, “Do I even want to be a parent? Do I even want to have kids?” even though you are already a parent and have been for two decades. Then you feel bad for having those thoughts because they’re so patently ridiculous.

Even after you die, you will still be a parent, and the choices you made and actions you took in your too-short life will affect people today, tomorrow, and decades from now, even long after you’re dead, and you shudder at the horror of that thought.

You’re also starting to realize that the window of opportunity for all those things you told yourself for years, “I’ll do someday,” is not just closing—it has closed.

It closed a while ago. You just didn’t notice until now.

Like how you promised yourself you were “just taking a break from singing” when you went in for your tonsillectomy.

But the doctor botched the surgery, and you were part of the 1% that end up bleeding out and needing a second surgery to stop the hemorrhaging and your throat was damaged, so you’ll never be the same again, and you’ll probably never sing again, and it all happened so quickly that you’re not even ready or willing to admit it so you keep saying “someday” even though you know it’s a lie you’re telling yourself because deep down you know it’s over forever but you don’t want other people to know that.

And how you told yourself you’d take that backpacking trip across Europe, but first, you’d learn a second language and become fluent in it. But you were too busy changing diapers, scooping cat poop out of the litter box, cleaning kid vomit out of the carpet, trying to find the right medication for your hemorrhoids, getting laid off from your job—more than once—and fighting with your wife about whether you should get a vasectomy or not so you can stop having kids, which seem to be ruining your life, then feeling like a shithead forever thinking that the kids you love could possibly ruin your life.

And speaking of kids, you knew you were prepared to help your kids tackle all the challenges of growing up that you remember from your childhood, like avoiding peer pressure, “just saying no to drugs,” understanding eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia, and even really hard stuff like teenage pregnancy and pornography on the internet…

And then you find out your kids don’t even know (or care) about any of those things, and they just laugh at you when you bring them up, instead hitting you with new things you never saw coming, like: “A girl in my class says she’s transgender and now calls herself a boy,” and kids are vaping in the bathroom, and you don’t even know what “vaping” is, and nobody cares about Marijuana anymore because it’s legal now and everybody does it and it's no big deal.

And they say: “A girl I know has been sharing nude pictures of herself online and sexting boys,” and now there are police involved and crimes you didn’t even have names for when you were growing up, and you have very little wisdom to share because you’re having a hard time comprehending what they’re even saying and “texting” wasn’t even a thing when you were growing up, much less “sexting,” whatever that is.

And you realize that you can’t understand most of what your kids say about anything because they’ve become illiterate and don’t even speak English anymore, but instead use a waterfall of bizarre “meme” gibberish, constantly dribbling out bits of sound in a foreign language at random intervals while sitting at the dinner table, saying things like “skippity toilet,” “skippity wop wop skippity slicer to the rizzler,” “skill issues,” “cap,” “no cap,” “bet,” “that guy is a gigachad,” and “this pizza is BUSSIN’!”

And you have nothing to add to any of this, and you don’t even have the energy to ask them what it means because you’re tired, but also because it’s all just so stupid that you don’t care, so you just stare at them in bewilderment.

And so you try to ignore that and just focus on the things going on in your own life, but what’s going on in your own life is awful, and good news is hard to come by because your mother-in-law is going in for another surgery, and will need a long recovery time, and your brother halfway across the country just got bad news about his brand-new baby in their most recent ultrasound, and your grandparents were all of a sudden moved into a nursing home.

And it all happened so quickly that you didn’t even have time to think about what that means, and out of the blue, your friend who’s a real estate agent is calling you to tell you he’s selling your grandparents’ house, and you can’t even think because everything is moving so quickly but the more you think about it, the angrier you get because you realize that this means your grandparents house, which they’ve lived in for the past 30 years—that you always thought would stay in your family forever—is apparently NOT actually going to stay a part of your life and is being sold right now to some random asshole who doesn’t know and doesn’t care that your greatest childhood memories were made in that house and you aren’t nearly ready to give that up.

And you get angry at your grandparents for being so selfish to sell their house without your permission, then you realize that you’re the one being selfish and why on earth would your grandparents ask you what they could do with their own damn house but still you’re angry about it and you can’t quite explain it except saying you feel so sad—so much sadder than you thought you would be over something like a house, and why are you even talking about houses in another state that you don’t even live in?

And you start feeling the pain again in your abdomen and wonder when you’re ever going to get those stupid results back from the radiologist so you can find out what’s going on so you can finally either have the surgery you need or figure out what else is causing the pain.

And you’re pretty sure it isn’t cancer, though it could be, but if it isn’t cancer, what is it, and why the hell does it hurt so much and why after five months of going to doctor after specialist after doctor after specialist can nobody tell you what’s wrong with you, and let you know that either A) you do have something life-threatening that needs emergency surgery or B) it’s something else.

And you check your cell phone and realize that you have a missed call from the school principal who is surely calling you to ask you to come to pick up your kid because he is always calling you to ask you to pick up your kid because your kid clearly isn’t cut out for this school and no matter how much counseling and therapy you’ve paid for, he still can’t figure out how to regulate his emotions and the kids at the school can’t figure out how to just leave him the hell alone and mind their own business.

And you check the voicemail and see that the principal has indeed left you a very long, very wordy message about how your son said something they’re considering “an incitement to violence,” and now your son is suspended from school for two days, because that naughty but clever boy joked: “Let’s stone Stephen, just like in the Bible! Hahaha!”

And you’re so confused you don’t even know what to say, but you’re kind of impressed because even though obviously it’s a completely inappropriate joke, it’s actually kind of funny because A) he goes to a private Christian school and B) that’s a very clever biblical reference that even the principal should be able to appreciate, even though, of course, it was wrong, but he’ll never understand because the principal doesn’t understand kids who don’t fall perfectly in line and act like perfect angels.

