Midlife Mastery Journal

Disillusionment and the Second Stage of Life

In today's "Style" section, Washington Post writer Henry Allen treats his readers to a virtual journey into those not-so-halcyon early days of television that we of a 'certain' generation remember so fondly. . . . Well some of us remember it fondly . . . even if, in fact, I was only just born midway through the year he wrote about (1948). I do remember distinctly that, after we got our first DuMont TV in the early 1950's, all playtime had to come to a complete halt at 5:30 p.m. when the world's most popular TV program — The Howdy Doody Show — came on. Not even the Good Humor man could drag me away from Doodyville.

Let me just add that if you have the least memory of what I'm talking about here, you're officially old. Join the club. Yet, Allen's article gives a decidedly odd twist to the same-old, same-old nostalgia. He tells about being one of those rare kid guests (the Peanut Gallery) on the NBC show in New York. It's an article all about how a 7-year-old had his youthful disillusionment confirmed by the unglamorous world of early TV. He describes the experience like this: "Clarabell, it seemed, was just another grown-up in the grown-up world that seems shopworn and unhappy to little kids, a world of foreclosing possibilities and ugly appetites." In fact, he goes on to say that ". . . disillusionment has another advantage besides conferring adulthood: It's life's own supply of raw material for laughs." Is that so?

Our Secret Anti-Aging Formula

OK. I lied. the formula's not all that secret, but it got your attention, didn't it? If you didn't know better, you'd think that the anti-aging formula was really a secret, though, when you consider how many men ignore it, deliberately or not. In this article, I intend to introduce a new terminology that I hope will help people become more aware of the conscious process that can turn midlife into a wellspring of possibilities. How's that for a secret?

I've decided to call my midlife success formula 'Proactive Transformative Integration', or PTI. It looks like a really complex idea, but it's not that hard to understand, once you've broken it down into its components. As you might expect, there are only three elements:

• It requires awareness and the making of conscious decisions
• It requires active involvement in the process of change
• It requires a willing acceptance of both possibilities and limitations

Is 'Adulthood' Just Postponing Growing Up?

According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, retirement is fading away. Nearly twice as many people aged 65 or older are maintaining a full-time job compared with 1995 levels. That means that our employment expectations today will be far different from the expectations that we had when we entered the job market, anywhere from 20 to 40 years ago. Of course, these figures can be attributed to multiple factors: the increase in the number of women in the job market, the dissolution of corporate retirement benefits, the economic downturn, etc. There's another factor playing out here, as well: more people just don't want to retire. In response to pressure from the pilots themselves, in December 2007, the Federal Government raised the mandatory retirement age for airline pilots from 60 to 65. This appears to be just the beginning.

What we're seeing seems to be the tip of an enormous iceberg: more people feel that making a contribution through their work is essential to maintaining meaning in their lives. That brings us the question raised in today's comic strip, Rhymes with Orange, where the little girl at the company picnic says to her adult questioner, "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up — do you know what you want to be when you retire?" In light of her question (and the realities of the current workforce that it reflects), I have a radical observation to make here: that, for many people, a career is simply a way of postponing finding an answer to the question, 'What you want to be when you grow up?'

Adults Ambushed by the 'More' Mentality

When I was just a kid (without an 'allowance'), I used to dream about what I'd do if I had $100 (an enormous sum of money). I would be happy because I could buy whatever I wanted. Now, the time has come where Craig and I can easily spend well over $100 taking a couple of friends out for a decent dinner. In fact $100 doesn't buy a whole lot of groceries anymore. When I was back there dreaming about my $100, I remember my mother buying a shopping cart full of groceries, paying with a $20 bill and getting change back. Wow! Are those days ever gone for good!

In the meantime, ancient as I am, those old childish thoughts of 'if I only had $$$$, I could be really happy' still come back to haunt me from time to time, although far less frequently. I've actually discovered that those childish thoughts of 'more' = 'better' that I carried over from childnood into to adulthood are really just pipe dreams. However, at the same time, they're deadly pipe dreams because, rather than dream fulfillers, my desires for more are actually dream killers. Here's the pattern: a) I want more, so therefore b) I need to sell my services, so that, as a result c) I can get paid money to buy what I want.

