The Midlife Crisis Guide For Millennials

A crisis of meaning no longer waits for midlife, instead expect a series of 'crisisettes' all along the way. Here's how to get to grips with them.

Photo by RAPHAEL MAKSIAN on Unsplash

You can almost always spot a midlife crisis by its symptom rather than its cause. When you imagine the archetypal middle aged man rocking up in his new red sports car, you’re not seeing his crisis so much as his attempted solution. It’s only when the initial rush of elation fades and his familiar dissatisfaction returns that he reluctantly turns up for therapy. There he finds that his solution failed because he didn’t address the underlying cause of the discontent he was trying to quell. His shiny new drive wasn't a cure, it was just the latest and most glaring symptom of his crisis of meaning.

This is a supplement to my recent GQ article What a Midlife Crisis Means for Millennials providing extra content, resources, and suggestions for my Substack subcribers. Pleased read the original article first so you’ll know what I’m talking about!

Not Your Father’s Midlife Crisis

The new car archetype has done a lot of heavy lifting over the years - yet despite it no longer really being fit for purpose, we can still learn from it. It is emblematic of the way we seek familiar solutions to novel problems. Though the cause of Mr. Boomer’s malaise was a lack of meaning in his life, he tried to resolve it with the purchase of a car, a symbol of success and achievement. In short he came to an ego-answer for a psyche problem - only the psyche seeks meaning, not new toys. As I stated in the original article, in doing this he was trying to solve a second-half-of-life problem with a first-half-of-life solution.

“We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the progam of life’s morning ... what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” - C. G. Jung

The psychological manifestation of the traditional midlife crisis is provoked by an existential situation; the pressure of time that arises as we make a transition from the youthful feeling that the time ahead of us is infinite, to the dawning realisation that it is in fact limited.

The midlife crisis comes at the crunch-point where the existential and psychological meet. As we grow and experience life, and as we see our time left shrinking, we come to realise that it’s time for a re-orientation of our very selves. The things that were important to us when we were younger have changed, and we are compelled to find a new direction. The real kicker is that because we’ve created our entire lives up to this point based on those earlier values - we can feel trapped by the very things that we first longed for.

It’s like a massive cosmic joke. Once you’ve achieved what your ego set out for you, your psyche comes along and changes the rules!

These days we’re more likely to regularly re-evaluate our relationship with ourselves along the way rather than facing a big reckoning like our parents’ generation might have. A bit more educated about the importance and possibility of a meaningful life, we’re less likely to be willing to sit around and wait for it to happen at some time in the future. While the one-big-event wakeup call still happens, it’s more likely that you’ll have smaller but no less important calls to action a various points in your life. However and whenever it happens, the same basic elements are at play:

• A sense of dissatisfaction with your life situation arises and continues to get worse.

• It presents itself as depression, anxiety, listlessness, restlessness, and a sense of feeling trapped or stuck.

• You often try to manage its symptoms through distraction, overwork, self-medication, or seeking temporary pleasures. All eventually fail.

• It cannot be fixed with solutions that worked in your past, but only through a deep reckoning with your Self and responding from who you’ve become, not who you once were.

The baby boomer model of hitting a crisis between the first and second half of life is reductive, though remains illustrative in its simplicity. According to Jungian analyst James Hollis, the first half of life takes place predominantly in the social world, framed by the question, “‘How can I enter this world, separate from my parents, create relationships, career, social identity?’ In the second half of life the questions change, ‘What does the soul ask of me?’ ‘What does it mean that I am here?” ‘Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?’ These questions necessarily raise a different agenda, and oblige us to ask questions of meaning.”

Though life doesn’t come in in two neat little halves, there is still a lot of truth in the map Hollis draws for us here. There’s also an important point that we often wish to ignore. While it’s not rigidly structured, developmental tasks do come in a general sort of order, and there are consequences for trying to skip ahead to one phase without having “completed” the preceding ones. If you try, it will almost certainly come back to bite you. After all, how could you possibly make a re-adjustment of values when you’ve yet to consolidate a set of values in the first place?

