A new midlife crisis every other week

I'm aged 26, yet I feel I've had multiple midlife crises.

There’s an allure to new beginnings. We praise people who look around, realize they’re on the wrong path, and do something drastic. When we read about them in books, it always works out for them.

But some of life’s most precious rewards come from after periods of persistence. In Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, he makes the argument that the most interesting jobs come to those who are the best at what they do. And the only way to get there is to practice your craft consistently.

This is true in relationships as well. I'd rather have one old friend than three new friends. Pinegrove would agree. The closeness and ease of being that comes from long-term relationships outclasses anything new, no matter how fiery or passionate. When you consider taking on a new friend, it's worth asking if this person is someone you'd want to keep in your life for 10 years. If not, why keep them in your life for 10 days?

When one has a midlife crisis, it's valuable to ask if you're simply trying to change the scenery of your life to arrive at a happier destination. I love Lawrence Yeo's take on this in Travel Is No Cure for the Mind:

But here’s the thing. Regardless of what you do to break out of the box, it won’t work. You can change your external environment all you want, but you will continue to travel with the one box that will always accompany you.

The box known as your mind.

The rest of the post is worth reading, but idea is that changing your external environment can create excitement in the short-term, but pretty soon, your life will revert to where it was before, because you haven't changed who you are. It's similar to the idea of hedonic adaptation, which William Irvine spells out in his book, A Guide to the Good Life:

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires. The psychologists Shane Frederick and George Lowenstein have studied this phenomenon and given it a name: hedonic adaptation.

When a new midlife crisis strikes, it's usually pushing for you to pursue the object of your desire. Whether that's a new job, a new car, a new relationship, or a new environment to life in, it's almost always a ploy to dedicate more of your time and energy into getting what you want.

And you should pursue what you want, right? Right???

A life solely focused on reaching and maintaining the objects of your desires is not worth living.

When you dedicate your limited time to pursuing pleasure, you're showing yourself that the most important thing in that moment is you.

In his commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace speaks about the value of switching out of the default mode of being, which is to be absolutely self-centered. He says:

It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

We default to living in a way that focuses entirely on what we're getting out of life. Of pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain, reaching for money, success, and fame. And when we become dissatisfied, doubling down or trying a radically new approach, thinking that when we figure it out this time, we'll arrive at that promised land.