Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

The point I am making here is that it is not sufficient for meaning in life that one attend to the present, to the atelic activities in which you are engaged. It matters what you are doing, not just that you are doing it in the Now.

That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.”13

“That which is hateful unto you, do not do unto your neighbor.

In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to

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

Tolstoy’s downward spiral came later in life than Mill’s—he was pushing fifty—and it went deeper. “My life came to a standstill,” he writes, “I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep and I could not help breathing, eating, drinking and sleeping; but there was no life in me because I had no desires whose gratification I would have deemed it reasonable

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

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment, insists that the “whole interest of . . . reason, whether speculative or practical,” is encapsulated in three questions: “What can I know?”, “What should I do?”, and “What may I hope?”

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