How to get through the U
A year after my first interview with Karl, whose case opens this book, we met for lunch. He was forty-six, and things were not better.
I didn’t take notes. We were just sharing. My interviews for this book probe some intimate depths. They require a high degree of trust. In our first conversation, Karl had given me a window on feelings he had not been comfortable discussing even with his wife. After that, trust had blossomed into friendship. I was interested in his life, and he was interested in my book. I had filled him in on the happiness curve, and on the paradox of aging. I had shown him Hannes Schwandt’s graph, the one explaining how, in midlife, years of cumulative disappointment about past years’ life satisfaction combine with declining optimism about future life satisfaction to produce a nasty feedback loop. I had pointed out to Karl that he was at the bottom of the curve, statistically: a place where the undercurrent has fought contentment for years and seems as if it never will switch direction. I had also apprised him of the voluminous research showing that the undercurrent normally does switch, around the time you think it never will. I wondered whether any of this information about the happiness curve was helpful to someone grinding through a slump. Would knowledge provide reassurance or hope of a path forward? Or is it just abstract science on the printed page?
Not long after I showed him Hannes Schwandt’s negative feedback loop, he emailed back: “Wow.” He continued: “The expectations gulf =despair/etc. hypothesis makes sense in my case. My expectations for my marriage/career/etc. were not met by reality. Over the years, the disappointment piles up, and one eventually exclaims, ‘I have failed. This is a dead end. What am I doing?’” Karl wrote of “illusions/dreams/imaginings not met, and the subsequent visceral response: denial, shocked/angry recognition of the reality, despair, and the fight-or-flight feeling. Does one bull one’s way through, or does one run like hell from work, a relationship, one’s home? Then there’s the, ‘Do I tell the spouse?’ question.
“Time to feed the kiddos and make a martini. Alcohol is balm for anxiety, you know.”
Well.
That did not sound good.
So we arranged to get together. Over Thai food, he reported that most days he still came home from work and felt trapped. He was still angry and disappointed with himself for feeling so disappointed, what with his manifold blessings. Learning about the happiness curve seemed to have somewhat placated the “rider,” his thinking mind. But it did not seem to have calmed the elephant, which was still, as Karl had told me a year earlier, confused, searching, scared. Knowing that relief might be on the way in a few years was cold comfort.
Karl wonders: What can he do now?
* * *
Like a lot of people in their early sixties, Joshua Coleman has traversed the trough of the happiness curve and lived to tell about it. “Now that’s kind of reversed,” he said of the discontent he experienced in his forties. “I have a great deal of serenity about the things I don’t like and have foregrounded the things I do.” Coleman is unusually well positioned to share what he has learned: he is a practicing psychologist who works with individuals and families in San Francisco. In an average week, one or two of the patients he sees are experiencing some version of midlife trouble. By that, he means not midlife crisis, but rather the malaise I experienced myself in my forties, an accumulating drizzle of disappointment which can become self-sustaining but is quite unlike clinical depression or anxiety. Coleman said he doesn’t think he has ever seen a midlife slump cause a full-fledged depression.
“It does seem that by the time people are in their forties, many people have achieved a lot of what they’ve hoped to achieve,” he told me, “so there’s this grand question of: Now what? Is this it? In the forties there seems to still be that great energy it takes to launch a career or family, but most of those things are in hand, so there’s much bigger cause to compare yourself to other people. One of the things I see as a therapist is people constantly comparing their relationships and situations to other people. As they get into their sixties and seventies, they’re much more accepting.”
Recall, in this context, the hedonic treadmill. We expect success and accomplishment and status to bring satisfaction, but the goalposts keep receding, because our comparator group keeps moving up, and someone else will always have moved up faster. We do not feel ready or able to give up the competitive drive of youth, and we have yet to reap the rewards of the communitarian values of older age.
What to do, then? One answer is: everything. All the behaviors and attitudes that are good for you at all times of life are also good for you if you are caught in a midlife emotional trap. That is one reason why so much of the advice that comes up if you do an internet search on “midlife crisis” seems so anodyne. Here is something pretty typical, from the “midlife transition” page of Dr. Andrew Weil’s website (DrWeil.com):
Explore and accept your feelings; allow yourself to reflect about your life on a regular basis; devote extra time to your partner or spouse to rekindle your relationship; set new goals; discover new hobbies; travel; volunteer; devote special time to your children; take care of your mental health—join a group or seek out a therapist if necessary. Exercise can help you take charge of your health and maintain the level of fitness necessary for an active, independent lifestyle.
