Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal. But nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.
~Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human [1]
1. Introduction
You're a senior leader in the prime of your career who's attained a degree of professional and personal success. You're keenly aware of the advantages you enjoy and feel grateful for the opportunity to do meaningful work that's well-compensated. You still have financial goals and would enjoy earning more, but that's no longer a primary driver. And yet despite these accomplishments it's not uncommon for you to feel a sense of restlessness or disenchantment. If so, you're similar to a number of my clients.
This is rarely the issue that leads my clients to seek coaching--they're typically in roles that they expect to occupy for the foreseeable future, and they view coaching as a means of becoming a more effective leader. But clients generally engage me as a coach for long periods of time--the average tenure in my practice is over two years--so a wide range of issues may emerge during the process, and their perspective may evolve in a number of ways during our work together.
Your feelings may be arising in response to achievements or changes in your professional life: a certain number of years in your role, a measure of financial security, the new faces and cultural norms that have come with sustained growth, turnover on the executive team or among early employees, a shift in the product or strategy, or even the sale of the company. Or they may be emerging as you reach certain personal milestones: turning 30 or 40 or 50, getting married (or divorced), having a child (or a child leaving home), the death of a parent or loved one, a serious illness, or even a major college or grad school reunion.
You're probably facing at least one of these issues--and possibly several at once. You don't feel driven to make an immediate move as a result--and you're not really sure if you want to make a move at all. You adapt well to change; you've worked hard to reach your current role; and you feel a great deal of responsibility toward your organization and your colleagues. And yet the cumulative impact of these issues sometimes leads you to wonder when it will be time for something different.
A midlife crisis?
You wouldn't call what you're experiencing a "midlife crisis"--that sounds melodramatic--but it's worth understanding that term more fully. Elliott Jacques was a innovative Canadian psychoanalyst and management thinker; he originated the idea of "corporate culture" in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory, and he coined another memorable phrase in a 1965 essay, "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis":
In the course of the development of the individual, there are critical phases which have the character of change points, or periods of rapid transition. Less familiar perhaps, are the crises which occur around the age of 35--which I shall term the mid-life crisis. [2]
The individual has stopped growing up, and has begun to grow old. A new set of external circumstances has to be met. The first phase of adult live has been lived. Family and occupation have become established... Youth and childhood are past and gone, and demand to be mourned. The achievement of mature and independent adulthood presents itself as the main psychological task. [3]
It is at this stage, Jacques notes, that the individual who "has stopped growing up" and "has begun to grow old" begins to experience a heightened awareness of mortality, which becomes a powerful influence in midlife. He cites the observations of an patient of Freud's at age 36:
"Up till now," he said, "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 sight--far enough away, it's true--but there is death observably present at the end."
From that point on, this patient's plans and ambitions took on a different hue. For the first time in his life he saw his future as circumscribed. He began his adjustment to the fact that he would not be able to accomplish in the span of a single lifetime everything he had desired to do. He could achieve only a finite amount. Much would have to remain unfinished and unrealized. [4]
This is the root of the midlife crisis, and while it's rare for one of my clients to report a feeling of "crisis," it's common for successful people at this stage of life to begin to question their current commitments and contemplate alternative paths. This need not involve the drama or dysfunction that we associate with a stereotypical midlife crisis--rash decisions to quit a job or abandon a relationship, ill-considered purchases, frantic efforts to hold on to fading youth.
What I see in my practice, and what you may be experiencing, is a more functional and less urgent version of this dynamic--let's call it "midlife malaise." You may feel a renewed desire to get somewhere--a feeling at odds with the knowledge that you're actually in a very good place right now. Or you may feel that your restlessness and disenchantment will be relieved only by going further--without knowing what that would look like. What can be done? Three suggestions:
Embrace mortality.
Cultivate gratitude.
Go nowhere.
Soon you will be nobody and nowhere, nor will anything you now behold exist, nor anyone who is now alive.
