Book review: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide

Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Setiya

This book is framed as one philosopher’s search for answers to midlife’s unease. I think it says as much about the author’s mindset as it does about the problems he tackles, and this review may say as much about me as it does about the book. The book is well-organized and focuses on using thought and reason to try to see things differently when you’re troubled. The intended audience is clearly more or less successful professionals (the author is a philosopher at MIT) who are financially if not emotionally comfortable.

I’m probably not the best audience for this book. I’ve spent a lot of my life depressed, and I’m on the older side of middle age. Thus, some of the ideas, if not their philosophical underpinnings, were already familiar to me. In addition, I don’t belong to the intended audience of successful professionals. (I was surprised at how often class issues came to mind as I read.) Finally, I also have very mixed feelings about the idea of reasoning yourself out of emotional distress. For all that, though, I’m still not sorry I read the book.

The first chapter gives a brief history of the concept of the midlife crisis. The idea is not new, but the phrase is, having been introduced in 1965 by a psychoanalyst named Elliott Jaques. This is the only part of the book where I got much sense of a social context to midlife, and I appreciated that it mentioned other books I can look up.

Each of the following five chapters focuses on a particular aspect of midlife, for example, regret about the paths not taken, sadness over past mistakes and misfortunes, and fear of death and dying. Some of Setiya’s takes did help me in doing a little mental reframing. For example, the chapter on regretting the roads not taken suggests that we feel we’re missing out because the world is so rich and varied and interesting. Would you really want a world so narrow, or wants and interests so simple, that you could get everything you wanted in the normal human lifespan? Well, when you put it that way, no. He also talked about not comparing your real life with an idealized alternative, advice that’s sound in many contexts.

Another chapter talks about how to deal with regrets and grief over past mistakes and misfortunes. I didn’t get much sense of how people grapple with some of the tougher things that can happen by the time you’ve been an adult for a couple of decades, or with the fallout of a rough start in life. To illustrate his possible solutions to being unhappy over life’s disappointments, Setiya introduces a hypothetical person who chose to be a corporate lawyer rather than pursuing a less secure career as a pianist and was not exactly unhappy being a lawyer but did regret not taking the risk of trying for the musical career.

I had hoped that the book might have some insight that would help me come to grips with the fact that, as Philip Larkin memorably put it in his poem Aubade, “An only life can take so long to climb/Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.” I struggle to find the courage to continue to try after repeated failures and frustrations, while knowing that time is growing shorter. It’s hard to face the painful possibility reflected in those words “and may never.” One of my biggest challenges is not to let the years ahead be darkened by my regret over lost time and past mistakes, especially those that have hurt others, and my fear of trying again. I didn’t find much here for that particular type of pain.

Another chapter is about being swamped with the responsibilities of adulthood, including parenthood, and wondering if there isn’t more to life than your chores. It presents two pieces of advice: care about something larger than yourself, and (to paraphrase) don’t let the things you need to do to stay alive crowd out the things you stay alive for.

The philosophical discussion that enriches this somewhat pedestrian advice seems to leave a lot out. It might seem simple enough to distinguish between activities that are essential for life and those that are valuable even though they don’t feed us or clothe us or put money in the bank, although I think the two categories are more interrelated than they first appear. It’s also troubling to me that the first type of activity is called ameliorative, because it is seen as addressing needs that, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have, or needs we would be better off without. Maybe it would be better if we weren’t vulnerable to illness and injury and so didn’t need to go to the doctor. (Maybe.) But “childcare, putting out fires at work, and struggling to keep your relationships alive” are also included in this category. In what kind of an ideal world would childcare not be necessary? Or spending time maintaining relationships with the people who are important to you? Grumbling about childcare is quite understandable, but lumping it in with needs we would be better off without seems a bit much.

If you take any creaturely need—the need for food, say—and try to imagine being human without it, you’ll see what bothers me here. Is this about being noncorporeal and not needing food, or about having this need met by something other than human labor? I wonder if, historically, the idea that “life would be better if humans didn’t have this need” might have sometimes been a way of saying “my life would be better if someone else took care of this need for me.” This possibility raises a host of deep economic and social questions, which are obviously outside the scope of the book but do have some relevance to a discussion of human purpose, especially in the framework the author chose.

The subsection of the book on the other kind of activity, the kind you do even though it’s not necessary to keep you alive, is titled “Make yourself immortal.” It begins by discussing the arts and Aristotle’s concept of deep contemplation of existing knowledge, things that you can imagine as raising your life up above the mundane, even if not quite into immortality. It goes on to say that many other less lofty things can also be included in this category. The author pushes back against Aristotle’s claim that practical action never has this type of value: “We can insist that carpentry and cooking could be part of an ideal human life, that if they turn on human needs, they are not needs we would be better off without.” What about childcare, I wondered. Could it ever be part of an ideal life? I personally found that the distinction between an ideal life (which in fact we could never live) and the necessities of real human existence raised more questions than it answered.

