The pre-mid life crisis

So everyone in the modern world is familiar with the idea of a mid-life crisis, when a person experiences a physiological lowering of hormonal drive, when one's life seems caught in a rut of the same old job and the same old spouse, and one is forced to contemplate the prospect of dealing with old age. 

Our lifestyle in the postmodern world however leads many to experience what could be called a pre-mid life crisis, which typically sets in when one moves from the twenties into the thirties. The dominant westernized middle class discourse today encourages young people to concentrate on educating themselves and finding highpaying comfortable jobs. The process starts in late adolescence and keeps people busy well into their twenties. Life is no longer just about hunting/gathering or tilling the land by day and trying to make babies by night.  This dismissiveness by design of basic biological drives (food gathering and reproduction) is fashionable today. Most today want to be rich and famous, are willing to try out multiple things in one life time to reach those ends; better healthcare, technological progress, more social security and more political stability make most people more confident and ambitious and at the same time more conscious and reflective of their career and lifestyle choices than their predecessors, say even a century older. At around thirty when these basic career-building rituals exhaust themselves, people often face a vacuum. They have a clear idea by now of their own abilities and limitations. They worry about starting families and being responsible.

Modern economies which came to be structured beginning the Industrial Revolution place a premium on skilled labor which typically is created through a rigorous training process. The modern university system where a person goes through four years of college education maybe followed by a few more years of higher professional education (law, business, medicine or even PhD grad school) before s/he is considered ready to join the workforce, is an outcome of these economic trends.  Universities have moved from being preserves of elite scholarship with access to a select few aristocrats, to being more egalitarian while ironically also being more closely tied to market forces, to the extent that a university education is most commonly, and almost exclusively, seen as the doorway to getting a comfortable job.  While most looking for successful careers join the workforce immediately after four years of college,  a significant minority, no doubt empowered by the prevailing climate of freedom, and material progress, choose to remain students for longer or get even more experimental with their lives and go traveling or volunteering or dedicate themselves to activism.  The latter group is most susceptible to the pre mid life crisis, although even their more commonplace peers who get embroiled in the academic-industrial rat race earlier often do not fare much better.

Even with all the premium on years spent in education and preparing oneself for the future, the middle class model today is still a small closeknit nuclear family where both partners have well paying stable jobs. There is no hard-and-fast time limit on when people should settle into this respectable rhythm, but biology and common sense make for some obvious limits.  This conflict between self-improvement, doing something creative and constructive with your life, and having the unbounded freedom to dedicate yourself to it on one hand,  and the security of a well-established respectable family model on the other, is the central confusion that leads one to the pre-mid life crisis.

Brash twenty somethings who are making a lot of money or dabbling in various kinds of activism that make them feel good, and are happily single, do not want the additional responsibility of family and kids. They are still obsessed with the "self-improvement" ideal and look upon the thirties and the idea of  being "good for nothing else but raising kids" with dread. A climate of open sexuality ushered in by the sexual revolution of the sixties and gender equality brought in by second wave feminism at about the same period, together with the invention of the magic pill, helps people keep biology at bay. People tend to move fluidly between relationships without much discomfort or attachment, and casual sex is more readily available, as more and more emancipated women happily join the "happening twenties" lifestyle.  Typically at around thirty, people however begin to get weary of all the promiscuity and feel the social pressure to settle down. This pressure sets in on several fronts : social as they see most of their peers get married, familial as parents and relatives of an older generation try to impose their  model on the newer generation, biological as the urge to pass on the genes is undeniable even if unfashionable, and even from popular culture and the mass media, which can be a surprisingly strong factor behind human behavior.  Some of these pressures are stronger on women, as biology and pop culture both seem to be constrain them more (as "Sex and the City" would testify). A thorough unpreparedness for this new feeling and the idea of restricted freedom these yuppies have come to associate with having a family and having what their parents would have called "responsibilities" make for a depressing vacuum. No matter that many of these parents were "hippies" in their time who in turn had quickly realized their "follies".

Yet biology, sex and family are not the only problems. The yuppies in their twenties are also obsessed with making it and playing it big. At no point in time in history before, have people been surer of themselves and indulged in such an enormous variety of activities as profession or leisure. What in our grandparents' days would have been daily hard slog, such as walking or biking a couple of miles everyday, have morphed into calory-reducing feel-good exercise for us. The self-confident generation writes freelance, contributes to the "Free Tibet or Palestine" causes, climbs rocks and runs half marathons with a gay abandon that can only bode better for humanity. Levels of environmental consciousness and awareness of human rights and international political situations are probably at their highest ever thanks to advanced communication technology. This also means that we are faced with maximum guilt.  The glut of options means more confusion.  The sheer variety of modes of amusement mean people are easily bored and would rather flit from one to the other. These are all factors that could worsen the pre mid life crisis when it sets in. The other key factor is of course the bloated importance that personal success receives. By the thirties, most of those who have spent their twenties in working handsome jobs, have realized the limitations in their imagined talents , and are faced with the depressing prospect of continuing and rising through the ranks of these jobs which when newly acquired had meant so much to them. Those who had dabbled more, spent a year backpacking and another two volunteering, begin to realize they are not getting anywhere with it, that their friends of the former kind are making much more money and have a more secure future, and that they have wasted enough time on delaying a regimented career without all the dividends they'd have imagined, are now hit harder by the pre mid life crisis.

The key step in preventing this crisis from setting in, or to deal with it when it does, is to recognize the possibility of this crisis and to plan accordingly for the future from your twenties.  It is important to realize for example that basic biological and social drives are important and can not be ignored. A rare few gifted individuals are capable of resisting the pressure to fall in with the hordes, and even then it is a difficult and challenging process which needs to have sufficiently strong motivating factors to be justifiable. It is important to realize that life does not end at thirty or that it is possible to pursue one's interests even while having a family. Improvements in life often come in little increments and the idea of making it big all of a sudden  might just have been a romanticized notion from one's youth.  Also it is ok to dream big and not make it soon. The years spent in learning, experimenting and dabbling, in pursuing activities only to later realize that one had no talent for it, do not really ever go to waste. They teach one valuable lessons, help to improve one in imperceptible ways that come in handy later on in life. People in their twenties are smart and experienced enough to know that approaches to life are extremely age group dependent and would know that the thirites might bring its own set of altered circumstances and priorities. An open enough mind and a willingness to adapt always come in handy...for most things in life.

There I have single-handedly diagnosed a condition and almost written a self-help book on it.  Talk of dabbling grad students! :-)

ps : this concentrates on a certain class of people, mostly from a  Western or Westernized (this would include a lot of affluent people from Asian societies for example) perspective.