Replies

“”””For Baby Boomers, the midlife crisis was very nearly a rite of passage. John Updike made a career of chronicling the earthquakes that rattled the mannered world of upper-middle-class suburbanites. But that world of well-scrubbed children, stay-at-home wives, and afternoon cocktails seems as remote today as King Arthur’s court.””””

That seems confusing, boomers were hitting their 40s and 50s well into the 2000s, in fact up until the last 10 years, not the 60s and 70s.

That seems confusing, boomers were hitting their 40s and 50s well into the 2000s, in fact up until the last 10 years, not the 60s and 70s.

I suppose if you're a Millennial, everyone older than you is a Boomer.

It's actually mostly Gen-X who are hitting their midlives today and I think the "red sports car/affair/tennis lessons" midlife crisis was personified by the people who hit their midlives in the 60s-70s, the generation that mostly predated Baby Boomers.

Still, the points made are valid. You can't have a midlife crisis if you've never really had a life.

The concept of a "mid-life crisis" had already become firmly entrenched in the American psyche by the late 1960s. By 1970s, it had become a hackneyed cliche. It was no longer "hip," no longer a "flex," no longer an example of "humble-bragging" to admit to entering a "mid-life crisis."

Thus, no one allegedly undergoing a "mid-life crisis" by that time could credibly claim to have been "caught unawares" (a prerequisite for complaining about suffering such a crisis).

At the same time, the stereotypical background for having a "mid-life crisis" - the "anamnesis," if you will - had all but vanished. The typical image of a late-30s junior executive with a stay-at-home wife, two kids, and a mortgage, who suddenly realizes with horror that he had become stuck in a rut and failed to enjoy his youth while he had it, was becoming illusory.

In short: A person can't have a "mid-life crisis" without believing that his life had become ossified, and that he was "doomed" to live out the rest of his days in a pre-ordained path. By the 1980s and 90s, the "American Dream" was beginning to crumble. Economic and professional uncertainty were taking hold. The likelihood - whether seen as a blessing or a curse - of plodding along in the same, monotonous trajectory for the next 30 years was diminishing.

So my thesis statement remains:

You can't complain about entering a "mid-life crisis" if all of society has been blaring it into your ears since your childhood that you have got to watch out and avoid entering a "mid-life crisis."

Regards,