~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations [5]
Embracing mortality feels deeply counter-intuitive--even unnatural--and for good reason. As the anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker has noted, our fear of death is "an expression of the instinct of self-preservation, which functions as a constant drive to maintain life and to master the dangers that threaten life." [6] And yet in order to prevent being paralyzed by our fear, we must keep it at a distance. Becker quotes the psychoanalyst and historian Gregory Zilboorg:
If this fear were as constantly conscious, we should be unable to function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort... Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality... A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it." [7]
So while a fear of death is necessary to sustain life, we must maintain it just outside of consciousness in order to live--and this tenuous balance ultimately breaks down. The ability to effectively repress our awareness of mortality becomes increasingly difficult in midlife, not only as we experience it literally (the loss of a parent or other loved ones, a significant birthday, the evidence of our own aging), but also as we encounter the milestones noted above, which highlight the passage of time.
These unavoidable reminders of mortality are among the primary sources of midlife malaise, and yet our intrinsic fear of death makes it difficult to see them for what they are. As a result you may misdiagnose the cause of your malaise, prolonging and intensifying your restlessness and disenchantment. Successful efforts to address these feelings will entail fully acknowledging and even embracing mortality. What does this look like in practice?
- Read about it, particularly from the perspective of people who are in the process of dying, their caregivers, and their loved ones. People approaching death who are able to report on their experience have a unique ability to remind us that we're following in their footsteps. [8] I've also found the work of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and other Stoic writers highly valuable. [9,10]
- Talk about it, particularly with people at different stages of life. A benefit of talking with older people who are willing to have this conversation is that they've already done much of this work--and a benefit of talking with younger people is that it may demonstrate how much progress you've already made.
- Participate in experiences associated with death. Decades ago investor Joel Peterson advised me and my MBA classmates to go to a funeral every year. [11] More frequently, I try to read an ordinary person's obituary every day.
And what might you hope to gain? Journalist Oliver Burkeman offers a perspective drawn from the work of psychotherapist Irvin Yalom:
[Yalom] points out that many of us live with the dim fear that on our deathbeds we'll come to regret how we spent our lives. Remembering our mortality moves us closer to the deathbed mindset from which such a judgment might be made--thus enabling us to spend our lives in ways that we're much less likely to come to regret...
Start thinking this way, Yalom points out, and it becomes a virtuous circle. Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully--which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety. [12]
And Elliot Jacques offers another:
The last half of life can be lived with conscious knowledge of eventual death, and acceptance of this knowledge, as an integral part of living. Mourning for the dead self can begin... The gain is in the deepening of awareness, understanding and self-realization. Genuine values can be cultivated--of wisdom, fortitude and courage, deeper capacity for love and affection and human insight, and hopefulness and enjoyment. [13]
Finally, note that I'm not suggesting we ignore or suppress the grief, sadness and other emotions that will likely be evoked by embracing mortality. I'm not under the illusion that this process will enable us to avoid these feelings as we near death ourselves, nor is that even a goal of mine. I do believe that embracing mortality allows us to experience these emotions with greater equanimity and thus accurately diagnose and come to terms with midlife malaise. But I also view the feelings evoked by mortality as valuable reminders of the finite nature of this existence--and thus an important source of gratitude.
As I gazed upon the impressive scene, all the so-called ruin of the storm was forgotten, and never before did these noble woods appear so fresh, so joyous, so immortal.
~John Muir, Wind-storm in the Forests of the Yuba [14]
Gratitude often results from a heightened sense of mortality. When we truly understand that our time in this existence is finite, we tend to feel grateful for existence itself, and our frustrations and disappointments can seem petty and irrelevant. In April 2017 I had to have an emergency appendectomy, and before my condition was diagnosed there was a moment in the hospital when I'd been in pain for 16 hours, medication wasn't helping, and the staff seemed unable to determine what was wrong. I was frantic and desperate--when suddenly the results of a scan revealed my appendicitis, and I knew I wasn't going to die that night. The experience left me grateful for each breath and every moment that I wasn't in pain. [15]
But the profound sense of gratitude evoked by such experiences tends not to last, as the danger recedes and life returns to normal. Embracing mortality may help us access a version of this state of mind more readily, but it's not sufficient to hold us there. We inevitably adapt to our new circumstances and take existence for granted again, and our frustrations and disappointments reappear.
