For the next hour, I answer questions from the audience and explain the main ideas of my book. Their tone is curious, friendly and even respectful. No one challenges my credentials or seems intent on skewering me. Soon there’s applause, and the professor invites everyone upstairs for a glass of wine. At the reception, he’s pleased, and says it obviously went well. Graduate students approach me with that same nervous look I’d seen at the reading.
I’m amazed. Is the bar for expertise lower than I’d thought? Are people projecting grown-up-ness onto me, to reassure themselves that someone knows what’s going on? Or am I suffering from imposter syndrome, and I know more than I’d imagined?
Not long into my tenure as a so-called expert, I realize that some of the people whom I considered experts—and by extension grown-ups—are dogged by self-doubt, too. This is especially true in academia, where you’re judged almost entirely on your intellect. Through friends, I meet a professor named Amy, who attended top schools, teaches at a major American university and regularly publishes in academic journals.
“I’m a fake intellectual,” Amy tells me over a glass of wine. “I feel like I have a surface-level knowledge about a number of things. I can see this tiny little piece, like I have tunnel vision; I can’t see the larger significance.” She feels surrounded by people who know more than she does and who have a better grasp of their topics. “If what an academic is supposed to do is change the way people think about the world, I can’t do it.”
Amy is up for tenure soon but predicts she won’t get it. “And I think they’d be right not to give me tenure; I’m not that good,” she says.
Not all academics feel this way, of course. I meet another professor, Keith, who remembers exactly when he began to feel like an expert in his field, philosophy. As a graduate student, he considered his professors to be capable of a kind of intellectual alchemy. They could draw on both the history of the field and on the particulars of various philosophical problems. In lectures, they wove all these strands together. When you’re a student, he tells me, “You don’t see yourself as an immature version of them. You’re like, ‘How could I ever possibly become that?’”
About three years into his doctoral program, Keith was teaching a class of undergraduates when one of them asked him a hard question that was only tangentially related to the lesson. Without much effort, Keith responded with a thoughtful, layered answer that relied on a broad understanding of the field. He handled a follow-up question the same way. He was doing the same kind of alchemy as his teachers.
“I remember walking back to my office after that class and thinking to myself, ‘Oh! That was a moment when I was an expert.’” He says he felt like a grown-up, too.
I’m cheered to meet someone who can pinpoint his own passage beyond apprenticeship. But when I retell Keith’s story to some other academics, they’re unimpressed.
“He’s a grown-up because he knows how to bullshit?” an English professor says dryly.
My father-in-law, Simon’s dad, tells me I’ve given too much credence to people with advanced degrees. “Competence in some kind of boring professional thing has no relation to mature insight into yourself, understanding the world, understanding other people. It’s got nothing to do with being a grown-up.”
Apparently, I’ve mistaken professional expertise for wisdom. It’s not the former that makes you a grown-up, it’s the latter. Or perhaps I’ve made a different error: I’ve mistaken being a grown-up for being a man.
* * *
—
Once I take the mystery out of expertise, I realize that I’ve done my research and I know enough to make my case. But I still feel a kind of sobriety and detachment. Very recently, I was lying in a tube wondering whether I’d survive. I’m still getting infusions of an immunotherapy drug every three months as a maintenance treatment.
I’m glad to be planning Dutch and Russian book tours, and to give a practically endless procession of interviews. I’m pleased each time a parent tells me that the French approach helped her baby sleep. And for someone who’s socially awkward, a book is a useful letter of introduction. I don’t have to struggle as hard to connect in social settings. People who’ve read it often feel like they’ve preconnected with me. My task is just not to muck up their good impression.
But I’ve just seen my life change in an instant, twice, so I’m careful not to grow attached to my new professional status. I’m facing my small success the same way I faced being in that tube: by listening to the voices and remaining calm.
What really affects me is the book itself. It’s a relief to have finally done something well. When I was younger, people assured me that I had potential. In my thirties, I wondered whether I would ever realize it.
When I handed in my first book, in my midthirties, I immediately wished that I could start over and rewrite it. The reviews were mixed, and practically no one read it. Another book like the first one would probably have meant the end of being an author and back to begging editors for piecework. Simon later confessed that he feared for my career, and dreaded having a bitter wife who couldn’t help pay the bills.
When I handed in the second book, on parenting, I felt that I’d written the strongest book I could. I didn’t want to change anything. In my forties, I was no longer banking on my potential. I was finally doing my best work.
For all of the book’s flaws, I’d also taken the adult step of having a perspective and defending it. For me, this was progress. I’d grown up learning never to get to the heart of things. And yet, I’d now gone deep into a complicated topic and pulled its strands apart.
