Random musings: The Seasons of a Man’s Life: The Mid-Life Transition

Welcome to the final installment of a three part series from The Art of Manliness.

Welcome back to our series on the phases of the adult life cycle, as studied by Daniel J. Levinson and described in The Seasons of a Man’s Life.

While the idea of adult development being a lifelong process, and of there being unique phases within it, is not widely known in popular culture, most people have probably heard of having a “midlife crisis.” The phrase conjures up an image of a cringe-worthy middle-aged man trading in his old clothes, wife, and car for newer models.

Psychologist Daniel J. Levinson’s research did find that many men do indeed experience a crisis during the period he calls the Mid-Life Transition, but plenty experience crises during other transitional periods in the life cycle as well. (Indeed, people often picture a fiftysomething when they picture the midlife crisis, so that what they may actually be thinking of is a man sorting out his issues during the Age 50 Transition, which comes later in the cycle).

Further, having a crisis of some kind during the Mid-Life Transition doesn’t typically resemble the popular stereotype, and is only one possible outcome of this broader transitional period.

That all being said, crisis is in fact the most common outcome of this phase, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that the Mid-Life Transition is filled with many substantial shifts to navigate and significant developmental tasks to grapple with. The second is that there is little support and “intel” available on what the terrain of this season looks like; you’ll find plenty of resources out there on starting a career, starting a marriage, starting a family, but what happens once you’re a decade or two into these enterprises?

Below we attempt to fill in these gaps, explaining the tasks in play, and the landscape to expect, when you’re traversing what Carl Jung called “the noon of life.”

The Mid-Life Transition begins around age 40 and lasts about five years until around 45, give or take 1-2 years on either side. It never begins before 38 or after 43.

The Mid-Life Transition is such a significant juncture in the life cycle because it not only serves as a transition between phases, but as a transition between eras. The era of Early Adulthood must be terminated, and the era of Middle Adulthood initiated. The Mid-Life Transition serves as a bridge between the two, over which every man must cross.

During early adulthood, youth acts as a source of momentum and identity — even a sense of purpose in and of itself. As a man’s youth recedes, he must confront the real shoreline of his life: What is his true identity? What is his true purpose?

This period, which can easily fall into a mid-life crisis, is full of deep soul searching.

Part of this questioning process, Levinson writes, requires that a man face the realities of his life; “he must deal with the disparity between what he is and what he dreamed of becoming.” At the same time, he wants to find ways to prevent that gap from growing any wider, to figure out what might still reasonably be accomplished in the decades which remain. With his life halfway through, a man looks back in order to see how he might make better use of his time moving forward.

In every season of adulthood, certain aspects of the self are particularly invested in, to the inevitable neglect of others. Those elements which get ignored during one phase then reemerge in a subsequent one, demanding some attention. During this particular season, a man may realize that he’s ignored his professional dreams, his roles as husband and father, his spiritual life, and/or other aspects of self, and self-in-world:

A man hears the voice of an identity or relationship given up in acquiescence to parental or other authority; of an internal figure who wants to be an athlete or nomad or artist, to marry for love or remain a bachelor, to get rich or enter the clergy or live a sensual carefree life — possibilities set aside earlier to become what he is now. During the Mid-Life Transition he must learn to listen attentively to these voices and decide consciously what part he will give them in his life.

As a man reevaluates where he’s been and where he currently resides, he considers where he wants to go next. He explores new alternatives and options and experiments with making choices “that will modify the existing life structure and provide the central elements for a new one.” As with all transitions in the life cycle, these changes may involve big decisions like divorce, or smaller, subtler shifts in attitude and perspective.

During this time many physical changes take place and it's not as easy to ignore the fact that old age is creeping up on us.

As a man enters his forties, however, he begins to notice a reduction in his physical vim, vigor, and virility. Certainly, his fitness and energy do not suddenly fall off a cliff; the diminishment is subtle and gradual. But it is perceptible: pushing oneself athletically feels a little harder and recovery from exercise comes a little slower; the energy to work overtime, to go out rather than stay in, to skip sleep and pull an all-nighter, is more difficult to muster; strength and agility go down, while the number of niggling aches and pains go up. Again, the difference in these areas from the thirties is not dramatic, and a man can remain very healthy and vital throughout his forties and the years to come. But he can recognize that he’s fallen off a bit from the peak of his physical powers (and probably from the peak of his mental powers too), and even if the change is small, it often still grieves him and reminds him of his mortality.

