Note 2: Becoming an adultier adult
We are living in a society that is more complex than it ever has been in recorded history, and it gets more increasingly more complex with time. (On a side note: this is why I understand those that romanticize the past and vote for politicians who promise to revert change and return back to simpler times.) As a result, our problems, whether they are structural or individual, have more complex causes. Psychology actually has a hard time determining the exact nature and cause of a midlife crisis.
This is another reason I hesitate to call what I’ve gone through “a midlife crisis”. I’ve been through such periods earlier in my life, with different triggers. Around 25, I realized that I was quickly nearing 30, which for many young gay men of my generation is jokingly labeled as “gay death” because of the community’s obsession with youth. I internalized this obsession in the same way I internalized society’s homophobia. This is something that hasn’t changed much, I still see many twenty-something gay men obsessed with this age limit. During that period in my twenties, I started checking off things I’d put on my bucket list as an adolescent. Skydiving, street dance classes and diving were just a few things I somewhat frantically ticked off.
The difference between what I went through then, compared to now, is that this time around feels more intense — but again, I have no way of knowing whether that is a result of me being more aware of my emotions and the increasing complexity of life, or whether it simply is that Jung and others were right and the period around 40 is a more intense period of development for most people. One big difference between then and now is death. In my twenties, I flirted with death — taking your skydiver’s license is impossible without awareness that you’re seconds away from potential death during the most intense stages of a jump, and diving isn’t directly free from risk either — to make the experience more intense. This time around, death’s role in the process is less about making my own experiences more intense, and more about the future.
Our labels on different stages of life are blunt tools: you spend some ten to fifteen years as a child, another five to ten as adolescent, then you have forty-some years of adulthood before you (hopefully) reach retirement. Even if we leave out the problem that “retirement” for millennials is a theoretical and nebulous concept based on expectations watching the previous generation, the concept of “adulthood” lacks nuances. I feel very different today as a 41 year old than I did when I was 25, yet both ages are part of what we call “adulthood”. I’ve changed more in the past two years than I did in the five previous years, and research shows that most of us change as much in any given ten-year period, as we did between 18 and 28. I’m not sure when I felt as an adult for the first time, but I’m sure that this period has resulted in me feeling as an adultier adult. Not as much because of what I’m doing or not doing, and more because of the reasons I do the things. It wasn’t the outcome I expected, and it’s not necessarily what I wanted, but I’m sure the process is exactly what I needed.