I was reminded of something another MIT philosopher, Stephen Yablo, wrote about two conflicting views of philosophers: Wittgenstein’s view of a fly trapped in a bottle, looking for a way out, and Kant’s image of a dove supposing that without the resistance of the air that supports it, it could fly better. Yablo wrote, “A lot of philosophy is these two metaphors battling it out. You are always trying to break free of something. This makes sense if you’re the bottled-up fly. But not if you’re the ungrateful dove. It can be very hard to tell.” (From Steve Pyke’s book of photographs, Philosophers, 2011.) I think you could substitute “everyday life” for “philosophy,” and it is often hard to tell.

The chapter on fear of death offered some useful options for thinking of death as something other than a painful or unjust imposition. I’m not sure I understood the discussion of Epicurus, though. Epicurus wrote, “So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.” However, Setiya argues that being dead is a deprivation, and it’s natural for us to face it with fear. For me, the tricky part has always been that it’s only a deprivation if you dwell on it while you’re alive. It’s a prospective loss, which I think is not the same thing as an actual loss, even when you know for sure that the prospective loss is going to happen someday. It may be natural to dread it, but maybe that’s why Epicurus tried to warn us about wasting the time when we are alive agonizing over what we’ll miss by being dead.

The main problem here has to do with the fact that rational explanations don’t always stop you from feeling fear or sorrow. There can be a disjunct between thought and emotion. To many of us, this is not new, but until close to the end of the book, Setiya seems to proceed on the assumption that thinking something through rationally is a decent way to change your emotions. In places he almost seems to be saying that it’s wrong to feel unpleasant emotions about something you’ve concluded it’s rational to accept. This seemed odd to me.

I would also say that dread is not the only possible response. I like this, from Shakespeare (Sonnet 73), which suggests another response to the shortness of life: “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

In the last chapter, we have another apparently neat dichotomy: telic activities versus atelic activities. A telic activity has a purpose, a future-directed goal, and you know when you’re finished with it. The problem with this type of activity, according to Schopenhauer, is that although we need to have goals, our plans are either frustrated or, sooner or later, realized, leaving us temporarily rudderless. The very nature of a goal is to put itself out of business. An atelic activity, on the other hand, is present-oriented and potentially inexhaustible: spending time with friends, for example, or playing the piano. Atelic activities are the antidote to the inevitable dissatisfaction of telic activities.

I was taken aback to find getting married among the author’s examples of telic projects, along with driving home from work and writing a book. Technically, yes, marrying does involve a series of goals, for example, meeting people, finding someone to love who loves you back, planning a wedding, establishing a household. But do people really set out to get married or to be married?

Here the book finally addresses the disconnect between thinking about your life and working with your feelings. It’s easy enough to see that many of your telic projects have an atelic side, but not necessarily easy to figure out how to put this realization into practice. The solution to this problem, we find, is mindfulness meditation. (Sigh. Again?) There’s a brief discussion of the Buddhist concepts underlying mindfulness practices, mainly the idea of no-self. I can see that it’s hard to try to summarize the subtle and nonintuitive concept of no-self. Setiya concludes that it’s “not intelligible.” (I think you could argue that that’s true but beside the point.)

However, he still sees value in mindfulness meditation, and I had to smile as I read his very telic (even ameliorative) rationale for using meditation to reduce your heart rate, blood pressure, and stress level and also to see the atelic aspects of your goal-oriented projects—to see that, having gotten married, you might also want to appreciate the time you spend with your spouse. “Meditation fosters an intuitive, not merely intellective grasp of the meaning and value of atelic activities.”

I was glad to see the nod to intuition as well as intellect, but by this point I was grinning broadly. For all my differences from the author, I could see myself so clearly in him. I roll downhill over and over on the same trajectory while insisting that I’m doing it differently this time because I’m on a different mountain. Type A people gotta check off all the boxes, evidently, and bookish people really want to articulate their reasons and plans even while recognizing the limitations of this focus.

Being able to laugh at myself is a relief, and in some sense it’s the other side of my angst about the past. The things I’m sometimes able to laugh at, the mistakes and wrong turns and futile endeavors pursued for far too long, are also the things I feel pain over. As I get older, I’m increasingly aware of how likely I am to feel amused by or, more discouragingly, regretful about the decisions I’m making now. But not deciding is also a decision, and the clock is always running. However, there’s something like a figure/ground shift where the paralyzing fear of messing up again and the grief at lost opportunities sometimes flip over into laughter and a rueful but heartfelt appreciation of a complex and full life, past, present, and, at least for a while longer, future. This book didn’t really teach me anything more about how that happens and how to cultivate the conditions that favor that shift, but there’s still some use in reading a book that leads you to realize it’s not the kind of book you need to read. Especially if it helps you to laugh at yourself.