Stories of Midlife Crisis

Steven Rubin of Los Angeles started a website, www.ww2daily.com, that chronicles World War 2 day by day. Today, October 23, 2006, he has a newscast as if it were October 23, 1939.

Tom Teicholz writes of Rubin:

"Rubin is having his midlife crisis -- not the bad kind but the good.

Much has been made of the male midlife crisis. Most media depictions of this phenomenon involve the male of the species besotted by small cars with large engines and/or young women with large flotation devices, often mixed together in a combination that disrupts marriages.

While this may be all too real an occurrence, there is a corollary that is rarely reported -- a positive version, where a person (and when I say a "person" I really am referring to someone of the male persuasion) decides to give their life greater meaning by changing not their family life but the content of their life."

Great post about Steve Rubin. It is important to have stories about people successfully using their MLC to create the lives they want.

A well known author and career consultant/coach, Barbara Sher, says the first half of our life was for everyone else (kids, parents approval, society). The second half of our life is for us.

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www.thedisquiet.com
Helping men who feel something missing in their lives

In 1974, William Diehl faced an unhappy 50th birthday. The Los Angeles Times' Elaine Woo writes:

He had no permanent job and was on his second marriage in 1974 when he turned 50. Someone had given him a party with an ice-cream cake shaped like a typewriter, an allusion to Diehl's long-held dream of becoming a novelist.

The cake, too pretty to eat, melted into a gooey mess, which struck Diehl as a metaphor for his life.

"I'd been working for 30 years and what did I have to show for it?" he recalled thinking when he beheld the cake.

The next day, he sold all his cameras, borrowed $5,000 from his best friend, and resolved to launch his best and final career.

That move turned out well. Diehl went on to publish nine popular novels, including "Sharky's Machine" and "Primal Fear," which were both made into movies.

He died November 24, 2006 at the age of 81.

I've got a friend who has just left a Fortune 500 company after 13 years and is considering joining a start-up. Great idea but I told him to first run out and "have his midlife crisis." Of course, I didn't really want him to have a midlife crisis (which are no fun) but I did want him to do the soul searching and exploration that can result from the process often leaving the individual with a far better chance of long-term happiness, peace and a life of no regrets.

This exploration however can be tough if he's slaving away at a small start-up. He has to pick his own path and I do think the start-up idea is a good one. However I hope that he at takes at least a month to travel, think, write, read, sleep, and most importantly make his life list before buckling down as an entrepreneur. At least that was my advice. I pointed him to this site so perhaps he'll discover what I've written here and tell us what he did.

Wesley Hein
Wesley [at] lifetwo [dot] com

Boston College finance professor Mike Barry started his work life as a nuclear engineer. Then, he told the Wilmington (MA) Advocate, he went through an "early midlife crisis" and went back to school at Boston College to got both a MBA and PhD. Now he's one of the most popular professors at BC and was recently voted one of the country's favorite business professors in a Business Week poll.

You've probably heard the story of Ken Barnes, Jr., the Orange County (CA) man whose attempt to sail solo around the world ended with near-fatal consequences off Cape Horn. But the Los Angeles Times' Dana Parsons thinks Barnes should hold his head up :

Barnes is the guy who, in his mid-40s, had a bit of a midlife crisis and decided to do something about it. He sold a house and a pool-cleaning business he'd built up over 20 years, and bought a 44-foot boat.

... You probably heard how it turned out. A couple of weekends ago, with his boat disabled and adrift off the southern coast of Chile near Cape Horn, he was rescued from the Pacific by cod fishers.

Not a very heroic end to a midlife crisis, unless you happened to be one of the cod fishers.

And that note of dejection resonated throughout the interview Barnes gave that ran Monday in The Times. ...Barnes gave (LAT reporter reporter Garrett Therolf) the bottom line: "I had my chance, and I failed."

And this is where I jump in, uninvited, into Barnes' world.

There are a lot of ways to fail in this world, but spending your own money to sail around the world only to be laid low by a fierce storm is not one of them.

... Barnes was unlucky. That's different from being a failure.

How can the voyage be a failure when he described it as the trip of a lifetime, the one that would validate his life on the planet? Is it a failure to feel like you're living a dream and to experience the solitudinous joy of lolling for hours at sea or watching lightning strikes that feel like they're inches away?

Is it failure to manage a boat in rough seas, all alone, and realize later that you were "on the edge of my abilities," as Barnes described it to Therolf?

That's not how I'd describe failure.

Rather than wait for someone to punch his ticket, Barnes punched his own.

People find satisfaction in different ways. Most of us don't need to circumnavigate the globe to feel fulfilled. Or if we did, we wouldn't dream of trying it.

But how can we not admire someone who did try it, especially when all the money and effort came from his own pocket?

Even with his communications system intact, Barnes must have had moments when he thought he might not make it. His masts were down and so was his electricity. Out there alone, he was a blip on the global scene and in danger of being lost to history.

I will assume that had he gone down, he wouldn't have done so cursing the fates for not sending someone to rescue him. I'll assume he'd have died with at least some last thoughts that he had truly lived.

Forty-five year old Dan Sikowitz left his job as a project manager at MCI so he could study to become a rabbi. At the end of five years of study, he told a friend ""Who I am and what I do are now one in the same thing," he said. "A wonderful feeling."" The New York Daily News wrote about his story here.

Midlife Crisis.. well, I don't know if this little box will let me write how much I want. I can't really explain how was it. It was heard, indeed, but the most important thing now is that is passed and I'm fine. ps: Greek Island Cruises really helped me to go through it.

I have been married for 9 years, second marriage. My husband loves me dearly and I him. However, I met a man through a younger mutual friend and we have been having an affair for almost 6 months now. I go back and forth wanting my husband, wanting the other man. I love both of them, but now my husband is tired of me pushing him away and I think I may have lost him forever. I have created this world of lies and deceit and now I want my life back. I don't know how to fix what I have done and I don't understand why I felt the need to cheat. Reading these stories has really made me understand the depth of the MLC.

The allure of having an affair, as far as I can tell with what flirtations I've seen, is that they make you feel so alive, they turn you on, they have things to say that you're not sick of hearing after so many years...

What if you could find the person in you that got turned on, and find ways to be that turned-on person, only in a better way, one that is healthy and can be spoken of out in the open?

No answer, just a question I ask myself.

That's not a midlife crisis -- it's a midlife transition. BIG BIG difference.

After my husband died of leukemia, I went back to school (in my late 50s) to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology. Mind you–the average age of students in my class is around 25, and most of the profs are in their late 40s and mid 50s.

My friends thought I was crazy. Yet, I had to try it. What a great decision I made! Not only am I learning skills to help others, but I’m also gaining a totally new perspective of what it means to be a twenty-something-year-old student trying to navigate in a world that is totally different from the one in which I lived when I was that age. I’ve found my fellow students to be totally accepting of me, and I have learned so much from them that I can use in the “real” world–their language is a constant source of entertainment; their opinions are enlightening and spot-on in most cases; their enthusiasm for life is contagious; and their can-do attitude bouys me up when I feel old and tired. In short, they make me feel alive.

Those adults who say that the younger generation is doomed simply have not talked with–or listened to–them. They are simply delightful, and I find a renewed optimism in knowing that this generation will one day be running the country—-and probably the nursing home in which I will be living!

Cherie Renfrow-Starry Therapist, Mental Health Counselor Edmonds, WA