And you’re confused about that because you never got in trouble at school growing up because you were homeschooled, so classmates, and rules, and teachers, and principals didn’t even exist, so you have no framework or context for even understanding things like this and don’t know what to say to the principal about what your son said, and you don’t know what to say to your son about what the principal said.

And you just decide, “F*ck it: we’re taking him out of school forever,” because it’s all just too hard. So you tell the principal, but then he tells you that you're overreacting, but you know you’re not overreacting because he has absolutely no idea how much we dread getting random phone calls from him in the middle of the day saying, “You need to pick up your son,” like he just did now for the tenth time.

And so you prepare yourself for a big fight, but you’re just so tired, and you just can’t even handle it anymore, so you just send the principal an email saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and it’s awkward every time you see him for the next few days when you pick up your other kids who aren’t in trouble (yet).

And you just can’t take all the hate, disappointment, confusion, broken promises, and unmet expectations with everything in your life, so you find yourself in your office in the middle of the day, shaking and sobbing, alone, on the concrete floor, having a total, utter, meltdown as your heart starts racing a million beats an hour, and you think you’re dying so you go to the emergency room.

And they look at your heart and say, “You’re not dying, but you definitely have a problem,” and they give you a referral to see a cardiologist, but that’s expensive and requires so many phone calls, and you have to set up more meetings and find out if they take your insurance and if you’ve met your deductible and if you brought your new insurance cards or if you’ve been carrying around old/expired health insurance cards for the past few months in your wallet.

And you try to get through all of that and think you may, in fact, survive, but then the emergency room bills start pouring in left and right from anyone and everyone on planet Earth, including companies and specialists you’ve never heard of before and don’t remember being seen by, and you’re watching the number grow: $3,000, $6,000, $8,000, $11,000, and you stop caring and think: “If I just close my eyes, it will all go away.”

And you start to think about how absurd it is that you’re almost 40 and you just had a near-death experience, curled up in the fetal position at your office, at a job you hate, thinking you might be dying from some inexplicable cause, then you remember that you had big hopes and dreams about all the things you’d have accomplished by the time you turned 40.

Things that you may have thought were ambitious in the past but certainly doable, like:

Run a marathon.
Be debt free.
Have retirement savings.
Own a house.
Buy a building.
Learn a second language.
Spend a year abroad studying art and music in Germany or Italy.
Become a pastry chef.
Become a falconer.
Get your master diver scuba diving certification.
Publish at least one book.
Record and release at least one musical album.

And you realize that YOU HAVE DONE NONE OF THESE THINGS and that you probably never will.

And you tell yourself, “Well, nobody else I know has done any of those things, either,” but you also remember: “But everybody else is an idiot. I’m smarter than them. Most other people let their years slip by doing nothing. I was going to be so intentional, carefully attending to my hopes and dreams and making sure I didn’t end up like them, but here I am now, and I’m just like them.”

And you wake up in the morning asking yourself, “What the f*ck happened? Why do I hate my life so much?” And all you can think about is finding even one reason to convince yourself it’s worth getting out of bed.

And sometimes your only goals are to:

Not die.
Not go bankrupt.
Not get divorced.

And that’s really where you’re at in life because your life is just that hard. And you’re thinking, “I’M STILL A COOL PERSON!”

And you call your friend, who is also a parent about your age, seeking advice, and you start telling him about your life and he sympathizes with you but then tells you that his teenage daughter ran away from home without warning and was gone for a week and nobody knew where she was, not even the police, then she came back without any explanations or apology, and you just try to make sense of it all but you can’t.

And you realize that there is NOBODY you can ask for advice anymore. You have outgrown everybody you know… nobody is coming to rescue you… you’re completely on your own.

You can’t just call mom or dad for parenting advice anymore because if YOU don’t know what the hell “skippity toilet” or sexting are, THEY certainly won’t.

And you get depressed, so you think, “I should go get a drink with a friend.” And you realize that you’re almost 40, and you don’t really have friends anymore.

And you think, “Well, fine then, I’ll just go make new friends!” But you have no idea how to do that or where to do that, and even if you did, it isn’t socially acceptable to just walk up to a stranger and say: “Hi, I don’t know you; you don’t know me—let’s be friends!” Because adults think that’s weird, even though that’s exactly how you made all your friendships in your childhood.

And you think you’ll tell your wife about that, but you’re not in a good relationship with your wife right now because your life is hard, and her life is hard, and it’s hard to be good friends when all you talk about is calls from the principal’s office, and your son getting suspended from school, and the bills piling up for your radiology visits for the surgery you may—or may not—have any time soon.

And you start to feel bad about your marriage and think it can’t be that hard for everyone else and it must just be you.

And then you find out that you actually have friends who are divorcing, left and right, and just on a whim, you decide to make a list just as an exercise, and you come up with a list of 34 couples you know personally who have gotten divorced.

And you look at some of the names on your list and realize that it includes not one, but TWO of the pastors from your childhood church you used to look up to and even some extended family members, and you get so depressed that you stop counting all the divorces and put the notepad away.

And you realize that… you know what?

Life is hard. Aging is hard. Midlife is hard.

…and that’s okay.

…and maybe you should go a bit easier on yourself.

Yes, I am in the middle of a midlife crisis.

Yes, I bought the convertible.

No, I haven’t moved anywhere, but yes, I go on getaways to tropical islands whenever I get a chance.

No, I didn’t (and don’t want to) divorce my wife.

No, I don’t have any good answers about any of this.

I’m still in the thick of it, or maybe even just in the beginning stages. I’m not sure what happens next or where to go from here. What I do know is that midlife is hard, okay? It’s f*cking hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.