RWL #300
up out of the pit of mid-life
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Wow - this is issue 300! It kind of crept up on me - I’m feeling like I should have had something special planned - but sadly I don’t. I do want to say I appreciate your continued subscribing and reading and feedback. Substack offered a new way to interact - with the chat function. I’ll see about posing an occasional question there, so if you are interested, check out the instructions here.
It’s another weekend of leaf blowing and raking, but the end is in sight - all of our oaks have now let go of all of their leaves. That’s early in the season from my experience - usually we’re doing the last of the clean up as the first snow flies in December - but I think I may be able to get everything in by the end of the day today. The pic above is of my driveway, with our woodpile off to the side. You can’t see the driveway because the entire thing is covered in oak leaves.
My wife was away on her annual girl’s shopping trip up to North Conway, so I was alone. So of course I made myself a bit of a feast last night after all the leaf blowing. Shredded beef chili, olive & rosemary bread, and amaretti. Making your chili with a cheap cut of beef (like top round) and then shredding it is a game changer over using ground beef. Try this recipe if you are interested.
If you are intimidated by the idea of baking bread, a great place to start are these no-knead recipes. That’s where I found my olive bread recipe. I’ve made all of these and they all came out great except the cinnamon raisin one, which burned. I think it needs to be cooked at a lower temperature because of the sugar, but I haven’t gotten around to testing that theory. The recipes are really easy, you just need to plan ahead because they use minimal yeast and it takes a long time for the dough to rise.
For a super sophisticated seeming, but actually pretty easy, pastry, try making raspberry amaretti cookies. They are a chewy cookie with an almond base. I use raspberry powder instead of freeze-dried berries.
I do have a longer recommendation for you this week, I wanted to tell you about another really great book I finished recently - Kieran Setiya’s Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, but I’ll put it in Read below.
So with that, willing good for all of you, have a great week and I present you with the links!
Read
What: Kieran Setiya, Midlife: A Philosophical Guide
Why: I suffered through my own mid-life crisis when I was in my PhD program (I started the program when I was 37, so the timing was just about right). The thing that helped pull me out of it was discovering the writings of Adam Smith, and specifically his book, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) written in 1759. Adam Smith is best known for his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (better known as simply The Wealth of Nations). Smith is known today as the father of modern economics as a result of The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), but in his own time he was famous as a moral philosopher. TMS gives us a moral foundation for how one should live. Specifically, what I took from Smith was that it was not only important to achieve, but to live justly. I mention this because Setiya is also a philosopher, and he sets out to write a self-help book based in modern philosophy. I think he has a little professional jealousy for the Ryan Holiday’s of the world who are making a fortune rehabilitating the Stoics for the 21st century, so he sets out to try to write a philosophical reflection with some suggestions on how to live and survive the midlife crisis that most men and I think women, too, go through, though maybe not at the same times.
Setiya discusses what we know from the happiness literature that most people experience happiness in their lives as U-shaped experience, meaning we are relatively happy when we are younger, then as we move into our late twenties/early thirties, happiness trends downward. At the bottom of the U is the mid-life crisis, after which happiness begins to trend upward again. I think of the bottom of the U as the pit of midlife. This isn’t to say that one isn’t ever unhappy in one’s early twenties or sixties, and one is never happy in their late thirties or forties. The U-shape is a long-run sense of happiness, with jags and bumps along the way.
The idea of a U-shape trend to our happiness is not new. What I thought was especially interesting was Setiya’s use of the linguistic terms telic and atelic. And even the ideas behind these terms aren’t entirely new - I wrote earlier this year about Arthur Brooks’ book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life which has a similar application of the concepts - I thought Setiya did a nice job connecting all of the ideas together in a coherent whole.
