You can choose to immerse yourself in things you might come to care about and so begin to change your life. This is not advice you can follow directly, since you cannot choose to love what leaves you cold. (.) The irony is that you need to do the opposite: you need to care about other things.

If nothing matters to you but your own well-being, if you are utterly self-obsessed, not much will make you happy. Is That All There Is?Ĭall it the first rule for preventing a midlife crisis: you have to care about something other than yourself. It was similar in men and women and regression analysis ruled out an explanation in terms of the stress of parenthood. The pattern showed up in seventy-two countries around the world. “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Adjusting for income, marital status, and employment, Blanchflower and Oswald found that the level of reported happiness by age had the shape of a gently curving U, starting high in young adulthood and ending higher in old age, with an average nadir at forty-six. You have lived long enough to ask “Is that all there is?” Enough to have made some serious mistakes, to look back on triumphs and failures with pride and regret, to look sideways at lost alternatives, lives you did not choose and cannot live, and to look ahead to the end of life, not imminent but not so far off, its distance measured in units you now comprehend: another forty years, with luck.

Ultimately, they are questions about the temporal structure of human life and the activities that occupy it. They are questions of mortality and finitude, of emptiness in the pursuit of projects, whatever they are. They are questions of loss and regret, success and failure, the lives you wanted and the life you have. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide – Kieran Setiyaĥ September 2021 Midlife: A Philosophical Guide – Kieran Setiya Introduction.

Midlife a philosophical guide