Love this, maps really well onto my experience. I see (and feel) a sharp deliniation between do-ers and be-ers, with the be-ers wishing they could do, and the do-ers not having time to process what they're doing.
> for ordinary people and their families it's profoundly harmful
People want (and believe they deserve) what they used to have, or what they see someone else has. I think the crux of the midlife crisis is coming to terms with tradeoffs. Everyone has spent potential to get where they are, and there aren't do-overs.
"I think the crux of the midlife crisis is coming to terms with tradeoffs. Everyone has spent potential to get where they are, and there aren't do-overs." << This. It is at the same time crisis-inducing and very motivating, depending on your situation and personality. You look down the pike and think "If I have an average lifespan, I can kick this shit into gear and have the whole timespan I've already lived to get some stuff done" or you think "I only have (x) years left, it's too late already." But either way, the crux of the matter is that you have a limited set of choices left. You had a limited set of choices before, too, but young people don't realize that. They don't quite feel the chapters being ripped out of the book of life yet, they don't see the just-pruned branches falling from the tree of life... Every affirmative choice you make is also a choice that kills something else. And this is not bad, necessarily -- a well-pruned fruit tree yields more fruit, without breaking. But it's not how we've been raised. We've been raised with limitlessness. We have not been raised with the interior disciplines of pruning and weeding and culling.
I had the sense last year that the limitless desire for a different life is a destructive force.
Mid-life crisis examples of how this desire shows up as regret: "What if I had stayed with that previous girlfriend instead of marrying my wife?", "What if I had moved to this other city instead of my home?", etc.
My personal conclusion is that this limitless desire is a dark pit of despair with no bottom. This may be part of the reasoning behind the tenth commandment seems to be applicable - "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
That desire can be toxic to the point of destruction is mostly treated as a foreign concept to our contemporary world.
So, I made the conscious choice to go in the other direction toward the light, and to see what adventure awaits over there.
Not sure fully what that means yet, but a part of it at least is accepting and embracing my own life as it is today, including all of the constraints.
It seems to me like the path out of the mid-life crisis is about signing up for the next adventure, letting go of the past, and looking forward to what's still to come. And most definitely not letting "desire for else" ruin my gratitude for the fact that I am highly fortunate, and still quite able to live, experience, do, and be so much.
Love this, maps really well onto my experience. I see (and feel) a sharp deliniation between do-ers and be-ers, with the be-ers wishing they could do, and the do-ers not having time to process what they're doing.
> for ordinary people and their families it's profoundly harmful
People want (and believe they deserve) what they used to have, or what they see someone else has. I think the crux of the midlife crisis is coming to terms with tradeoffs. Everyone has spent potential to get where they are, and there aren't do-overs.