in 1999, the Washington Post ran a special section titled “Midlife without the Crisis.” In the New York Times headline, “New Study Finds Middle Age Is the Prime of Life.”

In times of political and environmental crisis, this mindset often takes the form of the belief that nothing is truly worth doing with your time except addressing such emergencies head-on, round the clock – and that you’re entirely correct to think of yourself as guilty and selfish for spending it on anything else. This quest to justify your existe

Midlife crises express themselves in different ways for different people, but most commonly, Jaques argued, they lead people to question whether their lives are meaningful.