Found: The "Midafternoon Life Crisis"

Heather Havrilesky, reviewing TV shows for Salon.com, posits that we now have existential crisis not at midlife, but every day ...

Remember the midlife crisis? It was all the rage 20 years ago. Suddenly confronted with their crow's feet and their irrelevance in a youth-dominated culture, 40-something men and women across the country joined the gym, dumped their spouses, purchased sparkly metallic-colored Japanese sports cars with sunroofs, and attended the Forum seminars in which they tearfully confessed that they'd been living like obedient livestock all these years (aggressively led to this realization, of course, by their overbearing, authoritarian Forum leaders).

These days, we're far too self-involved and far too aware of our status as suffering, braying, googly-eyed moo-cows to be susceptible to such a dramatic epiphany. Instead of waking up and smelling the s*** hitting the fan after 35 or 40 years in the dark, we face down our demons and wrestle with our bad habits and tackle big, important existential questions at least once a day. The midlife crisis has been replaced -- by the midafternoon life crisis.

Here's how it works: At around 2 p.m. each day, the caffeine levels in our blood drop precipitously, while all of the blood in our brains is diverted to our digestive systems in order to tackle that burrito the size of a handbag we ate for lunch. At around the same time, we stop idly perusing our e-mail and come to the realization that we're not going to accomplish even half of we what set out to that morning. The stress of this realization, paired with our compromised physical state, creates the illusion that we cannot possibly continue to toil away at such a pointless job for another second (let alone another day!), which in turn causes our hands to sweat and our minds to race at the thought of wasting what little time we have left on Earth half-assing a bunch of meaningless, arbitrary tasks while steadily falling behind financially despite our best efforts to get ahead. Finally, we focus our merciless, under-caffeinated minds on our bossy spouses, our ungrateful children and our hopelessly self-involved friends (who, unbeknownst to us, are experiencing their own midafternoon life crises in sync with ours). As our disillusionment and disappointment and angst and fidgety stress grow, we feel a sudden urge to take action!

Three hours later, we quit out of YouTube, dust off the crumbs from our Very Special Emergency Glazed Donut, and go home with a stomachache vowing to get more work done first thing tomorrow.

It's all in the service of a review of the TV show "Breaking Bad," but before moving on to the actual criticism, Havrilesky theorizes that the midafternoon life crisis might be a good thing:

"... studies show that, like a pressure gauge that lets off excess steam to prevent an explosion, the midafternoon life crisis indefinitely delays the sort of sweeping epiphany that might incite an honest attempt to improve ourselves and our standing in life."

If a donut a day is what it takes to prevent people from running off with their executive assistants, it's a small price to pay!