All of DrWeil.com’s advice is good, but it is generic, chicken-soupy stuff. Ditto the (also typical) advice on midlife career change at a website called AgCareers.com:
Identify your strengths and interests. Realize that work cannot make you a happy person. Create a financial plan for the lifestyle you want. Set realistic, achievable goals for your career. Tap and expand your professional networks. Be a lifelong learner for continued career success.
And so on. Summarizing the acres and acres of self-help literature for people navigating middle age is an Augean task, which I won’t undertake here. Instead, I will narrow the focus. In conversations with Coleman and other psychologists, and in listening to the many people I interviewed, and also learning from my own period at the bottom of the happiness curve, I came across practices and advice that seem specifically applicable to the peculiar self-propelling dynamics of midlife slump. Though none is a panacea, all are based on solid science, all boast successful records, and all can help defeat the feedback cycle that works so hard to defeat us.
Normalize
That is therapeutic jargon for helping people see that their circumstances are not strange, alarming, or pathological. It is something psychologists say they focus on when counseling people for midlife dissatisfaction. “I do a lot of normalizing: helping them to see it’s not a character flaw, that it’s not evidence that they’re inherently bad or inadequate,” Joshua Coleman told me. “That there’s a reason they’re having their feelings that aren’t evidence of a larger problem within them. That it’s normal and expectable from a developmental perspective. And also that it’s time-limited, given the research.”
Think about Karl’s use of the adjective scared to describe his forties’ funk. He wonders, Am I losing my mind? Or Simon, whom we met in chapter 5, and who, in his mid-forties, has started to wonder if he will ever feel content, or if he even can feel content. “Maybe there’s something deeply psychologically wrong with me,” he frets. What Karl and Simon are feeling makes no sense to their rational selves, their “riders.” So the rider puts a label on it: abnormal. But there is no pill, no medical quick fix, for this peculiar malaise—so maybe it is beyond help? At my own low point, I revised (downward) my opinion of myself. This ungrateful, dissatisfied, self-disparaging person: Was he the new me? Was this now my personality?
Psychologists say normalization works in several ways. Helping people understand, and internalize, that there is nothing unusual about midlife malaise can reduce the feelings of shame and isolation. Dan L. Jones, a psychologist and the director of the counseling center at East Tennessee State University, said he tries to emphasize that what people are going through is a transition rather than a crisis: a normal, albeit unpleasant, stage in adult development.
Besides de-pathologizing a midlife slump, normalizing it can help interrupt the negative feedback loop that gives midlife discontent its peculiar ability to amplify itself. People feel disappointed and discontented, but then, looking around and finding no adequate justification for their feelings, they feel disappointed and discontented about feeling disappointed and discontented. Negative feedback can take hold quite independently of objective life circumstances. In fact, the more successful you are objectively, the more disappointed you may be by your own failure to appreciate your success. One response is to try to be more appreciative: count your blessings, remind yourself of the good things in life, write thank-you letters. That is good advice, both because it can be therapeutic and because gratitude is a virtue. But, as we have seen, blessing counting can have self-defeating side effects: by reminding us of the privileged nature of our objective circumstances, it can make our subjective lack of gratitude seem all the more like a moral failing or emotional ailment. “People not uncommonly apologize to me that their complaints are ‘first-world problems,’ a perception or belief that only adds to their unhappiness,” Coleman told me. In my case, the lift I got by counting my blessings also increased the bafflement and annoyance I felt about my inadequate gratitude. In Hannes Schwandt’s jargon, counting my blessings raised my satisfaction curve temporarily, but any benefits I received were self-negating because I was also inadvertently raising my expectation curve.
Schwandt argues that the answer needs to include managing expectations directly, by making people more aware that optimistic forecasting errors are normal and therefore that disappointment is natural. In other words: expect disappointment. In fact, if in young adulthood you do not err on the optimistic side, you are probably depressed. When seen as a normal phenomenon, objectively unjustified malaise is not a character flaw, a pathology, or a dirty secret. It is a perfectly ordinary readjustment. You may be dissatisfied, but you don’t need to be quite so dissatisfied about being dissatisfied!
