Excellent writing! I find that the older I get the more I am irritated by the complete lack of Parental and Societal preparation and guidance provided to navigate this life.
Still, due to early experiences, I've never felt completely 'at home' here on the physical plane and have been awaiting death since I was young.
One thing I also note is that I wonder if mid-life is when the dues begin to be paid - I am in 'rude health' because I have been diligent (and lucky). I have always eaten well, exercised and cultivated moderation and self-discipline.
A lot of people wonder where their diseases of affluence and comfort came from when they reach their 30s and constantly speak into existence how their back and knees are in terrible shape.
People who had sedentary childhoods are also on course for falls and fractures in their 40s similar to 70 yr olds now due to lack of bone density being laid down early (Wolff's Law).
Thanks Crumpet, I totally agree with you; I have had no role models on how to navigate these transitions and it's a sad and frustrating thing. Everyone just kind of goes with the flow and doesn't articulate to themselves what they're going through, like herd creature cattle. And each life transition requires a different perspective and different skillset; it's easy to find oneself in a transition with outmoded ways of thinking and to struggle within it (health wise, relationship wise, work wise, financially, etc). It requires careful planning, foresight and luck to navigate it properly, and many end up struggling and unable to progress...
It's fair to remember that in our modern age of rapid change, each new generation has grown up in a world that their parents could not have well foreseen. This was especially acute in my own family; my parents, children of the depression and WW2, married late, had children late, while my peers were children of boomers. Thus my family can be said to have skipped a generation, and my own parents' worldview was shaped by a world that had long ceased to exist by the time I came along.
I'm actually really enjoying mid life. Right now I'm monitoring my daughter playing wildly with her Barbies. In an hour I plan to head out to my homestead project and finish some attic wiring. This evening I promised to cook rotisserie bbq chicken with my dad. No shortage of things to do.
From your writings, I can tell that you live in an urban area, are childless and could be in better physical shape. I would argue that those three factors have great bearing on the midlife transition. The good news is that they can all be changed, if one wishes.
In my 20s I had an ego loss experience on the drug salvia. It literally felt like I died and came back. I think this helped me view a "career" in engineering as just a phase of paying off debts and accumulating skills rather than something ego attached. I was able to get into working out at 30 and change from skinny fat to ripped. Counter intuitively, the challenge of fitness is all mental. The less real you feel your body is, the more you can push the weights.
Now that I have some economic freedom I'm just focused on making things better in this physical place for the people around me. I can see how this blog is your way of doing this. I would challenge you to pull some of your creative energies out of the metaphysical realm and redirect them into the physical. I think you will find that things like health and fitness are much more plastic than they seem.
Hi Erik, I'm glad midlife is going well for you. Your understanding of my situation isn't quite accurate, although I prefer not to get into specifics here. Regarding the exercise point, though, I do engage in some moderate physical exercise, but it could always be more with a cleaner diet, you're right. I've never enjoyed working out and always needed a social aspect or someone to push me (it's hard to sustain something one otherwise doesn't enjoy), and of the two friends that used to do that one died and the other moved out of area. It's on my list of things to do if I can find the right motivational hook...
I agree with Erik on this. Maintaining a reasonable degree of physical fitness in middle age makes a dramatic difference in quality of life. Consistency is key. Avoid brutal, time-consuming routines like Crossfit. They are almost impossible to stick with. A simple, at-home calisthenics program that combines isometrics (plank, etc.), plyometrics (burpees, etc.), and multi-joint strength exercises (pull-ups, etc.) has kept me in shape for many years.
Regarding motivation, I leverage technology for this. Not in the sense of fitness trackers, which I loathe, but as an incentive. I find a TV show or movie I want to watch online, and then only allow myself to watch it while I'm exercising. Check out https://darebee.com/ for free, no-sign-up, calisthenics programs that can be scaled to different fitness levels and interests. I recommend "The Warrior's Codex," as it's built around basic combative movements, which makes it more interesting and relevant.
Most of what I've ever read on the topic of Midllife never completely hits the mark. I intellectually understand how what they are writing is possible, but it rarely encapsulates my experience.
"He is having a Midlife Crisis" is the label most applied to me - there were many, but the reasoning for my decisions and the explanations given for my behavior never aligned with what I was thinking or feeling.
Steins words ring true. The process of midlife is both timeless and influenced by current technologies, we are each capable of accessing these inner truths but face them with different sets of skills, experiences, circumstances, and willingness to battle the Ego to discover the Self. Limitless opportunities to reimagine your life and reinvent your self for those willing to remain uncomfortable.
We need a new word to capture the midlife dissonance of the "new normal," where tens of millions of people in midlife find themselves confronting a reality they never imagined possible—one for which most were unprepared emotionally, psychologically, financially, physically, and spiritually to navigate successfully or healthily.
Each day becomes more interesting than the last. I don't understand how this fact is not obvious to everyone, by factory default, because with a little shift in attitude and perspective it all makes perfect sense. It will ALL be taken from us. It's a waste of life to fret over each instance where you lose something you wanted to hold onto, you can't hold onto any of it. Instead, learn to fully participate in the process of letting go, learn to wield that which you can control in new and more meaningful ways. Over the decades, I have carried many labels and identities on my shoulders - I don't regret any of these experiences, they were part of the path, and with age, much easier to see today how the twist & turns, & ups & downs, are connected.
The transition to midlife has provided the greatest opportunity to live aligned with my heart, but required the greatest losses to create the space needed for these experiences. With aging, some things are taken from me, and others i chose to let go. But if I'm doing it right, I'm letting go of more than life takes away
Powerful words, Sean, thanks for sharing. Your last paragraph in particular really resonated with me - "if I'm doing it right, I'm letting go of more than life takes away"...
Interesting article NF! Thanks! And the comments as well.
“Jung noticed that Nietzsche only came in contact with his unconscious later in life, which Nietzsche misunderstood and misinterpreted…”
Since there is no such thing as "the unconscious” it would be more accurate to say that Jung misunderstood and misinterpreted Nietzsche.
The proof of this can be found in the passage on Nietzsche from Jung’s autobiography, which is a strawman masquerading, not just as an insight, but as the final word.
Jung might be worth reading, at least to some, but the fact is, his entire body of work is nullified by Nietzsche's the way a flashlight in the middle of the day is by a blazing sun.
Thanks Paul. Personally I appreciate both of them; Nietzsche especially for his "On the Genealogy of Morality", which had a very unusual and powerful effect on me, and Jung for his individuation process. I don't know if Jung's conception of the *collective* unconscious is real or not, but I'm well acquainted now with my personal unconscious and that is, I think, a very real thing...
Thanks for your response NF. I too apprecaite Jung (though I know it didn’t sound like it in my last comment). And I have no problem with the notion of an unconscious mind, just not in the way he talked about it. As a postulate it works fine, though I prefer to use “the self”, because the self can only be a postulate. Whereas “the unconscious”, especially as Jung used it, was turned into an actual entity, a thing. But it can’t be. That’s why, so far at least, no one has ever seen one, including Jung.
Thanks again for the article. It touched on a lot of interesting and important points. Speaking of articles, and as long as you mention Nietzsche, it would be interesting to read an article from you on that impact The Genealogy had on you.
It is interesting. Having suffered the death of my little sister at a young age (both hers and mine), I have lived always in memento mori - it shaped my life in every, and untold, ways. That still did not spare me the deeper awareness that came in midlife from the tangible contemplation of my own death, which continues to shape my life choices.
Yes, they are, the difference is that the "midlife crisis" involves an increasing understanding of encroaching mortality/death - that's what sets it apart from other liminal periods.
This is very good. Your writing is refreshing. As good as much of the dissident substack is, most writers are fairly predictable in theme and tone. Not so here; I have been frequently and pleasantly surprised.
Great insight! Thanks for sharing. I wish you well on your journey.
Without wishing to project onto or read too much into what you wrote, I think I've been stuck in the first phase. It's taken a while, but I'm fairly certain I understand what you mean by burying the corpse. Letting go and burying it, that's the hard part. So I feel like I have a better appreciation of what I might try to do.
Ironically and differently to your journey, I think I might start writing again and this platform might be a good place. Scares the fk out of me to expose myself, but I think it is what it is and I've got to do what I have to do.
... I'm not sure how to interpret the chart link. It has a column for positive, negative and total (which means?), and also no parameters for high/low. I'll have to study the site.
Thanks Stefano. Yes, “burying the corpse” of one’s prior identity/persona is a hard and painful thing to do, and it may take years to resolve (which is never total - I sometimes find my prior identity “flaring up”, but with time and distance I recognize it and no longer quite identify with it). I’ll check out your writing if you decide that’s the right move on your part - I agree that it’s a scary and daunting thing to do.
Re: the astrology link, after one inputs one’s birthdate and date that you want to see the previsions for, and you click “OK”, then scroll down and each day is hyperlinked — click on the date that you want to see and scroll down. I know that a “negative” number means it’s a current bad influence, and that a “positive” number means it’s a current good influence, but I’m not sure what those mean otherwise - I ignore them.
This is a beautiful and thought-provoking essay. I'm in the same stage of life, but, for various reasons, spent most of the last decade in survival mode, which did not allow much opportunity for deep self-exploration. In retrospect, I can see that I was dealing with much of what you've discussed here, even though it was pushed to the background by the pressure of just trying to make it through each day. One of the cruel ironies of the mind is that, when you start to feel that you're finally getting to the top of a hill, you see another one that was previously hidden from view.
Thanks Alex. Sometimes understanding the process may, in it's own way, help toward coming to acceptance of what one is going through. I have four books to read on neuro-divergence for a similar reason.
Re: your survival mode, I hope you can eventually get over the hill to greener pastures. For what it's worth, Jung argues that individuation is not straightforward and does not have a clear path. Instead it is like a labyrinth, one circles around the center following the twists and vicissitudes of fate, gradually learning more about yourself, then going backward, but gradually making your way there which he called "circumambulation around the center". How much simpler things would be if things progressed in a straight line! He wrote, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the centre. This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.”
That's a great insight! I've read quite a bit of Jung's work, but have never seen that quote before. Definitely one to remember. I wish you the best of success on your journey as well.
I'm lucky, I went through it early at 34. That liminal period went through the early years of the great recession. I changed utterly, on a path of discovery most of the time since, accelerating after 50.
I actually wrote two memoir about that period, but I never tried to publish. In short, my low nadir came in 2006, after I bought my first house. I had a version of the American dream and I was miserable. I went through an initiation with Jung inspired The Mankind Project, spring 07, hosted men's circles for a year, got lymes fall 08, economy collapsed, quit my fancy job, moved to the redwoods with my GF. The Great Recession effectively radicalized me.
That and a later longer failed relationship led me back to God. The last few years after covid have been the most transformative years thus far.
just want to say regarding that list of regrets. anyone who believes in the concept of regretting is just larping as something other than a regular old human.
Excellent writing! I find that the older I get the more I am irritated by the complete lack of Parental and Societal preparation and guidance provided to navigate this life.
Still, due to early experiences, I've never felt completely 'at home' here on the physical plane and have been awaiting death since I was young.
One thing I also note is that I wonder if mid-life is when the dues begin to be paid - I am in 'rude health' because I have been diligent (and lucky). I have always eaten well, exercised and cultivated moderation and self-discipline.
A lot of people wonder where their diseases of affluence and comfort came from when they reach their 30s and constantly speak into existence how their back and knees are in terrible shape.
People who had sedentary childhoods are also on course for falls and fractures in their 40s similar to 70 yr olds now due to lack of bone density being laid down early (Wolff's Law).
I do believe we reap what we sow.
Thanks Crumpet, I totally agree with you; I have had no role models on how to navigate these transitions and it's a sad and frustrating thing. Everyone just kind of goes with the flow and doesn't articulate to themselves what they're going through, like herd creature cattle. And each life transition requires a different perspective and different skillset; it's easy to find oneself in a transition with outmoded ways of thinking and to struggle within it (health wise, relationship wise, work wise, financially, etc). It requires careful planning, foresight and luck to navigate it properly, and many end up struggling and unable to progress...
It's fair to remember that in our modern age of rapid change, each new generation has grown up in a world that their parents could not have well foreseen. This was especially acute in my own family; my parents, children of the depression and WW2, married late, had children late, while my peers were children of boomers. Thus my family can be said to have skipped a generation, and my own parents' worldview was shaped by a world that had long ceased to exist by the time I came along.
I'm actually really enjoying mid life. Right now I'm monitoring my daughter playing wildly with her Barbies. In an hour I plan to head out to my homestead project and finish some attic wiring. This evening I promised to cook rotisserie bbq chicken with my dad. No shortage of things to do.
From your writings, I can tell that you live in an urban area, are childless and could be in better physical shape. I would argue that those three factors have great bearing on the midlife transition. The good news is that they can all be changed, if one wishes.
In my 20s I had an ego loss experience on the drug salvia. It literally felt like I died and came back. I think this helped me view a "career" in engineering as just a phase of paying off debts and accumulating skills rather than something ego attached. I was able to get into working out at 30 and change from skinny fat to ripped. Counter intuitively, the challenge of fitness is all mental. The less real you feel your body is, the more you can push the weights.
Now that I have some economic freedom I'm just focused on making things better in this physical place for the people around me. I can see how this blog is your way of doing this. I would challenge you to pull some of your creative energies out of the metaphysical realm and redirect them into the physical. I think you will find that things like health and fitness are much more plastic than they seem.
Hi Erik, I'm glad midlife is going well for you. Your understanding of my situation isn't quite accurate, although I prefer not to get into specifics here. Regarding the exercise point, though, I do engage in some moderate physical exercise, but it could always be more with a cleaner diet, you're right. I've never enjoyed working out and always needed a social aspect or someone to push me (it's hard to sustain something one otherwise doesn't enjoy), and of the two friends that used to do that one died and the other moved out of area. It's on my list of things to do if I can find the right motivational hook...
I agree with Erik on this. Maintaining a reasonable degree of physical fitness in middle age makes a dramatic difference in quality of life. Consistency is key. Avoid brutal, time-consuming routines like Crossfit. They are almost impossible to stick with. A simple, at-home calisthenics program that combines isometrics (plank, etc.), plyometrics (burpees, etc.), and multi-joint strength exercises (pull-ups, etc.) has kept me in shape for many years.
Regarding motivation, I leverage technology for this. Not in the sense of fitness trackers, which I loathe, but as an incentive. I find a TV show or movie I want to watch online, and then only allow myself to watch it while I'm exercising. Check out https://darebee.com/ for free, no-sign-up, calisthenics programs that can be scaled to different fitness levels and interests. I recommend "The Warrior's Codex," as it's built around basic combative movements, which makes it more interesting and relevant.
Most of what I've ever read on the topic of Midllife never completely hits the mark. I intellectually understand how what they are writing is possible, but it rarely encapsulates my experience.
"He is having a Midlife Crisis" is the label most applied to me - there were many, but the reasoning for my decisions and the explanations given for my behavior never aligned with what I was thinking or feeling.
Steins words ring true. The process of midlife is both timeless and influenced by current technologies, we are each capable of accessing these inner truths but face them with different sets of skills, experiences, circumstances, and willingness to battle the Ego to discover the Self. Limitless opportunities to reimagine your life and reinvent your self for those willing to remain uncomfortable.
We need a new word to capture the midlife dissonance of the "new normal," where tens of millions of people in midlife find themselves confronting a reality they never imagined possible—one for which most were unprepared emotionally, psychologically, financially, physically, and spiritually to navigate successfully or healthily.
Each day becomes more interesting than the last. I don't understand how this fact is not obvious to everyone, by factory default, because with a little shift in attitude and perspective it all makes perfect sense. It will ALL be taken from us. It's a waste of life to fret over each instance where you lose something you wanted to hold onto, you can't hold onto any of it. Instead, learn to fully participate in the process of letting go, learn to wield that which you can control in new and more meaningful ways. Over the decades, I have carried many labels and identities on my shoulders - I don't regret any of these experiences, they were part of the path, and with age, much easier to see today how the twist & turns, & ups & downs, are connected.
The transition to midlife has provided the greatest opportunity to live aligned with my heart, but required the greatest losses to create the space needed for these experiences. With aging, some things are taken from me, and others i chose to let go. But if I'm doing it right, I'm letting go of more than life takes away
Powerful words, Sean, thanks for sharing. Your last paragraph in particular really resonated with me - "if I'm doing it right, I'm letting go of more than life takes away"...
Interesting article NF! Thanks! And the comments as well.
“Jung noticed that Nietzsche only came in contact with his unconscious later in life, which Nietzsche misunderstood and misinterpreted…”
Since there is no such thing as "the unconscious” it would be more accurate to say that Jung misunderstood and misinterpreted Nietzsche.
The proof of this can be found in the passage on Nietzsche from Jung’s autobiography, which is a strawman masquerading, not just as an insight, but as the final word.
Jung might be worth reading, at least to some, but the fact is, his entire body of work is nullified by Nietzsche's the way a flashlight in the middle of the day is by a blazing sun.
Thanks Paul. Personally I appreciate both of them; Nietzsche especially for his "On the Genealogy of Morality", which had a very unusual and powerful effect on me, and Jung for his individuation process. I don't know if Jung's conception of the *collective* unconscious is real or not, but I'm well acquainted now with my personal unconscious and that is, I think, a very real thing...
Thanks for your response NF. I too apprecaite Jung (though I know it didn’t sound like it in my last comment). And I have no problem with the notion of an unconscious mind, just not in the way he talked about it. As a postulate it works fine, though I prefer to use “the self”, because the self can only be a postulate. Whereas “the unconscious”, especially as Jung used it, was turned into an actual entity, a thing. But it can’t be. That’s why, so far at least, no one has ever seen one, including Jung.
Thanks again for the article. It touched on a lot of interesting and important points. Speaking of articles, and as long as you mention Nietzsche, it would be interesting to read an article from you on that impact The Genealogy had on you.