The Myth of the Adult

We in the West have a severe cultural bias toward adults, and particularly toward young adults. As kids, we can't wait to grow up, so we can get all the privileges of adulthood that are denied to younger folks. Children envy adults, not recognizing the responsibility that goes with it; while adults idealize childhood, forgetting about the lack of freedom of the child. Yet, almost all our attention is focused either on our responsibilities as adults (like child-rearing) or on our capabilities and opportunities as adults.

We somehow look on maturity (most often defined as 'retirement') as something to be prepared for, like some sort of final exam. We talk about adulthood in terms full of possibility, referring to the 'prime' of life. We talk about our mature years as 'golden' (shades of the proverbial watch they used to give you at retirement) or our 'senior' years (like having a permanent 'senior moment'). Yes, in our culture, adulthood is where it's all happening. Or is it?

Puberty, Morality, and Maturity

As anyone who has read many of my articles must know, I'm a great fan of Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development. He maps out three major 'stages' of moral evolution that people navigate as they grow: the 'preconventional' stage, the 'conventional' stage, and the 'postconventional' stage. The preconventional stage maps (broadly speaking) to prepubescence. It's that period of life where the young person is under the formal protection and tutelage of adults, and behavior is more or less constrained by adult supervision. Puberty changes all that, of course, as a young person rebels against his or her constraints and seeks a sort of autonomy. None of this should be news.

I believe that the sift from prepubescence through puberty ought to parallel the transition from tutelage to autonomy and also the transition from preconventional to conventional morality. The term 'morality' has so many different connotations that I want to state clearly what I mean by it: for me, 'morality' is an evaluation of the internal motivations for people's behavior. Puberty, then, corresponds to a motivational shift from adult constraint (preconventional morality) to personal autonomy (conventional morality) even if there's no change in the behavior itself.

Obligations and Expectations

Almost everything in life these days comes with training wheels. Remember them? They kept you from falling over and hurting yourself before you really learned how to ride a bicycle. Once upon a time, only a few things (like our proverbial bicycle) came with training wheels, now, some people are trying their best to outfit the planet with them. Not only are people trying very hard to save us from ourselves (have they put up child-proof guard rails around the Grand Canyon yet?), but we're being provided with very specific instructions on the correct operation of everything. You probably remember the story of the guy who put his ladder in cow manure and sued when it slipped over (of course that never happened, it was a story both invented and repeated by Ronald Regan). Now your ladder says, "Do not set ladder in cow manure." (It doesn't??? That's odd, because mine does!)

Let's talk a little about these 'training wheels' that we've been given throughout our lives. What are they there for? You're probably saying, "Isn't it obvious that they're there to help people get started doing something that they've never done before?" That's the approach that I would take with it. However, there are two issues that militate against what you and I would see as 'obvious': 1) some people are two frightened or too lazy to go beyond the training stage and 2) some trainers can be so insistent that people 'get' the basics that they prevent them from moving beyond them.

Men and Mastery of Midlife

This is an article by and for guys. Please don't get me wrong: none of us is the least bit misogynist. On the contrary: in many ways we need to follow the lead of women who very often have been dealing with midlife with considerably more finesse than we men have. After all, you generally don't hear the term 'midlife crisis' applied to women, do you? In some ways, women have learned the 'secret' to dealing with their transition into the 'second half of life'. Only, it's not really that much of a secret, and even a fairly superficial observation will give you most of the clues you need to figure things out. Unfortunately, our culture works fairly effectively in most cases to prevent that kind of observation from ever happening.

Our purpose is therefore to present a challenge to you men who are coming up on midlife: Do you dare to become proactive when you're dealing with your own life? Or, will you be content to go along blindly, oblivious to everything that's going on around and wihin you, and just hope for the best? Enduring men's 'midlife crisis' is not a foregone conclusion. There are alternatives. However, these alternatives will demand that you rethink some of your closely-held presuppositions and confront some cultural stereotypes. Is it worth it? Just consider the alternatives.