“If they know that life satisfaction tends to be U-shaped in everyone and previous expectations don’t match up with outcomes for most people, that could make people feel less unhappy about their life,” Schwandt told me. Normalization, he believes, can have a double-whammy effect. “If you tell people there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, this already helps you. And the second thing that helps you is maybe you can break the cycle of this vicious feedback effect. By knowing this is a normal developmental stage, you will also suffer less.”
When my own fog of dissatisfaction began to lift, around the age of fifty, the change felt like something which was happening to me, not something which I was in charge of. I believe, though, that my discovery of the happiness curve during that time eased the process, by helping me normalize a slump which had previously seemed strange and culpable. This book, really, is an effort to share and spread the news that the happiness curve is normal, and in some ways beneficial—and that a frontal assault on it (“I’m NOT going to feel this way!”) can be counterproductive.
So … count your blessings. But if counting your blessings leaves you feeling no less disappointed, there is nothing wrong with you. Gratitude is harder in the trough of the U, so cut yourself some slack.
Interrupt the Internal Critics
In my forties, as I have mentioned, I was beset by inner voices assuring me that I was wasting my life, accomplishing too little, falling behind my peers. That was nothing unusual. “One of the biggest causes of suffering is social comparison,” Coleman said. “Status anxiety is a huge component of this kind of self-torture. Have I achieved enough? Am I a failure? Am I a success?” As we have seen, the race for ever more status, however genetically predetermined it may be, is self-defeating where happiness is concerned. That is the reason for the advice given by the economist Richard Layard which I quoted in chapter 2 and which bears repeating: “One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.”
Easier said than done. We are wired, especially in the earlier part of life, to want more, more, more, and to look up, up, up. In youth, upward comparison gives us ambition as we make exciting plans and optimism as we imagine our future attainments and satisfaction. Two decades later, of course, our youthful ambition and optimism turn against us as we keep looking upward on the achievement ladder but realize we are running out of time to get there. In my case, what was especially disconcerting was that my compulsion for upward comparison sometimes ran amok, unmoored from my own values. I would feel envious of successful TV journalists or novelists, even though I never particularly wanted to do TV or write a novel.
Before my own penchant for compulsive self-criticism faded as I moved into my fifties, I learned I could obtain some relief by using a simple but surprisingly effective form of cognitive therapy. (Cognitive therapy teaches people to identify and disrupt immiserating and self-defeating thought patterns, and to replace them with more accurate and constructive ways of thinking.) Whenever I felt a social comparison coming on, I would jump in consciously and interrupt it, changing the mental subject to something constructive. After a while, I developed a two-word mantra for semiautomatic self-interruption: No comparison! (“Brent is so much more—NO COMPARISON!”; “I’m wasting my life because I should—NO COMPARISON!”) Shouting “NO COMPARISON!” at myself was not a perfect stratagem, but it had the dual benefit of disrupting negative thought spirals and helping me feel that my rational side could exert some control.
For me, and I suspect for many others, the most insidious kind of upward comparison was comparison to myself, or rather to an idealized, out-of-reach version of myself. Why don’t I ever do as much work as I should? Why isn’t my latest article as good as the one I wrote a few months ago? Why didn’t I say the right thing to my husband yesterday? We all err and fall short in all kinds of ways every day, and so I never lack grounds for self-criticism, and of course self-criticism is healthy, up to a point. In my forties, however, self-criticism took on a life of its own. Here, too, I eventually found a home-brew cognitive treatment: Throughout the day, when the internal critics started carping, I interjected the reminder, “I don’t have to be perfect today.” Just pulling myself up short and making that obvious statement to myself, when my mind began drifting to yet another checklist of all the things that were wrong with me or my life, helped interrupt and defang the relentless inner critics.
The self-interruptions I developed were effective for me because they were easy to use semiautomatically, and not because the phrases themselves possessed any inherently therapeutic power. My cognitive interventions may not work for you; you will want to experiment and discover your own. The larger point is that you might be surprised by how well cognitive interventions can work. Getting better control over the inner conversation is far from the whole battle, but it helps.
Stay Present
The trough of the happiness curve is a time trap. Life satisfaction in years past has not met expectations; life satisfaction in years to come seems likely only to decline. Disappointment about the past and pessimism about the future squeeze out fulfillment in the present.