While you still have a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the professional and personal accomplishments that you've experienced in recent years, the visceral feelings of happiness, pride, and triumph that initially accompanied these achievements have probably faded. This is the result of a process known to psychologists as "hedonic adaptation." Building on earlier work by Harry Helson [16] and Philip Brickman [17], among others, UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky notes that emotionally significant events change our expectations by shifting our reference point, and that we habitually adapt to our new circumstances, thus diminishing their impact over time:
Human beings have the remarkable capacity to grow habituated or inured to most life changes... What is particularly fascinating about this phenomenon, however, is that it is most pronounced with respect to positive experiences. Indeed, it turns out that we are prone to take for granted pretty much everything positive that happens to us... We obtain an immediate boost of happiness from the improved situation, but the thrill only lasts a short time. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, we find our expectations ramping upward and we begin taking our new improved circumstances for granted. [18]
Just as our fear of death serves an important purpose in keeping us alive, hedonic adaptation plays an essential role in humanity's continued growth and development. Lyubomirsky reminds us that hedonic adaptation, "is not a bad thing. A ceaseless striving for more is surely evolutionarily adaptive; if realizing our goals left us all feeling entirely complacent and content, our society wouldn't witness much progress. If we were always content with the status quo, we'd never strive to accomplish more." [19]
But what's beneficial for the species as a whole over time may be quite troublesome for us as individuals at any given moment. Like many aspects of our psychology, hedonic adaptation is a feature that occasionally acts like a bug. And this is likely what you're experiencing in the midst of your midlife malaise. You may recognize yourself in Lyubomirsky's image of the successful professional:
When we commence working in an enviable new position, we get a big boost of well-being, even euphoria. We think about the new job (and what we love about it) often, and we experience lot of positive emotions as a result of the chain of positive events set into motion by the job... However, in the words of one of my graduate students, those puddles of pleasure slowly dry up and eventually evaporate completely... The excitement, happiness, and pride we used to feel happens less and less, as we focus less and less on the novelty of the job and turn our minds toward the countless daily hassles, uplifts, and distractions of life...
At the same time as we obtain less and less pleasure from our new position, another critical thing happens--our expectations rise... So the job that use to be special now becomes our right and privilege. Whether it's the boost in our compensation, authority, flexibility, or control over our time, we begin to feel that we deserve no less. We begin to feel that our novel and stimulating work experiences have simply become part of our new life--our "new normal"--and we come to expect the happiness we now have. This new (and extremely common) development has the unfortunate consequence not just of dampening our happiness...but pushes us to up the ante, to want more and more, so that we are almost never content with what we have, even when we are fortunate to have plenty. [20]
And thus another primary source of midlife malaise: hedonic adaptation continuously fuels the restlessness and disenchantment that so many successful people eventually feel despite their evident accomplishments. The sense of gratitude that surges up in response to experiences that heighten our sense of mortality will inevitably erode unless we repeatedly cultivate it. What does this look like in practice?
