I really enjoyed this discussion and (as mentioned in another comment) would love to hear it continue in a podcast episode! Maybe both authors touched on this already, but it seems to me like a lot of the structure of a midlife crises involves wondering what one’s life would be like if they’d taken a radically different path: if married,…
I really enjoyed this discussion and (as mentioned in another comment) would love to hear it continue in a podcast episode! Maybe both authors touched on this already, but it seems to me like a lot of the structure of a midlife crises involves wondering what one’s life would be like if they’d taken a radically different path: if married, what if I had remained single? If single, what if I had gotten married? I feel like some of this (not all) is independent of what social norms surround an individual and are just a natural function of feeling like one is halfway through life.
Yes, there's always going to be a "grass is greener effect," but I have to say that I hear those kinds of sentiments less from people who are married with kids. Once they've made the decision, their incentive structure leads them to continue investing in what they have since they can't (or at least they can't without great difficulty) undo it. In that sense, making strong commitments has liberating effect, insofar as it liberates us from what could have been. Or to put it differently, people who are married with kids (unlike those of us who aren't married) have experienced both kinds of lives and then they make a more informed comparison between those lives. They don't have to wonder about something they never had, because at one point they did have it.
I really enjoyed this discussion and (as mentioned in another comment) would love to hear it continue in a podcast episode! Maybe both authors touched on this already, but it seems to me like a lot of the structure of a midlife crises involves wondering what one’s life would be like if they’d taken a radically different path: if married, what if I had remained single? If single, what if I had gotten married? I feel like some of this (not all) is independent of what social norms surround an individual and are just a natural function of feeling like one is halfway through life.
Yes, there's always going to be a "grass is greener effect," but I have to say that I hear those kinds of sentiments less from people who are married with kids. Once they've made the decision, their incentive structure leads them to continue investing in what they have since they can't (or at least they can't without great difficulty) undo it. In that sense, making strong commitments has liberating effect, insofar as it liberates us from what could have been. Or to put it differently, people who are married with kids (unlike those of us who aren't married) have experienced both kinds of lives and then they make a more informed comparison between those lives. They don't have to wonder about something they never had, because at one point they did have it.