Mindfulness—or mindful presence—refers to mentally occupying the present moment without judgment, instead of, for example, constantly letting our thoughts anticipate the future or reassess the past. Be Here Now, the title of a 1971 bestseller by Ram Dass, encapsulates the concept. Meditation, an ancient and widely practiced route to mindful presence, seeks to contain wandering thoughts and hush jabbering interior voices by fixing attention on something concrete and immediate like breathing; it has undergone extensive scientific scrutiny in recent decades, and it has emerged with flying colors. There is ample scientific evidence that meditation reduces anxiety and increases positive feelings. Corporations and even armed forces are adopting it. “The goal of meditation is to change automatic thought processes, thereby taming the elephant,” writes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. “Meditation done every day for several months can help you reduce substantially the frequency of fearful, negative, and grasping thoughts, thereby improving your affective style.” Yoga, tai chi, and other present-minded disciplines can have the same effects. So, for that matter, can ordinary exercise.
During my lowest period, I didn’t try meditation or yoga. I did use exercise and sessions listening to music in a darkened room. By trial and error, I also discovered another home-brew form of cognitive behavioral therapy. When my mind drifted away from the present to obsess about the past or future, I would try to intercept the drift and change the subject to the here and now. For example, I would listen to the breathing of my husband next to me in bed. In my interviews, some people dealing with midlife slumps report using meditation, apps, and mental exercises that build mindful presence. They, too, seem to get mildly but usefully helpful results.
Mindfulness, according to Coleman, can help quiet down the amygdala, a source within the brain of fear and anxiety. It can help us accept and manage difficult feelings and insoluble situations. “We can’t always think our way through those,” he told me. “A lot of the time we just have to develop serenity and acceptance and tolerance.” And mindful presence can reduce the tendency to dwell on whatever dissatisfaction we may feel, interrupting and shushing negative feedback. So … be here now.
Share
Going it alone in times of hardship is never a good idea for Homo sapiens, hypersocial species that we are. We know instinctively to reach for support when hit with an external shock like a cancer diagnosis or unemployment, even if we prefer to share only with our nearest and dearest. The most insidious feature of a midlife feedback trap is that it turns our instinct for sociability against us. Our unhappiness is not justified by our objective circumstances; therefore it shows a character defect; therefore we are ashamed of our unhappiness; therefore we hide it. “People feel if they’re not achieving all they could, they’re inherently flawed,” said Coleman. “Shame in general causes people to withdraw and shut down.”
Moreover, dissatisfaction with status plays an important part in happiness-curve dynamics, and there is no better way, in modern life, to diminish one’s status than to seem vulnerable or failing. For those coping with midlife dissatisfaction, Coleman said, “Exposing it to others means diminishing status by definition. The price of admission of what would be therapeutic or healing would be crossing a threshold which would increase status anxiety.”
Karl, recall, had not discussed his malaise with his wife, for fear of triggering a “shitstorm.” He had discussed it with only one friend. (Two, counting me.) Another mid-forties interviewee, Sterling, told his wife of his malaise, but after she hit the panic button he stopped sharing. “It’s not something people generally talk about,” he told me. “It’s not something I’d go to my best friend with.” When I asked Anthony, from chapter 5, how many people he had reached out to, he said, “Well, I think maybe zero.” He guessed that his wife might know, but they had not discussed it. David, in chapter 7, was leading a start-up when he was at the bottom of his happiness curve, and he thought he couldn’t afford to seem unsteady or despondent. Psychologists say women are more willing than men to seem vulnerable and to share their midlife complaints, but, if so, the gap may close as more women join the status race once reserved for men.
As we have seen, being caught in the trough is no small problem, and avoiding self-isolation, although no emotional panacea, can go a long way toward providing stability and preventing mistakes. Outreach can take the form of professional counseling or therapy, which you need not be sick or dysfunctional to do. “Going to counseling is like taking a class on yourself,” Dan Jones, the East Tennessee State University psychologist, told me. “You’re hiring a consultant on yourself. It makes people feel more self-aware. People feel listened to.” But plain old friendship—social connectedness, in other words—has some of the same benefits.
