All about the midlife crisis |
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All about the midlife crisis
Dante wrote about it centuries before psychologists named the midlife crisis. Today’s millennials are finding their own version of the dark wood
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Lost in the woods since 1320
Dante Alighieri was 35 when he wrote the most famous opening line in Italian literature: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” That’s the first line of Inferno, written in the early 1300s — six centuries before the psychologist Elliott Jaques identified what he called the “midlife crisis” in the late 1950s. Jaques, using Dante’s Inferno as a model, described a crisis arriving punctually at age 35, when we reach “the summit of life” and realize it’s all downhill from there.
Cliches about the midlife crisis have historically been male-coded — divorce, convertible, younger girlfriend, whole new life, a sequence so widely recognized it’s long since become a punchline. But Gail Sheehy’s monster hit Passages argued that most adults continue to go through developmental phases, much like children do, making for “predictable crises.” Fifty years later, writers Lindsay Goldwert and Gabrielle Moss have found the sense of crisis very much alive, this time........