Should we hold ourselves accountable to our expectations from 20 years ago?

The Millennial Midlife Transition, Part 3

Dear Friends,

I warned you from the beginning that this would be a three-part series. I lied. For your sake and for mine, I decided to break up the ending into two newsletters for this week and next. And then we’ll call it a wrap.

I started the series by looking at how the whole concept of midlife has changed since our parents’ generation — not so much economically (contrary to popular belief), but more sociologically in how we’ve shaped our lives.¹ In part two, I explored the physical changes that accompany midlife as a reminder to accept those changes and shrug off the billion-dollar marketing to make us feel insecure about our appearance as we age. This week, I want to peer into the psyche and explore that odd sensation when you wake up in your 40s far removed from the daydreams of your early 20s, and you ask yourself: Is this where I was meant to arrive? Did I choose the right path, or did I stumble along by opting for convenient compromises? Did I become the most authentic version of myself and what does that even mean? And for next week: Has the rest of my story — the next 40 years — already been written?²

If you’ve applied for a job in your 30s or 40s, you know the experience of threading together our seemingly random life choices into what we hope will be a coherent cover letter that convinces the reader that this was the plan all along. Eventually, we start to believe in our own bullshit branding; we convince ourselves that this really is the most likely destination of “where life would take us” and the inevitable version of “who we would become.”

But those are just the effects of good storytelling.

Lately, I have been re-reading letters from 1996-2003 (yes, we used to write letters). It’s surreal to revisit the dreams and expectations of youth. There was the version of me who studied outdoor education at Northern Arizona University and was sure I’d become a peripatetic mountaineering guide with a small cabin in Northern California. There was a version of me who studied neuropsychology and wanted to use artificial intelligence to understand the mysteries of the mind. There was the year of wanting to become a high school science or math teacher. For another stretch, I wanted to be a national park ranger unfazed by the stresses of city life and office politics. And then, one year I became entranced by the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggers — and I was entirely sure that I would only be happy if I dedicated myself to literature. After graduating, I figured that perhaps journalism would give me the best shot of tying all these interests together.

When all that mattered was climbing up a rock. ~ 2000

I became none of those versions of myself. But why? And how did I end up working in global development instead?

For love and control

“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.” ~ Auden quoting John Foster Hall

I had a moment of near-religious conversion in 2005. At least that’s how it seems to me now. I was 24 years old and had recently returned to San Diego after a failed attempt to make it as a foreign correspondent in Mexico. I loved to read and write but refused to work in an office — and I couldn’t imagine any career path that would allow me to do the former without the latter.

I spent my mornings reading in the public library and my afternoons and evenings working in a coffee shop. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the local library with a hardbound copy of Jeff Sachs’ The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime. In the book, Sachs argues that after 15 years of unprecedented global economic growth, ours was the first generation with enough money and knowledge to eradicate poverty:

Our generation is heir to two and a half centuries of economic progress. We can realistically envision a world without extreme poverty by the year 2025 because technological progress enables us to meet basic human needs on a global scale and to achieve a margin above basic needs unprecedented in history. The technological progress has been fueled by the ongoing revolutions of basic science and spread by the power of global markets and public investments in health, education, and infrastructure. Remarkably, contrary to the dark vision of Thomas Malthus, we can accomplish all of this with a world population that is eight times larger than in 1750.

I lifted my head from my reading and looked around the library at everyone going about their business. How could they be thinking about anything else, I wondered. After 70,000 years of Homo sapiens, ours would be the generation to eradicate poverty! No more hunger or child mortality. Universal access to primary education, safe drinking water, and treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it. Ours would be the generation to make this happen!³

In the penultimate chapter of The End of Poverty, Sachs asks, “Will the rich world act to help save the poor?” Yes we will, I wanted to shout to everyone in the library! Today, any talk of “saving the poor” makes me throw up a little in my mouth. In retrospect, I see that I was infected by a kind of moral crusade. I was like a born-again Christian struggling to understand why anyone would choose to not accept Jesus and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Where did this moral impulse and the need to evangelize come from?

Years later, I read Nina Munk’s brilliant biography of Sachs and Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning, a profile of extreme altruists which found that they often grew up with non-functional parents. I remember my pulse accelerating when I heard MacFarquhar describe the research in a podcast:

It’s the idea that a child who grows up with at least one parent who is non-functional either because he or she is an alcoholic or severely mentally ill, or for some other reason just does not function as a parent. And the idea is that this child may take on the burden of fixing his family. He wants desperately to make everything OK, and he feels it’s up to him, so he may try to become the perfect student, he may do the housework, try to cook the dinner, try to take care of his siblings, even his parents. And the idea is that this child may, when he grows up, feel an outsized sense of moral duty to fix the world in the way that he tried to fix his family when he was a child.