Terry, forty-three, thinks talking to friends saved his marriage and may have held his life together. “When I hit forty and I had my second son, it dawned on me that the days of being a cool guy are pretty much over,” he said. “I’m forty, I have two kids, I’ve got responsibility at work. Any footlooseness and fancy-freeness is gone. My life is changing diapers and being a dad. I love it, but it’s just a total shift of identity for me, and an abrupt shift. I had some existential angst as a result. I didn’t buy a convertible, but I started shopping a lot. I started buying clothes. Not extravagant, but everyone who knows me jokes about it. My external life has been steady, but my inner life was a real struggle, and in some ways continues to be, though it’s lessened. Inside I was just thinking, Man, is this what my long-term future looks like?”
He started going to church with his wife, and there became friendly with, as he puts it, a bunch of guys. “In the past, I’d always say it’s impossible for me to be friends with a guy who doesn’t like sports; I’d have nothing to talk to him about. That has now proven to be false. I have intimate male friendships. A lot of these guys are in similar life phases.”
The effect on his life satisfaction? “It’s really huge. If it were just me and my wife trying to deal with this by myself, I don’t think I’d be able to do it.” His friends relieve his isolation, but even more important for Terry is that they invest in his wellbeing and hold him accountable, as he does for them. “I know I’m capable of doing something rash. I worry about that. I’m capable of crashing my marriage. The fact that I have these people whom I’m emotionally and spiritually accountable to really helps prevent that. I tell them what’s going on in my life, and they tell me, and I feel like if I did something like that, I’d have to tell them. I don’t want to have to show up and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve had a fight with my wife and slept at the Holiday Inn.’”
In isolation, disappointment and discontent ferment and fester, which leads to shame, which feeds the urge for isolation. Breaking that cycle is job one. If you can, call a friend.
Step, Don’t Leap
If the trough of the happiness curve feels like a trap, that is because it is a trap. Like one of those straw-tube puzzles that tighten when you try to pull your fingers out, it uses our own instincts against us. By pestering us with negative feedback and hedonic adaptation and those other perverse imps that block contentment, the happiness curve turns our objective accomplishments into subjective disappointments; by ratcheting down optimism, it converts our past hopes into gloom about the future; by subverting gratitude, it transmutes the blessings we count into sources of shame; by shaming and baffling us, it prompts us to hide when we most need to share.
Thus trapped, we react, naturally enough, with an impulse to flee: Get me out of here! Boiling up unbidden come fantasies of escape, schemes to bolt job or family, yearnings to occupy a whole different life. When I felt the urge to quit my job—now! today!—I knew, as I think most people feeling such urges know, that the flight instinct was not rational. But knowing it was irrational did not suppress it. I would earnestly tell my elephant that I had a good situation, that I was meeting my goals, and that it made no sense to walk into my boss’s office and quit without a plan. The elephant’s response: get me out of here!
Complicating the situation for me, and for many other people in a feedback trap, was that I really was getting stale professionally. At that point in my forties, I had made a deliberate choice to put money in the bank, even at some cost to personal growth. My profession, journalism, was undergoing upheavals which were tossing many midcareer journalists out in the cold—upheavals which I thought might reach me, as indeed eventually they did. My “rider” had worked through the options and decided that staying put and building reserves made sense. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t make a precipitous or impulsive move. By the time my job collapsed, I had figured out an idea for a start-up, and my bank account was flush enough to provide a safety net.
All of that, however, is clear only in hindsight. In real time, the price of standing pat through my forties was a seemingly interminable stretch of ennui and restlessness. Even had I known then everything I know now about the happiness curve, I still would have had no clear way to distinguish between change I needed to embrace and change I needed to shun. After all, sometimes we should change things up in midlife, even if change does not relieve restlessness or ennui. Karl had switched jobs in his early forties. The bad news was that his discontent followed him to the new job. But the good news was that his new job was better. He learned that the problem was in himself, not in his job; but he is still glad to have made the jump. By the same token, some people who leave marriages fail to fill an existential hole in their lives, but nonetheless do find a better match.
Another way to state this conundrum is to refer back to the happiness equation from chapter 4 …
H = S + C + V + T
… where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your emotional set point, C stands for the circumstances of your life, V stands for factors under your voluntary control, and T stands for time’s influence on life satisfaction. I wish the dissatisfaction I felt in my forties had come in a box plainly marked C or V or T. If C, I would have known to make a change in my life circumstances, for instance by changing jobs. If V, I would have known to work on my attitude or develop a hobby. If T, on the other hand, I would have known to prioritize patience and err on the side of caution. Unfortunately, in real life I had no way to know just how much of each element was in play.
