Midlife

I despise the term “midlife crisis.” It’s laden with such cultural baggage.

Chip’s Note: Adrian is a talented filmmaker, partly due to his background as a psychologist.

Chip’s Note: Tania has been an MEA facilitator and came to MEA during Covid, planning to stay for a couple weeks and kept prolonging her stay, ultimately staying more than a dozen weeks. She’s an avid traveler and observer of human behavior, especially in midlife.

I’m a proud midlife activist. No life stage is more derided than this period of life. It’s the Rodney Dangerfield of life stages: “it don’t get no respect.”

In one of the most famous fairy tales, the fairy godmother casts a spell that offers Cinderella a beautiful gown, carriage and horses so she can go to the Prince’s ball, but she’s told she has to leave by midnight before all of this fantasy returns to rags, a pumpkin, and rats.

Korea is a fascinating country, not just because they have a vibrant artistic culture (think K-Pop and Academy of Awards Best Picture “Parasites” and many other films), but it also has the lowest birth rate of any modern country in the world (just 0.74 children per woman when the replacement rate for a country is 2.1) and it also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, just behind Japan. If you want to get a window into our aging global future, you’d want to look at Korea and Japan.

The challenge of being an author with a big publisher is that you deliver the final manuscript about a year before the book comes out, which means new ideas may percolate to the surface that won’t be captured in the published book.

Part of the reason I decided to write “Learning to Love Midlife” (https://bit.ly/48ag4FH) was because I didn’t feel there were many mainstream books that told the modern midlife story. But, I recently cracked open James Hollis’ insightful first book, “The Middle Passage,” and was reminded of just how influential this work of art was on my early thinking on midlife.

Taking a gap year in midlife used to be the kind of topic you might hear at an expensive restaurant. But things have changed. More people are working part-time remotely, many inexpensive places (especially in Latin America and Asia) have become modernized, and a growing number of folks in their 40s and 50s are seeing a "midlife atrium" as a necessary career pitstop in a career that will likely continue into their 70s.

Chip’s Note: Annie was one of our five finalists of 151 entrants into our “Life Begins @ 50” contest. Given the quality of her essay, you can see there was some lovable, impressive competition. Thanks, Annie, for sharing your story! If you’re curious about being around the age of 50, check out my co-founder Jeff Hamaoui’s “Life Begins @ 50” workshop in Baja this spring: https://www.meawisdom.com/workshop/life-begins-at-50-embracing-your-second-adulthood-with-jeff-hamaoui