At first, I resisted this idea as I had resisted many psychological ideas about altruists because it seems designed to suggest that extreme altruists were mentally unhealthy, that there was something wrong with them, and that it was simply a matter of trauma. But then I thought about the people I wrote about in my book, and it certainly is striking that almost every single one of them falls into this category. Almost every single one has a parent who is alcoholic or severely mentally ill. And, in that sense, I think that particular kind of suffering demonstrably can lead to a true moral commitment.

She nailed me. And so this desire to help others, this “outsized sense of moral duty,” was in fact just the hangover of how I grew up? The etymology of “philanthropy” is a love of humankind, but did it really just come down to wanting a sense of control that was missing from my childhood?⁴

The accumulation of biography

I don’t fully believe that story either. There were many factors that led me down my career path and any psychoanalysis of my upbringing can only explain so much.

And no, I don’t have regrets. The moral of this story is not that I took the wrong path, or that my authentic destiny was to become a national park ranger or brain researcher. No matter which path I chose, I would have wondered about the paths untaken. If there is a moral to the story, it is captured by the essayist Meghan Daum:

What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.

Success and self-awareness

James Hollis calls the first half of life “one giant, unavoidable mistake.” By ‘mistake’ he doesn’t mean something we should regret, but rather that we have little awareness of the unconscious forces that shape our personalities and relationships. The second half of life is an opportunity to understand the forces that shaped our sense of self during the first half of life; and with some courage and determination, it is an opportunity to develop a more authentic sense of self based on what we discover.

But that’s for next week and the final post of the series: How do I start the second half of life with whatever self-awareness I’ve gleaned from the first half?

🧰 A nice interface

I’m enjoying Read Something Wonderful, a new website from the makers of Matter that highlights great essays over the past 100 years. I love the user interface and it’s a nice reminder to pay attention to more than what has come out in the last 24-hour news cycle. It’s also a bit of a nostalgia machine for middle-aged dudes who grew up reading on the internet in the early 2000s. I had forgotten about some essays that left a mark on me like Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

🚴‍♂️ The Netflix Tour de France Documentary

Iris and I have watched the first two episodes together and love it. Such great storytelling. If this doesn't get you into professional cycling, I doubt anything will. And if you find yourself getting really into the series, former professional cyclist and YouTuber Phil Gaimon and his wife Emily Alvarez are offering their insider/outsider commentary about each episode (at least the first episode!). This year’s Tour de France is two weeks away and this week’s Tour de Suisse is giving us a good preview (plus, Switzerland: so pretty).

👏 Kudos: Nate Matias & Ivan Sigal

My friends Nate and Ivan finished their bike ride in the footsteps of the California Farm Workers March. They profiled some impressive folks along the way including bilingual journalist Melissa Montalvo and political science professor Randy Villegas.

🎵 A Playlist: NYT’s The Amplifier

I’ve been enjoying the New York Times’ twice-weekly newsletter and playlist, The Amplifier. As a life-long Joni Mitchell fan, today’s newsletter/playlist is especially great. I love the tracks by Allison Russel, Blake Mills, and Lucius.

Have a great week!

David

1. It’s probably not possible to fully distinguish between economically and sociologically. For instance, many of us have probably moved more than our parents not just by choice but also because the job market demanded it. Anyway, the debate about whether Millennials got uniquely screwed is ongoing and Jill Filipovic recently updated her thinking after participating in an actual debate on the issue.

2. I want to divulge that it feels indecent to write about the midlife transition. After all, the mythical midlife crisis is what comes after financial and professional stability. It is unsightly to complain when things have gone mostly right. And yet … I relate to how Kieran Setiya describes it in his book, Midlife: “On the surface, life was going well. I had a stable family and career. I was a tenured professor in a good department housed in a congenial Midwestern city. I knew I was lucky to be doing what I loved. And yet there was something hollow in the prospect of doing more of it, in the projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death. When I paused to contemplate the life I had worked so hard to build, I felt a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear.”

3. I’ll resist the temptation to embed the graphs from Our World in Data about the progress we have and haven’t made for each of these indicators.

4. I don’t think that it’s just me. When I look around at my peers working in philanthropy I don’t see a heightened sense of moral empathy so much as a desire to control money and impose ideology onto others.