Humans are not very good at understanding what makes them happy and what doesn’t, even on a good day. In the midst of a multiyear funk, they are even more likely to misattribute the source of their troubles. How then, to distinguish signal from noise, and reaction from overreaction? Counseling can be particularly helpful here, because it provides a systematic way to disentangle confusions and sort through options, with the guidance of someone who knows where the common pitfalls are. Of course, people who experience something more like a fog than a hurricane, a persistent malaise rather than a full-on crisis, are less likely to seek professional help. That describes the majority of people in the trough of the U—which, remember, is a decrease but not a collapse in life satisfaction, and not usually an emergency. For noncritical cases, the best advice I have seen, and something of a consensus among professionals, is: change is good, but keep it real.
The Get me out of here! temptation is to throw everything away. The reality, however, is that change is less disruptive and more successful if we build on our accumulated skills, experience, and connections, taking them in new directions rather than starting over. Carlo Strenger and Arie Ruttenberg call midlife change an “existential necessity” for people with business careers, but they deplore what they call the myth of magical transformation. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2008, Strenger, a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, and Ruttenberg, the founder of a company that markets services to people in midlife, argue that the notion that we can become or do anything, if only we try hard enough, is self-defeating.
We have seen hundreds of people come back from uplifting talks and intensive workshops believing that their lives were about to change forever. But the pattern is always the same: the magic lasts for several days, and within a couple of weeks the overwhelming majority of participants no longer understand why they thought the pep talks they heard would transform them. Subsequently, they feel confused—they don’t quite know in which direction they would like to evolve, so they abandon their efforts to change. Paradoxically, therefore, the very doctrine that aims to encourage change in people serves to stifle it.
Instead, move laterally, incrementally, constructively, logically. That reduces the odds of impulsive mistakes and helps keep the downside manageable, making attribution errors less costly. Also, it works. Recall, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in chapter 5, how our inner incentive system rewards us with immediate but short-lived spurts of satisfaction for making progress toward a goal, whereas actual arrival delivers fleeting pleasure but soon becomes the new baseline. We may feel we need a great leap forward, but smaller steps toward attainable goals are not only more achievable but usually more satisfying. “Change doesn’t have to be major to accomplish the goal of making you feel better,” writes the psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne. “It might be a matter of altering your routine in some small way that gives you a different vantage point on the world. It may take longer, but even small adjustments can grow into truly innovative changes if you adopt the agile mind-set.”
The point is not to avoid ever making a dramatic change or taking a big risk while navigating the bend in the curve. Rather, the point is that changes you make and risks you take should be integrative, not disruptive. Life adjustments should be respectful of your accumulated experience and your prior choices; they should be realistic about your values and obligations and opportunities. That said, integrative change can be big—very big.
I interviewed a fifty-five-year-old teacher named Barb whose midlife self-disruption provides a good example. In my survey, she described her fifties as exciting, full, entertaining, and rated her life satisfaction at nine, near the top of the Cantril scale—versus only a four for her forties, for which her descriptors were struggle, stressful. I rarely see turnarounds of that magnitude, so I tracked her down for an interview—via Skype to India, where she lives and works.
Barb was raised by a conservative family in Texas and never felt she fit in well. She used a lot of drugs and alcohol in her teens. In her twenties she met her husband and entered what turned out to be a successful marriage, but she struggled to figure out who she was. Her thirties brought children and a settled life teaching special education in an elementary school. Stability suited her. “I felt we had a good thing going.” But the next decade brought turbulence. The kids, older, didn’t need her as much. A move to an Eastern state was hard: “I cried for two months.” Teaching math, in middle school and then high school, had its rewards, and she felt intensely loyal to her students, but her background in special education brought her a lot of troubled kids to teach, and the relentless stress frazzled her. “It was really hard or really wonderful. There was hardly anything in between. It wasn’t sustainable, but there wasn’t anything else I was interested in doing. I felt really trapped. And my husband was not enjoying his job, either.” Gradually, the aridity of their work lives desiccated their relationship. “Our marriage was never on the rocks, but it was hard to find the positive.”
