Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

end? If my problem is an excessive investment in telic activities, the solution is to love their atelic counterparts, to find meaning in the process, not the project. If your problem is mine, this solution will work for you.

We can meditate on breathing, on ambient noise, on our present sensations, in order to reduce our heart rates, our blood pressure, and our levels of anxiety and stress. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is now a popular tool of clinical psychology, pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn.31

The moral of this prehistory is less the timelessness of the midlife crisis than the strength of its grip on our imaginations.

make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.

I don’t agree with Aristotle. When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf. Being mortal, think of mortal things.

“Her intellectual gifts do but minister to a moral character that is the noblest and best balanced I have ever met with in life.”

The key to happiness, then, is managing one’s expectations. (This seems like the right time to warn you that you are reading a very mediocre book.)

Not for nothing are we told that true comprehension of the insight I do not exist is accessible only through sustained and arduous meditation!

How self-indulgent is the midlife crisis, a hardship it is a luxury to live through?