Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

But you can meditate for insight, if not into the no-self view, into the value of the atelic.

You recognize the paths you will never walk, the lives you will never lead, and look back with nostalgia at the liberty of youth.

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

Against this, I take the rather boring view that you and I are human beings and that our mental lives belong to the animals we are. That we are creatures of this kind is not something we should hope to learn by introspection.

“incomplete” and heralds the “completeness” of seeing, understanding, and thinking: “at the same time, one is seeing and has seen, is understanding and has understood, is thinking and has thought.”

Think of the days on which you have nothing to look forward to but sleep: a respite from childcare, putting out fires at work, fighting to keep your relationships alive. Don’t get me wrong, these things all matter. Their value may be final; but it is essentially ameliorative. Caught on the treadmill of what has to be done, day by day, you may not h

Where those you love would not exist except for your mistakes, you have reason to be glad that those mistakes were made.

Don’t be fooled by the foreshortening of time that accompanies middle age. You have more time than you think.

You can choose to immerse yourself in things you might come to care about and so begin to change your 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.)