Facing your midcareer crisis

Research confirms that middle age is, on average, the most difficult time of life. The reasons for the 'midcareer crisis' however, are not well understood. Photo / 123RF

About eight years ago I found myself living a cliché. A tenured philosophy professor at a respected university, I had the career of my dreams. I was doing what I loved, and yet the prospect of doing it year after year began to feel oppressive. I was having a midlife crisis.

Recent research confirms that middle age is, on average, the most difficult time of life. In 2008 the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald found that self-reported life satisfaction begins high in youth, bottoms out in our mid-40s and then recovers as we get older. The pattern is robust around the world, affecting both men and women.

The reasons for the "midcareer crisis" are not well understood. Why does job satisfaction suffer during midlife? Judging by my own experience, and by conversations with friends, there are multiple factors: the narrowing of options, the inevitability of regret and the tyranny of projects successively completed and replaced.

Although they have rarely addressed midlife by name, philosophers offer tools for thinking through the shape of our careers and the attitudes we take toward them. These tools can help you learn whether your malaise at midcareer is a sign that you need to change what you're doing or to change how you do it.

Some of the insights I gleaned from philosophy speak to the challenge of accepting what we cannot change. As life goes on, possibilities fade, options are constrained and past decisions forge limits upon us. It is often in midcareer that we acknowledge the lives we'll never live and the pain of missing out.

Can philosophy help us come to terms with this? I think it can, by reframing the predicament of regret. Why do we feel a sense of loss about lives not lived or professions we won't pursue? We do so, even when things go well, because the values realized by different choices are not the same. It's reasonable to experience loss when you choose a career in finance over one in fashion, even if you are sure you made the right call.

Regret need not imply that anything is wrong. Even when outcomes are rosy, regret of a certain sort is appropriate. Regret shows that you value many activities. The only way to avoid regret entirely is to care about just one thing. But that would impoverish your life.

All very well, you might say, except that there is another kind of regret — the kind we experience when things do not go well. What about mistakes, misfortunes, failures? At midlife we find ourselves reflecting ruefully on what might have been. A friend of mine gave up a promising career in music to become a corporate lawyer. Ten years in, she found her work disappointingly drab. What haunted her was not so much wondering how to change tracks now but wishing she could change the past. How could she make peace with that?

You have to distinguish what you should have done at the time from how you should feel about it now. When my friend mourned her lost career in music, I reminded her that she would not have met her husband, and her daughter would not exist, if she hadn't gone to law school when she did. Love is a counterweight to regret. So is the fulfilment we glean from friendships, projects and the activities we pursue.

Accepting what we cannot change is only part of the problem. For me, the deepest source of malaise at midcareer was not regret about the past but a sense of futility in the present. My work still seemed worthwhile, yet the prospect of doing one thing after another until I finally retired felt somehow self-defeating.

How can doing what is worthwhile seem empty? A first explanation turns on the notion of "ameliorative value" — the value of solving a problem or answering a need, even when the need is one you'd rather not confront. A lot of work is like this. Although it is necessary, amelioration brings limited satisfaction.

One reason for a midcareer crisis is that too much of your time at work is spent putting out fires and avoiding bad results, instead of pursuing projects with existential value — the kind that make life worth living. The solution is to make time for feel-good activities either in the office — for instance, by starting a pet project — or outside it, by reviving a favorite hobby or taking up a new one. Existential activities have value that ameliorative ones do not.

There is a second explanation for the sense of emptiness at midcareer, which goes beyond the need for existential worth. When we look philosophically at the nature of projects and our investment in them, we can discern a structural flaw. Projects aim at their own completion. When I focus on writing this essay, for instance, I focus on a goal that I have not yet achieved, which will be a memory the moment I am done. Satisfaction is always in the future or the past; no wonder the present feels empty.

One form of midcareer crisis turns on excessive investment in projects, prizing the next achievement and the next. But there is another way to be. The key is to distinguish two kinds of activity in which we engage. Projects are telic activities, in that they aim at terminal states, not yet achieved. You're negotiating that deal and then closing it. Reaching the goal brings a moment of satisfaction, but after that, it's on to the next project.

Other activities are atelic, without a built-in end. Think of the difference between walking home and going for a stroll. When you engage in atelic activities, you do not exhaust them. Nor do they evoke the emptiness of projects, for which fulfilment is always in the future or the past. Atelic activities are fully realized in the present.

At work we engage in both telic and atelic activities. You are, for example, writing a human resources report (telic) and taking feedback from colleagues (atelic). Most telic work activities have meaningful atelic aspects: When you're working on that deal, you're furthering your company's growth strategy. So you have a choice. You can focus on either the project or the process. By adjusting your orientation to become less project-driven, you can defeat the sense of emptiness in the present.

Are these strategies enough to reconcile you to the limitations of your career? If not, that is an argument for switching tracks. Midlife is not too late: The midcareer crisis can be a spur to radical, vitalising change.

Written by: Kieran Setiya
© 2020 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group

Written by: Kieran Setiya

© 2019 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group