And having been inside that tube, with my insides exposed, I know myself better. I’d spent my life imagining worst-case scenarios. Now I know that when one of those scenarios happens, I can handle it. I won’t disintegrate. I walked home from my treatments and cooked dinner for my kids. I also didn’t run back to America, assuming everything must be better there. I stayed in France, trusting another country with my very existence. And when it was over, I didn’t want to change husbands or radically change anything. I emerged calm, and grateful for my life, and wanting it all even more.
You know you’re in your forties when . . .
You can detect when someone’s lifestyle requires a trust fund.
You understand that even a small job is important to someone, so you should do it well.
Your retired high school teachers, who once seemed godlike, now want to network with you.
When you watch The Graduate, you identify with the parents.
When you meet someone extremely charming, you’re not seduced—you’re suspicious.
10
how to have a midlife crisis
THE MIDLIFE CRISIS WAS INVENTED in London in 1957.
That’s when a forty-year-old Canadian named Elliott Jaques stood before a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and read aloud from a paper he’d written. Addressing about a hundred people, Jaques claimed that people in their midthirties typically experience a depressive period lasting several years.
Jaques (pronounced “Jacks”)—a physician and psychoanalyst—said he’d identified this phenomenon by studying the lives of great artists, in whom it takes an extreme form. In ordinary people symptoms could include religious awakenings, promiscuity, a sudden inability to enjoy life, “hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance” and “compulsive attempts” to remain young.
This period is sparked by the realization that their lives are halfway over, and that death isn’t just something that happens to other people: it will happen to them, too. He described a depressed thirty-six-year-old patient who told his therapist, “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in si
ght—far enough away it’s true—but there is death observably present at the end.” (Perhaps he was recalling the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote in the nineteenth century: “When we are ascending the hill of life, death is not visible: it lies down at the bottom of the other side. But once we have crossed the top of the hill, death comes in view—death, which, until then, was known to us only by hearsay.”)
Jaques didn’t claim to be the first to detect this midlife change. He pointed out that, in the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri’s protagonist in The Divine Comedy—who scholars say is thirty-five—famously declares at the beginning of the book, “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Jaques called this “the opening scene of a vivid and perfect description of the emotional crisis of the midlife phase.”
But Jaques offered a modern, clinical explanation, and—crucially—he gave it a name: the “mid life crisis.”
As he addressed the meeting in London, Jaques was nervous. Many of the leading psychoanalysts of the day were sitting in the audience, including the society’s president, Donald Winnicott, renowned for his theory of transitional objects, and Jaques’s own mentor, the famed child psychologist Melanie Klein.
It was an acrimonious group, which had split into competing factions. Attendees were known to pounce on presenters during the questioning period. And Jaques wasn’t just presenting an abstract theory. He later told an interviewer that the depressed thirty-six-year-old patient he described in the paper was himself.
When he finished reading the paper, titled “The Mid Life Crisis,” Jaques paused and waited to be attacked. Instead, after a very brief discussion, “there was dead silence,” he recalled later. “Which was very, very embarrassing, nobody got up to speak. This was new, this is absolutely rare.” The next day, Melanie Klein tried to cheer him up, saying, “If there’s one thing the Psychoanalytic Society cannot cope with, it’s the theme of death.”
Chastened, Jaques put “The Mid Life Crisis” aside. He went on to write about far less personal topics, including a theory of time and work. “I was certainly utterly convinced that the paper was a complete failure,” he recalled.
But he didn’t forget how it felt to be that troubled man standing on the crest of the hill. About six years later, he submitted the paper to The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, which published it in its October 1965 issue under the title “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.”
This time, instead of silence, there was an enormous appetite for Jaques’s theory. The midlife crisis was now aligned with the zeitgeist.
* * *
—
If you were a man born in 1900, you had only about a 50 percent chance of living to age sixty. The average life expectancy for men was around fifty-two. It was fair to think of age forty as the beginning of the end.
But life spans in rich countries were increasing by about 2.3 years per decade. Someone born in the 1930s had nearly an 80 percent chance of living until age sixty. That gave age forty a new vitality. Life Begins at Forty was the best-selling American nonfiction book of 1933. Walter Pitkin, the journalist who wrote it, explained that “before the Machine Age, men wore out at forty.” But thanks to industrialization, new medicines and electric dishwashers, “men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living.”
By the time Elliott Jaques published “Death and the Mid-life Crisis” in 1965, the average life expectancy in Western countries had climbed to about seventy. It made sense to change your life in your thirties or forties, because you could expect to live long enough to enjoy your new career or your new spouse.
And it was getting easier to change your life. Women were going to work in record numbers, giving them more financial independence. Middle-class professionals were entering psychotherapy and couples counseling in record numbers and trying to understand themselves. People were starting to treat marriage not just as a romantic institution, but as the source of their self-actualization. Divorce rules were loosening, and the divorce rate was about to surge.