- Explicitly acknowledge what you have to be grateful for and regularly remind yourself of these elements in your life. A few months after my appendectomy I wrote up a "Gratitude Checklist" that begins, "I'm alive. I'm not in pain. I can think clearly. I can see, hear and walk..." and I'm keenly aware that those statements won't always be true. [21]
- Be mindful of the dangers of social comparison. Hedonic adaptation can accelerate dramatically when we compare ourselves to others--a particular challenge for successful people who invariably have friends, classmates and colleagues who are even more successful in one way or another. We've evolved to be acutely sensitive to our relative status, so there's no simple solution here, but a starting point is simply being aware of this dynamic and its corrosive effect on feelings of gratitude. [22]
- Gain clarity on your values and where you derive meaning and purpose in life. In the absence of this understanding, you're more likely to rely on subjective measures of success--and be more prone to social comparison. (I find the "VIA Survey of Character Strengths" to be a useful tool in this effort. [23])
- Seek out experiences that evoke a sense of wonder and awe, emotions that can restore our sense of gratitude for existence. John Muir wrote the lines above after spending the night tied to the top of a 100-foot tall tree while a windstorm roared around him. We need not go to such extremes, but, as journalist Richard Louv notes, "the natural world is one of our most reliable windows into wonder." [24]
While cultivating gratitude can help slow the advance of hedonic adaptation and diminish its impact, we can't turn the process off--it's a fundamental aspect of our psychology. This is one reason why midlife malaise is so often characterized by an urge to get somewhere or go further. Rather than follow that impulse, I encourage you to consider doing just the opposite--to go nowhere.
Whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that's been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time.
~Pema Chödrön, It's Never Too Late [25]
To be clear, go nowhere does not mean stay put. Your restlessness and disenchantment may well lead you to make changes in your current life circumstances. The resolution to your midlife malaise may lie elsewhere, and you may have to travel to find it. But in addition to embracing mortality and cultivating gratitude, I recommend taking a new approach to the process of pursuing your goals and to life in general. I'm not proposing stasis, but I am suggesting that you view the concept of movement from a different perspective.
As a successful person, you've been highly skillful in the process of identifying, pursuing and achieving goals, and for much of your life this has been an important source of fulfillment. This emphasis on goal-achievement isn't problematic in earlier stages of life, when we operate under two illusions: The abstract nature of mortality leads us to imagine that we have an infinite amount of time to pursue our goals, and our lack of experience with hedonic adaptation leads us to imagine that achieving our most important goals will surely bring permanent fulfillment.
But by midlife our perspective begins to change. We haven't accomplished certain goals, and it dawns on us that we will not have enough time to do so. Like Freud's 36-year-old patient, we realize how much will remain "unfinished and unrealized." And we have accomplished other goals, and we’ve been shocked to see how quickly the sense of fulfillment they provide wears off and how insistently our expectations continue to rise.
To help us address this challenge, MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya points out a fundamental distinction between two different types of life experiences:
Borrowing jargon from linguistics, we can say that some activities are "telic": they aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and thus exhausted. ("Telic" comes from the Greek telos or end, the root of teleology.) Driving home is telic: it is done when you get home. So are projects like getting married or writing a book. These are things you can complete. Other activities are "atelic": they do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they have been achieved. As well as walking from A to B, you can go for a walk with no particular destination. That is an atelic activity. So is listening to music [or] hanging out with friends... You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will. But you cannot complete them. They have no limit, no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end. [26]
Up until midlife we generally have a telic mindset. In our personal and professional lives we identify, pursue and achieve goals that have clearly defined end states--we are going somewhere and this is how we get ahead. But the clarity achieved as we let go of our illusions in midlife renders the telic mindset problematic in several ways. As Setiya notes, a telic approach to life requires an endless stream of new goals and new projects:
If what you care about is achievement--earning a promotion, having a child, writing a book, saving a life--the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide. Sure, you have other goals, and you can formulate new ones. The problem is not the risk of running out... It is that your engagement with value is self-destructive. The way in which you relate to the activities that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and so expel them from your life. Your days are devoted to ending, one by one, the activities that give them meaning. [27]
So the successful achievement of a telic activity necessarily entails a loss of meaning and purpose, which can give rise to feelings of restlessness and disenchantment. At the same time, Setiya warns, such feelings can lead us to question the validity of our current pursuits: "Sensing a flaw in your projects, you blame their particular goals, not the fact that you are goal-fixated, and attempt to start over." [28] Whether we're successfully completing our projects or abandoning them to pursue new ones, we can find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle, in which our efforts to alleviate midlife malaise only perpetuate the condition.