Here is how Setiya applies the terms:
Borrowing jargon from linguistics, we can say that some activities are “telic”: they aim at terminal states, at which they are finished and thus exhausted… Driving home is telic: it is done when you get home. So are projects like getting married or writing a book. These are things you can complete. Other activities are “atelic”: they do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion, a final state in which they have been achieved. As well as walking from A to B, you can go for a walk with no particular destination. That is an atelic activity. So is listening to music, hanging out with friends or family, or thinking about your midlife. You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will. But you cannot complete them. They have no limit, no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end. (p. 134)
Combining the telic/atelic terms with the U-shaped curve, the early part of our lives is dedicated to telic activities - completing our education, starting a career, getting married, having children, etc. Sometimes we achieve these things and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes marriages fall apart, sometimes careers get derailed. The focus on the telic eventually comes face-to-face with mortality. The achieving of things starts to lose meaning, and therefore our happiness declines. One begins to climb out of the pit of mid-life when one begins to embrace the atelic more. One of the things I tell myself frequently is, 100 years after I die, almost no one will remember anything about me, other than perhaps a few facts in some future descendant's genealogy project (assuming I have descendants that far). This isn’t specific to me - it applies to most of you, too. It’s something the heroes of Homer were worried about three thousand years ago - they were willing to suffer and die so that they would be remembered in song. I think the first step out of the pit of midlife is coming to terms with the fact that you will be forgotten. That isn’t to say that what you do does not matter. Our actions matter quite a lot, and perhaps more than we think. Trauma can echo down generations, even after the actual trauma itself is no longer known. I think kindness can do the same. Having a good relationship with one’s friends and family is an atelic activity, but it can potentially have far more reaching impacts than any telic achievement.
Writing this newsletter is an atelic activity. There is no end to it. I will hit send in a little while and I’ll immediately start thinking about what I will write next. I actually have an ongoing collection of things I might share that I add to almost continuously, so the fact that a newsletter pops out each week is almost a side-effect of my process of collecting. It is a project without an end, and without any real purpose except that I enjoy doing it and imagining that you get something from reading it. My podcast is the same. I do it because I like hearing interesting people tell their professional life stories. I don’t make any money from either activity, and at various points I’ve been told they were both detrimental to my professional career - taking my focus away from what I should be doing (writing articles for peer-reviewed journals). Finding your own drummer is part of the journey up out of the pit of midlife. Doing what everyone tells you you should be doing is part of the telic chase that leads down to the pit.
There is more to the book, such as dealing with the loss of possibilities, and the reality that one can not go back and take the other fork in the road once one has made a choice. That’s a trap that I get stuck in sometimes - especially when I spend time with people who I know make a multiple of my salary. I sometimes look at the pay that hospital CFOs make and I think about what I could do for my family with that kind of money and I confess I do have bouts of jealousy. I wish I could tell you that I am perfectly content all of the time, but that would be a lie. However, I can tell you that the frequency of dissatisfaction is low, and lasts a short time. It is usually cured by a little time in the kayak or a walk in the woods on a Tuesday morning. A life without any dissatisfaction would be boring. Dissatisfaction pushes us to grow. As Aristotle would say, the key to happiness is finding a balance between the telic and atelic, the golden mean - just enough of both.
The thing that triggered my own midlife crisis was the sense of failing. I went into my PhD program overconfident because I had done very well in my MBA and MS in Finance programs. But those were professional degrees. You just have to put your head down and do the work. A PhD in economics is, first of all, exponentially harder quantitatively than any MBA program. However, it is not just harder. There is also a creative component to PhD studies that can’t be accomplished by just working hard. You have to come up with new ideas. And I would have thought I would be good at that, but I actually struggled with it. So for the first time in my professional life, I was sure I was going to fail. I had worked for years to get the Army to send me to PhD studies, we made sacrifices in terms of where we lived and what I did. And suddenly it looked like it would be all for not. This led to a reflection that my whole life had been a mistake. It was reading Smith that pulled me back to my senses, or at least gave me a framework that was more focused on the atelic. I ultimately wrote my dissertation about Smith’s work, especially TMS. I remember one day, some time after reading Smith and beginning my climb out of the pit, joking with my wife about something and laughing, and she suddenly stopped and said, “You’re back.” Philosophy can change your life for the better.
Do check out the book - it’s only 160 pages. The writing is light for the topic and the fact that Setiya is in fact a philosopher, and most philosophers are awful writers.
**
Watch
What: Ethan Kross, What to do if your inner voice is cruel (7 min)
Why: Very good discussion of the usefulness of our inner voice, and when it goes bad (and becomes “chatter”). Worth 7 minutes of your time.
This plays well into finding your way out of the pit.
**
Listen
What: EconTalk, Kieran Setiya on Midlife (99 min)
https://www.econtalk.org/kieran-setiya-on-midlife/
Why: An interview with Setiya, the author of Midlife (mentioned in Read above). Very good interview.
**
What: Smart People Podcast, Shamus Khan (57 min)
Why: Khan is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, which I wrote about last week. If you read my review (or part of it - I know it was long), and you’re on the fence about reading the book, check out this interview.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso