When the Deadline Looms...

The provisional self collapses, un-lived lives make their claims, and mortality finally comes into view.

Welcome to My Musings. Where I share insights that have impacted me, thoughts on personal growth, and actionable strategies to help you navigate career and life.

Before we get into it, I want to share my latest podcast appearance on My Life After with Steve Joseph. It was a great conversation, tapping into a lot of what we get into below. Check it out, subscribe to Steve’s work, and let me know what you thought of the conversation.

I was speaking with a client recently about the usual: leadership dynamics, complicated CEO relationships, and the daily grind of work. And then - unexpectedly - we veered into the subject of the midlife crisis.

Now, I’d be lying by saying this was totally unexpected. I think, generally speaking, that most folks start to see a struggle with missed opportunities, questions about work and purpose, and a general itch for change around the 40 year mark.

But, I was surprised by what came next: he told me that people don’t really talk about it.

To me, it feels like one of the most common, even inevitable, human experiences. I think about it often and believe it is a ripe territory for work with people, both inside and outside of the career change space. Even Dante opened his most famous work, Inferno, directly addressing the topic:

“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, the right road lost.”

With the midlife crisis seeming, at least to me, to be a part of the zeitgeist, it would make sense not only for it to be unsurprising, but also, for us to be prepared for it.

And yet, for my client, just hearing that it was “normal” seemed to come as a relief.

So, that left me wondering - it might be normal, but what is the midlife crisis, really? And why does it happen?

Where the Term “Midlife Crisis” Comes From

The phrase itself was coined in 1965 by psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques. He observed that many creative figures hit a wall— - or transformed - around the age of 37. Rossini stopped composing. Goethe fled to Italy. Michelangelo set aside his brushes for 15 years.

I found this striking. Around that age, I put down my camera and guitar and focused on work more - while, at the same time, found myself with less energy for legal work in general and starting to really wonder if I had the interest or stamina to keep doing that work. The energy I once had for it seemed to drain away, right at the point when other life transitions were unfolding - marriage, children on the horizon, and the slow approach of 40.

Journalist Gail Sheehy once dubbed the 40s “the Deadline Decade,” a time when people confront the blunt question: What have I done - and what have I not done? And, I think that I, along with my client, and (if I can put myself in such illustrious company) Goethe, Michelangelo and Rossini were all struggling with the same question.

The Unlived Life

Adam Phillips, in his book Missing Out, writes that midlife intensifies our awareness not only of real losses but of “the unlived life”. The roads not taken, the selves we never became.

It’s a strange kind of grief. These losses aren’t tangible, but they feel real. We mourn the imagined futures that never arrived.

Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who found himself in midlife malaise at just 35, described the hollow prospect of “doing more of the same until I die.” He had a career, stability, success. And yet - emptiness. So, he stopped. And did something else.

I recognize that feeling. I too knew I couldn’t do what I was doing forever. Not because it was wrong, but because it wasn’t enough.

The False Self Collapses

James Hollis, whose work I return to often, frames midlife as the moment when our “provisional personality”. He describes this as the self we constructed in youth to please others and survive. And, he believes that it simply stops working for us.

Why? I think it’s because the expectations of parents, teachers, bosses - all the outer structures we once relied on - become less relevant. They stop being the goal we are aiming to satisfy - but, nothing immediately takes their place. The dissonance between who we are and who we were conditioned to be grows too loud to ignore. That gap is the seed of the crisis.

The Weight of Mortality

For others, the trigger is mortality. Cheryl Richardson recalls the moment at 50 when she realized: more years were behind me than ahead. Suddenly, everything was up for reevaluation - marriage, friendships, priorities.

That’s the uncomfortable truth of midlife. You look at your body and notice it’s not what it used to be. Children grow up and need you less. Your career has either plateaued or demands more than you’re willing to give. And the fact that you are going to die (yes, you), a once abstract concept, becomes very, very real.

What People Do About It

Sometimes people buy into the cliché: the sports car, the affair, the desperate grasp at youth. To lean on my therapist’s way of viewing this, it’s a Peter Pan complex - a way of saying, “If I can continue to act as a child and do childish things, I won’t get old - and I won’t die.”

In other words - a thinly veiled version of denial.

But avoidance rarely works. That means that instead of repeatedly pursuing some temporary hedonic experience (and, while I haven’t bought the car - yes, I’ve done this in different ways (Read: Burning Man, Phish Tour, etc.)), we are called to confront our fears. To deal with what we’ve been avoiding. To reorient around what matters, while holding the uncomfortable questions about legacy, meaning, and time.

Buying the car is avoiding it. The real work is going through it.

And, the research bares this out. Follow-up studies to those having reported a midlife crisis (in surveys like MIDUS) found that aging actually brings higher positive affect and lower depression compared to younger adults. Which suggests that, when approached consciously and with intention, the “crisis” is less an end point and more a threshold - an entryway into a new and different series of stressors (work, children, aging parents, health) that we need to learn how to navigate and adapt to.

Why It Matters

As William Bridges would remind us, we often linger in the “messy middle” of transitions, caught between the ending of one phase and the true beginning of another.

If you’re in this stage, know you’re not alone. The midlife crisis is not a pathology. It’s not a punchline. It’s a normal, even necessary, chapter of growth. It’s the moment when the provisional self collapses, the unlived lives make their claims, mortality comes into view, and the question of meaning presses in.

And while it may feel like crisis, it may also be - if we’re willing to walk through it - the opening to a more authentic way of life.