The Midlife Crisis

I don’t deny that reactions may be more extreme. When Tolstoy documents his crisis in “A Confession,” he complains that “there was no life in me because I had no desires whose gratification I would have deemed it reasonable to fulfill” (Tolstoy 1882: 30). It is possible to feel that way. But it is the more qualified, more elusive experience that strikes me as more typical and more interesting. Its content is obscure enough to raise philosophical questions. What distinguishes the emptiness of the midlife crisis from the unqualified emptiness in which one sees no reason to do anything, no reason to prefer one outcome to another? What kind of value is missing, if practical reasons remain? There is work for philosophy to do here, if only to articulate what we have lost, or never had.