There was dramatic social upheaval, from the civil rights movement to the birth control pill. It wasn’t just individuals who had midlife crises. The whole society seemed to be having one, too.
The idea that a midlife crisis is inevitable soon jumped from Jaques’s academic paper to popular culture. And according to the new conventional wisdom, the forties were the prime time for this to occur. In her 1967 book, The Middle-Age Crisis, writer Barbara Fried claimed the crisis is “a normal aspect of growth, as natural for Forties as teething is for a younger age group.”
The midlife crisis, which had scarcely existed five or six years earlier, was suddenly treated like a biological inevitability that could possess and even kill you. “A person in the throes . . . does not even know that something is happening inside his body, a physical change that is affecting his emotions,” a 1971 New York Times article explained. “Yet he is plagued with indecision, restlessness, boredom, a ‘what’s the use’ outlook and a feeling of being fenced in.”
The crisis soon expanded from Jaques’s original definition to include practically any inner strife. You could have a midlife crisis because you’d achieved everything you’d intended to, but couldn’t see the point of it all. Or you could have one because you hadn’t achieved enough.
Management theorists urged companies to be sensitive to their crisis-stricken workers. In 1972, a US government task force warned that midlife crises may be causing an uptick in the death rate of men aged thirty-five to forty. “A general feeling of obsolescence appears to overtake middle managers when they reach their late thirties. Their careers appear to have reached a plateau, and they realize that life from here on will be a long and inevitable decline.”
Despite some biological claims, the midlife crisis was mainly viewed as a middle- and upper-class affliction. Classic sufferers were white, professional and male, with the leisure time to ruminate on their personal development and the means to afford sports cars and mistresses. People who were working-class or black weren’t supposed to self-actualize. Women were assumed to be on a separate schedule set by marriage, menopause and when their children left home.
But women soon realized that the midlife crisis contained a kind of liberation story, in tune with the nascent women’s movement: if you hated your life, you could change it. This idea found a perfect messenger in Gail Sheehy.
Sheehy was the daughter of a Westchester advertising executive. She had obediently studied home economics, married a doctor and had a baby. But that life didn’t suit her. By the early 1970s, she was divorced and working as a journalist.
In January 1972, Sheehy was on an assignment in Northern Ireland when the young Catholic protester she was interviewing got shot in the face. The shock of this near-death experience soon combined with the shock of entering her midthirties. “Some intruder shook me by the psyche and shouted: Take stock! Half your life has been spent.”
Researchers she spoke to explained that panicking at thirty-five is normal, since adults go through developmental periods just like children do. Sheehy traveled around America interviewing educated middle-class men and women, ages eighteen to fifty-five, about their lives. In the summer of 1976 she published a nearly four-hundred-page book called Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. By that August, it was the New York Times’s number one nonfiction best seller, and it remained in the top ten for over a year. I remember seeing its rainbow-striped cover on my mother’s nightstand.
Sheehy had gone hunting for midlife crises in America, and she’d found them. “A sense of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression is predictable as we enter the passage to midlife,” she writes in Passages. People can expect to feel “sometimes momentous changes of perspective, often mysterious dissatisfactions with the course they had been pursuing with enthusiasm only a
few years before.” Ages thirty-seven to forty-two are “peak years of anxiety for practically everyone.” She said these crises happen to women, too.
With Sheehy’s book, an idea that had been gathering force for a decade simply became a fact of life. Soon there were midlife crisis mugs, T-shirts and a board game that challenged players, Can You Survive Your Mid-Life Crisis Without Cracking Up, Breaking Up, or Going Broke?
* * *
—
But were midlife crises actually happening?
The anthropologist Stanley Brandes had his doubts. As he approached age forty himself, he noticed that all the self-help books in his local bookshop, in Berkeley, warned that he was about to experience a major life upheaval.
Brandes thought about Margaret Mead’s classic 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa, in which Mead argues that Americans expect teenage girls to have an adolescent crisis, and many of them do. But she observed that Samoans don’t expect the teenage years to be filled with emotional upheaval, and in Samoa they aren’t.
Brandes reasoned that the midlife crisis might be a cultural construct, too. “It was kind of a trick that my culture was playing on me, and I didn’t have to feel that way,” he decided, laying out his theory in the 1985 book Forty: The Age and the Symbol.
Brandes didn’t have much data to go on, but soon researchers were analyzing findings from studies including a massive one called “Midlife in the United States,” or MIDUS, that began in 1995. What did all this reveal about the midlife crisis?
“Most people don’t have a crisis,” says Margie Lachman of Brandeis University, a member of the original MIDUS team. Lachman says midlifers are typically healthy, have busy social lives and are at the earnings peaks of their careers, so “people are pretty satisfied.”
There Are No Grown-ups Page 8
