The mid-life crisis is a well-observed phenomenon. Is there a philosophical angle on this? MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya thinks there is. He discusses it in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.
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Even if we've achieved most of our ambitions, many of us hit a point where we wonder what really matters.
We feel that we've been missing something important, though it may not be completely clear what that is.
Inspired by his own midlife crisis, philosopher Kieran Setia explores the meaning and implications of this phenomenon.
Kieran Setiya, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you for having me.
The topic we're talking about today is the midlife crisis.
I think I'm probably in the middle of a midlife crisis, but you better explain what you mean by a midlife crisis.
So unlike a lot of familiar cultural ideas, the midlife crisis, as a phrase, has a definite history and a point of origin.
So 1965 psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques published this paper, death in the midlife crisis, and what he found was that his patients seemed to be doing well and flourishing stable jobs, happy relationships, but had a sense of malaise and futility somehow connected with death.
And he wanted to figure out what that was.
So it's not that people in midlife have become bitter and twisted because their ambitions have been thwarted in some way.
No.
The problem he was concerned about is very much a first world problem.
It was people who were doing pretty well and had been quite successful and yet still somehow felt that their lives were repetitive and futile and it had.