Now before you younger whipper snappers get all het up on me - I’m not saying that your values don’t matter, or that you’re not committed to them. But I am saying that values do change over time, and they change as a result of life experience. The problem with the archetypal Boomer is that they may not have been so alert to how they were changing over time, so it caught up with them all at once. The problem with younger generations may be that in their impatient longing for a sense of alignment, they may be too quick to dismiss, avoid, or foreshorten the misalignments that naturally occur in life.

Don’t Distract Yourself From Your Discontent

Nobody likes to feel unhappy, but feelings of frustration, listlessness, restlessness, and even anxiety can be messages from your unconscious that need to be listened to (naturally this is not always the case). It might sound kind of masochistic, but the psyche often communicates through discomfort. It introduces frictions into your life to make you aware of what needs to change. Because it’s unpleasant, we tend to want to escape it rather than really listen in to what the friction is telling us. The thing is, most of us want to avoid or distract ourselves from the unpleasantness rather than listen to what it’s trying to say.

As any casual viewer of Mad Men will be know, feelings of existential dread and meaninglessness in the Boomer generation were widely managed through the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. Meanwhile, family doctors handed out barbiturates, narcotics, and amphetamines as freely as cough drops; making them amongst the most highly prescribed drugs of their day.

These days we may no longer be able to drink and smoke at work (boo) nor hit up our GPs for narcotics (double boo!), we still have myriad other ways to the difficult but important task of being accountable to our greater life’s purpose. And though self-medication is still a popular choice (and we have a new generation of uppers and downers), the more universal modus operandi is distraction - usually via social media or the compulsive consumption of diverting streaming services. While it’s find to veg out and take the edge off every once in a while, doing so too much can make us less able to hear psyche’s call and find ourselves cruising towards some kind of crisis.

After all, if psyche doesn’t get your attention by whispering, she will start to shout.

It’s a Myth that Fulfilment Only Comes with Freedom

One of the things I didn’t get enough room to explore in the original article is the tension that lies between freedom and and limitation. Part of the reason why Boomers suffered the way they did is that the rigid social structures of the time inhibited their freedom. Whether this was heteronormative expectations of the family or committing to a career for life, options were limited to start with and got more difficult to change as you went along. Notwithstanding the usual objective challenges of the economic environment, people coming of age today probably have more flexibility in social and working life than ever before. Yet this doesn’t seem to have solved the problem.

That’s because meaning and fulfilment emerge from the tension between freedom and obligation. You actually need both for personal growth and a sense of purpose. Too much obligation can crush you, but too much freedom can leave you feeling empty. Words like “resilience” and “discipline” get a bad wrap these days, but they are important factors in the course of personal development. Being able to power through periods where things feel misaligned, say in your relationship or your work, help you develop the skills required to better deploy your purpose in those periods where you are more aligned.

Photo by Robert Stump on Unsplash

When you get too much freedom without having developed enough discipline, you can end up like a windsurfer who doesn't have the requisite skills to harness the wind; you end up flailing around rather than charging ahead in your intended direction. The challenges, boundaries, and limitations of the first half of life are designed not just to stifle you, but to help you develop discipline and resilience.

While the dream of total freedom would appear to ward off any potential crisis down the line, you’ll find that the opposite is true. That’s because meaning is not found in freedom alone, but rather in the tension that arises between freedom and responsibility. Nothing better illustrates this than becoming a parent. Many new parents, overwhelmed by what parenting requires, would not describe having children as fun. In fact, lots of research shows that parenthood brings a decrease in happiness, but overall increase in fulfilment - a distinction that ‘s important to understand.

Don’t Confuse Happiness With Fulfilment

Happiness is something that comes and goes, not a consistent state. Fulfilment is different. Happiness is like an ice cream cone that is to be enjoyed while it lasts. But even if it could last forever, your enjoyment wouldn’t because the happiness you experience is fundamentally based in its transience. Fulfilment or flourishing is not so much a passing experience as an underlying state of affairs.

The paradox about fulfilment is that it requires pain.

You don’t get the satisfaction of completing a marathon without the hard work of training and running it; you can’t celebrate your book launch without the hours of hard graft writing your book; and you can’t celebrate thirty years of happy marriage without all the hard work it took over the years to maintain that marriage (they should call it “fulfilling” marriage) Hard work may not be fun, but feelings of accomplishment only arise as a result of it.