That was the state of things when they decided to move overseas. By then, Barb was fifty-one, and they had been toying with the idea of living abroad for a few years. When friends moved to Cairo, Barb went to visit and felt energized. That triggered the decision to begin a relaunch in earnest. “I had basically told my husband, ‘We cannot go on with this. We have only so many working years left, and we can’t spend them being miserable.’” Online, Barb found an international school in Cairo that needed a special education teacher with strength in math. “We did Skype interviews and the people at the school there were just great. You could tell it was going to be a good institution.” Their kids were in their twenties. Her husband was retired. They felt ready.
How did the move go? “We loved it.” Barb and her husband reveled in Egypt’s rich history and culture. She learned some Arabic, made local friends, camped in the desert with a bedouin guide. Her husband got involved with the local schools. Then, when Barb’s principal moved to a school in Chennai, Barb and her husband followed her. When I Skyped with her there, she described Chennai as amazing, a place where the people are gentle and the school absorbing.
Barb had once assumed she would live abroad for a few years and then return to the United States. “When we first did this, it was a given that at some point we’d go back to the States and I’d live out my old age there. But I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll do that. I feel much more at home here than I do when I’m at home.” To the person who feels stuck at fortysomething, she had this to say: “Life is really short. You don’t have to stay doing something that makes you miserable. But you have to be willing to take risks.”
For the fortysomethings like Karl who yearn for freedom or escape, Barb’s story may sound like an advertisement for bolting. Notice, though, that as dramatic as her story may be, the underlying theme is continuity. Barb found a professional berth that exploited her existing skills and experience, and she vetted it carefully. She didn’t move to Cairo until the kids were independent and her husband was eligible for Social Security. With his pension, they knew they could get by on one job if necessary. They made sure they both felt ready and were on the same page. In her move to Chennai, Barb changed countries but kept her boss, maintaining an anchor relationship. Hers is a story of change, yes, but of change that was logically conceived, carefully timed, and methodically executed. It was integrative. Not disruptive.
My own self-disruption, the effort to launch a start-up in my early fifties, failed as a business proposition. But it did give me change and challenge, and it was a far cry from the impetuous flight I had imagined in my forties. My business plan exploited my experience and connections in journalism; I had enough severance pay and savings to make the gamble affordable; and I took care to preserve my relationships and options. I cannot claim the kind of professional and emotional home run that Barb scored. But I got my at-bat without ejecting myself from the game.
Wait
It gets better. This is the most important wisdom of all. And the hardest to use.
Lots of stratagems can help people who are languishing at the bottom of the U. Yet, at the end of the day, the currents we battle there run strong and deep, and, in real life, the countermeasures at our disposal can alleviate the dissatisfaction, but are unlikely to eliminate it. I am not even sure eliminating it is a good idea. Remember: the happiness curve, however unpleasant at its nadir, seems to be part of a healthy and important personal (and social) transition. If we could drink a potion and make it go away, we might find ourselves much the poorer later on in life. Perhaps, as Frost said, the best way out is through. For most people, a midlife slump is bothersome but not traumatic—especially if you are aware that it is common, it ends, and it is not catastrophic. Most people can wait, if they need to. For most, waiting will pay dividends.
In today’s world of just-in-time everything, suggesting to people that patience and gradualism and soldiering on can help solve a pressing problem seems counterintuitive, if not countercultural. We prefer to think of time as our servant, something we use and fill, rather than as our master, shaping us in ways we may not control or even understand. So wait is difficult advice to take. Perhaps it helps to bear in mind that, in the context of the happiness curve and its peculiar feedback traps, waiting is not a passive strategy. It’s not doing nothing. Waiting is a way of working with time and letting time work for us. Patience is not the whole answer for almost anyone, but it is a part of the answer for almost everyone. In the end, waiting was most of what I did in my forties. Of all the measures I used, it proved the most effective.
Thomas Cole’s middle-aged Voyager, recall, is bereft of his tiller, bereft of oars. Reassurance, in the person of his guardian angel, hovers out of sight, even as the implacable hourglass remains ever in view. His hands clasped in fearful supplication, the Voyager looks to heaven for protection, placing his fate in the care of a higher power. To Cole, that higher power was God, yet the artist’s imagery has a secular interpretation, too. In the Voyage of Life, you are a plaything of forces larger than yourself, borne upon a stream you cannot control. So relinquish control. Trust the river. Trust time.
And here is the thing about patience. It is easier to achieve—much easier—if you are not waiting alone.