Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

Who knows, maybe reading about philosophy at midlife will inspire a new and abiding passion? I recommend it—though you may find other interests,

Call it the first rule for preventing a midlife crisis: you have to care about something other than yourself.

How should we think about the lost opportunities, the regrets and failures, the finitude of life and the rush of activities that drive us through it?

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.)

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.