Unfortunately the cultural messages we consume over social media don’t address the the complex realities of fulfilment. Instead you are sold empty promises that you can “be yourself!”, “live your best life!”, and “follow your passion” without acknowledging that rough times aren’t only par for the course, but absolutely required to develop a meaningful life. Worse, they promote the toxic expectation that if life doesn’t quite feel like “your best life” there must be something wrong.

“Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life” - James Hollis

A meaningful life is not found in the freedom to express yourself as you like alone, but rather in the tension that arises between that freedom and the responsibilities that life demands from you. You can’t “live your best life” without finding out who you really are first - and that’s not easy.

The Key to Finding Meaning Throughout the Life Course

My original GQ article was inspired by a quote from Viktor Frankl that I have reflected upon a great deal in my life:

“It wasn’t what we expected from life, but what life expected from us.”

There is so much wisdom in this quote. For me it's strength is the way it inverts the way we think about the world by encouraging us to find meaning in life as it is instead of how we want it to be. Fortunately most of us won’t encounter anything near what Frankl had to. Yet when things go awry (as they always will), we still have the cheek to shake our fists at life and scream, “why won’t you give me what I want?”. The more humble question to ask is, “what does life expect from me at this moment?”

Looking at life this way frees you from constantly seeking a better situation in exchange for responding fully to the situation you are in. It enables us to realise that we can be “living our best lives” now, not because it feels good or everything has slotted into place, but because it’s better to live fully in the live we are currently living instead of waiting for a better one to come. This isn’t settling for something less, it actually enables us to better move towards a better one to come.

“When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will be begin to say: “What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?” “Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?” - James Hollis

A life is the whole picture, not just the bits that feel good. The better we become at accepting the valleys with the peaks the more fulfilling the whole ride will be. In my Little Book of Calm I use the analogy of life being like an assault course (or, for my American audience, an obstacle course).

Photo by Marc Rafanell López on Unsplash

When you sign up for one you do so expecting the challenges of climbing walls, swinging on ropes, and crawling through mud. You don’t go on an assault course, arrive at the first obstacle, and say to yourself with frustration and consternation, “what’s that doing there?” Similarly, if you’re running hurdles you don’t come to the first hurdle and say “if that hurdle weren’t here I’d be able to run forward without impediment!” It’s the same with life. Our hurdles and challenges aren’t “in the way” they are the very constituent of the life course. The sooner you get on board with that, the better.

“Fear governs so much of our lives, and produces all sorts of defence strategies. Standing up to our fear is perhaps the most critical decision necessary in the governance of life and the recovery of the soul’s agenda in the second half of life.” - James Hollis

Feelings of dread and meaninglessness in life are like whispers from a benevolent demon nudging you to take the necessary steps to address what’s lacking in your current life path. This demon only creates a crisis when its whispers are so persistently ignored that he resorts to shouting. You just have to listen out for them, and ask the right questions.

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Resources:

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Podcasts:

You 2.0: What Is Your Life For? Hidden Brain Podcast with Shankar Vedantam interviewing Victor Strecher.

Who Do You Want To Be? Hidden Brain Podcast with Shankar Vedantam interviewing Ken Sheldon.

Books:

Life On Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything by Victor Strecher.

Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey by James Hollis.

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life by James Hollis.

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis.

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Research:

Sense of Purpose and Strategies for Coping With Anxiety Across Adulthood, by Gabrielle N. Pfund, Victor Strecher, Ethan Kross, and Patrick L. Hill, GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry, 2024.

Reduced Epigenetic Age in Older Adults With High Sense of Purpose in Life, by Eric S. Kim, Julia S. Nakamura, Victor J. Strecher, and Steven W. Cole, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2023.

Self-Affirmation Alters the Brain’s Response to Health Messages and Subsequent Behavior Change, by Emily B. Falk et al., PNAS, 2015.

Purpose in Life and Use of Preventive Health Care Services, by Eric S. Kim, Victor J. Strecher, and Carol D. Ryff, PNAS, 2014.