The path out is to adopt an atelic view of life--to reconsider the goal-oriented approach that has served you so well, and, rather than substitute a new set of goals in order to get somewhere or go further in midlife, try going nowhere. What does this look like in practice?
- Develop your capacity for mindfulness, defined simply as "nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance of experience." [29] The most straightforward way to accomplish this is through meditation, but practices such as exercise, time in nature, and journaling can also be helpful. [30] The purpose here is to allow yourself to slow down, be present in the moment, and get more comfortable with stillness (which can feel like stagnation if we’re constantly in motion.)
- Heighten your awareness of the telic mindset--the need to experience meaning by completing an activity and moving forward to begin the next one. This orientation will continue to serve you well in many circumstances, of course, but in the midst of midlife malaise it may lead you to mistake motion for progress.
- Integrate more atelic activities into your life, pursuits that are fully realized sources of meaning in each moment, not upon their completion: Walk with no destination in mind. Visit the beach or a forest or a mountaintop. Take a road trip. Go nowhere.
Note that I’m not suggesting you stop pursuing clearly-defined projects. Goal-achievement can remain a source of meaning and fulfillment throughout our lives--but we need to be mindful of the limitations of this approach. And even in these efforts we can adopt a different mindset, as Setiya advises:
Atelic activities correspond to each of the projects that structure your life... If my problem is an excessive investment in telic activities, the solution is to love their atelic counterparts, to find meaning in the process, not the project... Atelic activities do not occupy some rarefied peak to which we seldom ascend. If you look for them, you can find them, and find meaning in them, all around. Neglect of this can lend a false allure to early retirement, quitting work in middle age to take up gardening or golf. [31]
This is the mirage of midlife malaise: the idea that your restlessness and disenchantment are a function of the inadequacy of your current projects and will be relieved only by completing them and achieving your goals, or abandoning them and adopting new ones. The telic mindset can lead us to view life itself as a project with a goal, an experience that is fully realized only upon its completion, but this is a grave mistake. This existence has a terminal point, of course--life ends--but if we experience life by constantly moving forward toward its conclusion, by going somewhere, then we miss the potential for value and meaning that exists in every single moment.
5. In Closing: Not Every End Is a Goal
Setiya's concept of telic and atelic activities can help us relax our compulsive need for goal-achievement and to find value and meaning in experiences that do not "aim at a point of termination or exhaustion," but offer fulfillment in the process. And yet even these experiences will end, as they must.
We have a reflexive aversion to endings because they tend to evoke sadness and loss. This is understandable--every ending is, in a sense, a symbolic death, and as noted above, fear of death is a deeply human impulse that helps to keep us alive. But when we allow this fear to cause us to turn away from endings or rush through them, we miss out on unique opportunities to learn about ourselves--and to prepare for the most important ending we will inevitably face. [32]
Nietzsche invites us to take another view of endings and, as a consequence, to appreciate them rather than resist them. In atelic activities the ending is not the goal, and yet even an atelic activity must end in order for the experience to be realized. The song must end. The road trip must end. The beautiful sunset, the delicious meal, the engrossing conversation, the passionate embrace. All must end.
And this is true of life itself--the point of life is not to reach the end, but our life must reach an end in order for it to have a point. Our fear of death leads us to yearn for immortality--and yet if this existence were truly infinite it would be meaningless.
As you explore the practices suggested above--embracing mortality, cultivating gratitude, going nowhere--acknowledge your midlife malaise fully at every step of the process. The intent isn't to willfully suppress your feelings of restlessness and disenchantment, but to consider whether these practices exert some influence over them. Your feelings may subside, and you may choose to remain in your current life circumstances. Or they may persist, and you may choose to make a change.
