Life's Rough Middle Patch

"Harvest Moon" is a rare positive song about middle age and appreciating what you have

Last week I opined a little on Twitter on the emotional difficulties of middle age, and I think it actually lost me some followers. Twitter is a place slanted towards the young, so I should talk about my middle-aged angst on a blog, which is a fittingly unfashionable platform for an unfashionable topic.

I've been reading a lot recently about "deaths of despair" from suicide, alcohol-related illnesses, and drug overdoses, and how they have been spiking among the middle-aged. This full blown national midlife crisis is getting surprisingly little attention despite the fact that it has dragged down the nation's life expectancy. There are deeper causes behind this, but there's also a reason why this is manifesting among those in middle age.

It's the stage of life that's perhaps the most emotionally fraught, even more than adolescence. Once you hit middle age you suddenly realize that you've gotten to where you are going to be. There is no bright future anymore, just the present for another few decades until you die after you've hopefully had a little time to enjoy your retirement. With each passing day, I can hear a door slam. The sense of possibility that came with youth is gone.

Once you've reached this point and become cognizant of your rut, you start to think long and hard about whether it's a good rut to be in or not. A lot of what we call a "midlife crisis" is merely people realizing the die is cast and they are deeply unhappy about having to live the second half of their lifetimes in the place where they have ended up.

It hasn't been too bad for me. Quarantine has reminded me of how lucky I am to have my wife and daughters. The way my school has handled the transition to distance learning makes me happy to work for them. The appreciations I got from graduating seniors last week reminded me that my job is one that truly makes an impact on others.

However, it's becoming more and more apparent what I am not going to have and where I have failed. Being a teacher who sacrificed prime earning years to grad school means I will never have the money to travel to a lot of the places I've dreamed about since my youth. I am probably never going to get a book published. My attempts to be an "independent scholar" after leaving academia have basically failed. Name publications don't want to publish my submissions, and never will. I haven't made many new friends where I live and it's unlikely I ever will, and will spend the rest of my life hundreds of miles from my family and closest friends.

On balance things have worked out! But that doesn't mean that certain things don't get lost to the point that they can't come back. That's the bitter truth of middle age. It's little wonder that people my age far less affluent than me are dying "deaths of despair." America is a place where it is less and less likely that people can reach middle age feeling good about where they have ended up.

Yet we lack even the most basic public conversation about this. The "midlife crisis" is a stock target of derision in our popular culture. In this youth-obsessed society discussing aging is a faux pas deserving of mockery. It's high time that we reckoned with the emotional difficulties of middle age. Maybe the beginning is for us sad sack middle-aged types to just talk about it.