The Midlife Crisis Excuse

"There is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis."

That's the the belief of Dr. Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell's medical school, writing in the New York Times.

Why do we have to label a common reaction of the male species to one of life’s challenges — the boredom of the routine — as a crisis? True, men are generally more novelty-seeking than women, but they certainly can decide what they do with their impulses.

Friedman cites several examples. Once is a narcissistic personality who has an affair with a younger version of his wife. Another seeks relief from the routine of home life with an affair at work.

To Friedman, the first example was someone who had never faced aging. This isn't unusual. In an article in May 1993 Atlantic, Dr. David Kessler told writer Winifred Gallagher that people who are prone to a "midlife crisis" are people who "have to work hard to maintain their illusions. They spend a lot of energy on the cognitive effort of self-delusion, until reality finally intervenes." Most people learn to make small corrections and adaptations along life's course; some hit an iceberg.

Friedman thinks the second example was a man, a successful mid-career lawyer, who had never had to be an adult. Having children forced unwanted responsibility on him, but, Friedman writes, "In all likelihood, the same thing would have happened if he had become a father at 25."

There are certainly real midlife crises, but Friedman is right to point out that it's an overused get-out-of-jail-free card for almost any sort of bad behavior at midlife. We wrote in our article "What Do You Mean There Are Four, Or Five, Or Six Types Of Midlife Crisis?" that "The popular belief that practically everyone goes through a psychological trauma at midlife, and that the crisis causes behavior ranging from silly purchases to thrill seeking and infidelity, provides cover for people who want to do those things anyway."

So why is "midlife crisis" the go-to explanation for midlife misadventures and changes?

Friedman says it's a "youth-obsessed culture" that bathes us in pictures of youthful looking fifty year old stars and stories of people who ditch their spouses, families, and jobs to seek something 'better' for themselves.

I'd argue that another reason is that our language is insufficient. Much like people who have one word for "snow," we don't characterize the gradations of midlife crisis properly because, in part, we can't describe them. We need "midlife reassessment," "aging crisis," "midlife stress event," and "midlife depression." And that's on top of using age-independent language to describe many problems that happen in midlife -- such as divorce or depression -- but that have nothing to do with whether one is 45, 25, or 65.

The pervasive notion of "midlife crisis" has left little room for competing explanations. It's a shorthand that everyone understands. Since the midlife crisis concept made its way into popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s, it has crowded out more complicated explorations of the causes of midlife behavior. As Friedman's piece shows, it's time to move beyond this one-size-fits-all explanation / excuse. It's too simple -- and wrong.