Whatever your path, I hope you'll bear these lines from Nietzsche in mind--in my own life I've found them a source of acceptance and peace. And those qualities are essential in the process in navigating the shoals of midlife, as Elliot Jacques reminds us in his description of a successful resolution to a "crisis of middle life":
There is further strengthening of the capacity to accept and tolerate conflict and ambivalence. One's work need no longer be experienced as perfect... There is no need for obsessional attempts at perfection, because inevitable imperfection is no longer felt as bitter persecuting failure. Out of this mature resignation comes the serenity in the work of genius, true serenity, serenity which transcends imperfection by accepting it....
It is this spirit...which overcomes the crisis of middle life and lives through to the enjoyment of mature creativeness and work in full awareness of death which lies beyond--resigned but not defeated. [33]
Dedicated to Oliver Burkeman, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kieran Setiya--journalist, psychologist and philosopher--each of whom has had an immense impact on my work, my thinking and my approach to life. Thank you.
Footnotes
[1] Human, All Too Human: Part II, 204 (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878)
[2] "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis," page 140 (Elliott Jacques, 1965, in Death: Interpretations, Hendrik Ruitenbeek, editor, 1969)
[3] "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis," page 149
[4] "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis," page 150
[5] Meditations, Book XII, Section 23 (Marcus Aurelius)
[6] The Denial of Death, page 16 (Ernest Becker, 1973)
[7] "Fear of Death" (Gregory Zilboorg, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1943, cited in The Denial of Death, page 17)
[8] A list of books and poems on mortality
[11] Joel Peterson's Last Lecture, 15 Years Later
[12] The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, pages 192-193 (Oliver Burkeman, 2013. The Antidote is an extraordinary book that's had a significant influence on my thinking and further study, and I highly recommend it. Two chapters are included in the syllabus for my class on Unhappiness at Stanford, and I'm deeply grateful to Oliver Burkeman for his insights and generosity.)
[13] "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis," pages 162-163
[14] The Wild Muir, page 116 (John Muir, 2013. Originally published in Muir's The Mountains of California in 1894.)
[15] What I Learned in the Hospital This Weekend
[16] "Current trends and issues in adaptation-level theory" (Harry Helson, American Psychologist, 1964. Helson's work emphasized the importance of the relative nature of experience in determining how we feel in response: "Judgments are relative to prevailing norms or adaptation levels. Thus a 4-ounce fountain pen is heavy, but a baseball bat to be heavy must weigh over 40 ounces." [page 26])
[17] "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" (Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978: "[After winning the lottery] many ordinary events may seem less pleasurable, since they now compare less favorably with past experience. Thus, while winning $1 million can make new pleasures available, it may also make old pleasures seem less enjoyable... [In addition] eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off... Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness. In sum, the effects of an extreme stroke of good fortune should be weakened in the short run by a contrast effect that lessens the pleasure found in mundane events and in the long run by a process of habituation that erodes the impact of the good fortune itself.")
[18] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 18-19 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)
[19] The Myths of Happiness, page 118
[20] The Myths of Happiness, page 119
[21] Gratitude Checklist
[23] VIA Survey of Character Strengths
[24] The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age, page 243 (Richard Louv, 2012. Another valuable resource on the important role of nature in our lives is the work of Florence Williams: The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, 2018.)
[25] When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times , page 27 (Pema Chödrön, 2000)
[26] Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, pages 133-134 (Kieran Setiya, 2017. This volume expands considerably on the topics Setiya explores in his 2014 paper, "The Midlife Crisis.")
[27] Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, pages 132-133
[28] Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, pages 138
[29] Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, page 51 (Linda Graham, 2013)
[30] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
[31] Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, pages 140-143
[32] William Bridges on Transitions
[33] "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis," pages 163-164
For Further Reading
The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change (Carlo Strenger and Arie Ruttenberg, Harvard Business Review, 2008)
Marcus Aurelius, 3,000 Years, and the Present Moment
Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)
The Death Clock (Life expectancy predictor)
We Croak ("Inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.")
Alain de Botton on Status Anxiety
Photos: Highway by Neil McCrae. Marcus Aurelius by David Jones. Moraine Lake by James Wheeler. Beach by Ian D. Keating.