Thanks Paul. Nietzsche's Genealogy inspired these two posts:
https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-egalitarian-ratchet-effect-why
https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/deeper-societal-trends-predating
I also discuss the strange personal effects reading the Genealogy had on me, which I was not expecting and caught off guard by in the second half of this post: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/on-inspiration-letting-go-of-results
Thanks for the links NF! I look forward to reading them.
Seems to me that humans are always in mid-life transition, and that all three phases of Stein's schema are always in play.
It is interesting. Having suffered the death of my little sister at a young age (both hers and mine), I have lived always in memento mori - it shaped my life in every, and untold, ways. That still did not spare me the deeper awareness that came in midlife from the tangible contemplation of my own death, which continues to shape my life choices.
Yes, they are, the difference is that the "midlife crisis" involves an increasing understanding of encroaching mortality/death - that's what sets it apart from other liminal periods.
Just means we are slow learners.
well said - I can confirn all of it.
Still not calling it a midlife crisis but awareness 😉
This is very good. Your writing is refreshing. As good as much of the dissident substack is, most writers are fairly predictable in theme and tone. Not so here; I have been frequently and pleasantly surprised.
Thanks Levi, I appreciate your feedback.
Great insight! Thanks for sharing. I wish you well on your journey.
Without wishing to project onto or read too much into what you wrote, I think I've been stuck in the first phase. It's taken a while, but I'm fairly certain I understand what you mean by burying the corpse. Letting go and burying it, that's the hard part. So I feel like I have a better appreciation of what I might try to do.
Ironically and differently to your journey, I think I might start writing again and this platform might be a good place. Scares the fk out of me to expose myself, but I think it is what it is and I've got to do what I have to do.
... I'm not sure how to interpret the chart link. It has a column for positive, negative and total (which means?), and also no parameters for high/low. I'll have to study the site.
Thanks Stefano. Yes, “burying the corpse” of one’s prior identity/persona is a hard and painful thing to do, and it may take years to resolve (which is never total - I sometimes find my prior identity “flaring up”, but with time and distance I recognize it and no longer quite identify with it). I’ll check out your writing if you decide that’s the right move on your part - I agree that it’s a scary and daunting thing to do.
Re: the astrology link, after one inputs one’s birthdate and date that you want to see the previsions for, and you click “OK”, then scroll down and each day is hyperlinked — click on the date that you want to see and scroll down. I know that a “negative” number means it’s a current bad influence, and that a “positive” number means it’s a current good influence, but I’m not sure what those mean otherwise - I ignore them.
This is a beautiful and thought-provoking essay. I'm in the same stage of life, but, for various reasons, spent most of the last decade in survival mode, which did not allow much opportunity for deep self-exploration. In retrospect, I can see that I was dealing with much of what you've discussed here, even though it was pushed to the background by the pressure of just trying to make it through each day. One of the cruel ironies of the mind is that, when you start to feel that you're finally getting to the top of a hill, you see another one that was previously hidden from view.
Thanks Alex. Sometimes understanding the process may, in it's own way, help toward coming to acceptance of what one is going through. I have four books to read on neuro-divergence for a similar reason.
Re: your survival mode, I hope you can eventually get over the hill to greener pastures. For what it's worth, Jung argues that individuation is not straightforward and does not have a clear path. Instead it is like a labyrinth, one circles around the center following the twists and vicissitudes of fate, gradually learning more about yourself, then going backward, but gradually making your way there which he called "circumambulation around the center". How much simpler things would be if things progressed in a straight line! He wrote, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at most, at the beginning; later, everything points toward the centre. This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.”
That's a great insight! I've read quite a bit of Jung's work, but have never seen that quote before. Definitely one to remember. I wish you the best of success on your journey as well.
Wow what a great and though-provoking post. Thank you for sharing and I will look more into those book recommendations.
I'm lucky, I went through it early at 34. That liminal period went through the early years of the great recession. I changed utterly, on a path of discovery most of the time since, accelerating after 50.
I'd love to hear more about your journey through that period if you've written about it previously or if you decide to in the future.
I actually wrote two memoir about that period, but I never tried to publish. In short, my low nadir came in 2006, after I bought my first house. I had a version of the American dream and I was miserable. I went through an initiation with Jung inspired The Mankind Project, spring 07, hosted men's circles for a year, got lymes fall 08, economy collapsed, quit my fancy job, moved to the redwoods with my GF. The Great Recession effectively radicalized me.
That and a later longer failed relationship led me back to God. The last few years after covid have been the most transformative years thus far.
Interesting to hear, thanks for sharing. It sounds like a major journey.
My SMV is a Subaru Outback, very reliable if not too sporty.
just want to say regarding that list of regrets. anyone who believes in the concept of regretting is just larping as something other than a regular old human.