Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

And the question is not simply what to do, but what you have done and what you have not done, what to feel and how to think about yourself.

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.8

There are distinctive problems that arise from the temporality of midlife, from our multiple orientations to the past and the future, from our relation to unrealized possibilities or counterfactuals, from the scale of life and of the projects that occupy it.

“What can I know?”, “What should I do?”, and “What may I hope?”34 Here the universality of the questions comes out, paradoxically, in their first-person character, as questions for anyone.

new consensus was being formed, a new image of midlife as a time of competence and personal growth, not uncertainty or regression.

Elliott Jaques had linked the midlife crisis with transformation and creative rebirth.

work of Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the 1980s, which led to the adoption of the Human Development Index by the UN Development Program. Sen urged the measurement not of commodities but of capabilities, the achievement of human potential. The Human Development Index is a crude attempt to do this, combining GDP with life expectanc

In the Nicomachean Ethics, named for his son, Nicomachus, Aristotle argued that a good life is one of virtuous activity in accordance with reason. His word for happiness or human flourishing, “eudaimonia,” has been adopted by psychologists who distinguish self-realization or “eudaimonic well-being” from “hedonic well-being” or the experience of ple

“these findings tell a story in which the age U-shape in job (and overall life) satisfaction is driven by unmet aspirations that are painfully felt in midlife, but beneficially abandoned and felt with less regret during old age.”30 The key to happiness, then, is managing one’s expectations. (This seems like the right time to warn you that you are r