But I think forties and fifties seem now to be the paradigm of middle age.Īnd the cliché, particularly for men in this midlife period, is that you make some kind of radical change as some kind of compensation for the feeling of helplessness about the way life is going. You could start worrying about this in your twenties and thirties. They are about coming to terms with the fact that you have a substantial past you cannot change and that it constrains what you can do with your future. It is probably true that the picture of midlife has shifted so that now, when we say ‘midlife’, we mean at least forties or maybe fifties.īut, actually, a lot of the issues that interest me about midlife are quite general and arise both earlier and later. When the phrase ‘midlife crisis’ originates, which is in a 1965 essay by Elliott Jacques called “Death and the mid-life crisis,” he is talking about people in their mid- to late thirties. I ended up writing Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, a book about the midlife crisis, or the many midlife crises: the many challenges of adapting to middle age.īefore we get stuck into the five books that you’ve chosen on this topic, could you give a sense of when you think midlife begins because that, in itself, is quite a controversial topic. I looked for philosophers who had written about this and you are right, there isn’t all that much.

My idea was to use the judo move of thinking about midlife as a path through the uncertainty of midlife. I didn’t really have a picture of what comes next. A tenured professor in a good department, I was at that point in my academic career where you stop climbing and reach a plateau, and I realised that I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my life. My interest in the topic comes out of my own malaise around midlife. I can’t think of another philosophical treatment of middle age. This is quite an unusual topic for a philosopher to write about.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Midlife by kieran setiya