Not only is it hard for a man to accept the fact that his body feels older, it is hard for him to countenance that it looks older too. Thirtysomethings typically look much like their twentysomething selves, but in one’s forties, the years finally begin to show. The freshness of youth ebbs from a man’s visage. Even if not particularly vain, even if he does not much rue the maturation of his appearance, a man often still finds it a little discombobulating to note the contrast between how he feels on the inside and how he looks on the outside. In many ways, he still feels like, and imagines himself as, the 20-year-old of two decades back; how strange it is then, to know that as he walks down, say, the aisle of an airplane, and the passengers look up and make their instant, instinctive calculation of the age and sex of each person who passes by, their assessment spits out: “middle-aged man.”

How a man wears his age goes beyond surface appearance, to how others relate to him. When he was in his mid-thirties, those in their early twenties thought of him as a kind of older brother; now that he is a full generation removed from them, they “regard him more as boss or ‘dad’ than peer, and feel more separate from him by the barriers of age, authority, and social network.” Even to those in their thirties, a man in his mid-forties is perceived as being significantly older (disproportionate to what their actual gap in years would suggest). As Levinson observes, “He is becoming more distant from (and dominant over) the world of early adulthood. He is becoming a ‘senior’ adult, something quite different from the ‘junior’ adulthood of the thirties and the ‘novice’ adulthood of the twenties.” While in time this shift can come to be embraced with satisfaction, “Initially he may feel great disappointment and loss at being ejected from the youthful generation.”

In these ways and others, a man entering his forties is reminded that the period of early adulthood has come to an end, and he mourns the passing of his youth. It is normal and natural to grieve over this loss. But while youth in chronological and biological terms may be in decline during the Mid-Life Transition, a man should not be saying goodbye to youth as an energy. Levinson notes that the energies of both the Young and the Old are present in every period, and a man’s task is never to jettison one or the other, but to achieve a balance in this polarity appropriate to each respective season.

During the midlife period, this means neither resigning one’s self to a decrepit old age — becoming languid, complacent, and dull — nor desperately trying to cling to one’s youthful lifestyle by retaining habits in dress, behavior, and mindset that read as jarringly unsuited to this more senior season (the effect of which is akin to seeing someone tromping through the snow dressed in shorts and a t-shirt).

As an adult, we are now approaching the period we had been striving for...to become a full member of society, not a novice as we were in our twenties or a junior member as in our thirties. But there is still a sense of loss when we realize that our lives are half over and we still haven't accomplished everything we had hoped we would. The secret is not to wallow in self pity but to set a new goal:

The goal is to “create a middle-aged self, wiser and more mature than before yet still connected to the youthful sources of energy, imagination, and daring.” A man should seek to embrace and enjoy being in positions of greater responsibility and authority in family, work, and civic organizations, to utilize a confidence born from seasoning, and yet remain open to further learning, new ideas, and fresh experiences; he should value the solid steadiness of the Old, while holding onto the zest for continuous development which characterizes the Young.

This is often the time that we assess our careers...did we end up where we thought we would?

The man who has been successful up until this point realizes that his accomplishments haven’t brought the ultimate happiness and satisfaction that he imagined they would. He questions what real value his work has given to himself and to others. And he realizes that his achievements have come with costs — that in striving to attain certain rewards, he has sacrificed parts of his self, his life, and his relationships with loved ones.

The man who has not obtained outward success has a harder, more bitterness- and regret-filled time recognizing that such success may not hold the value he supposed it did in his younger years. But eventually he too comes to feel that professional achievement is not the end-all, be-all of existence. He realizes that he is not his job, and that there may be other elements of life worth investing in.

In neither case do men entirely give up their ambitions; they simply move away from having these ambitions tyrannize them. “The task is not to get rid of the Dream altogether, but to reduce its excessive power: to make its demands less absolute; to make success less essential and failure less disastrous; to diminish the magical-illusory qualities.” A man at midlife typically becomes less hard-charging, befitting the revisions he has undergone both in his energy levels and in the worth he lends to climbing yet another rung of the ladder. While he doesn’t lose the desire for excellence, power, and recognition altogether, he gives “more emphasis to the quality of experience, to the intrinsic value of his work and products, and their meaning to himself and others.”

During this time, a man's children are probably now approaching young adulthood:

As a man’s relationship with his children changes, so does his relationship with his wife. The couple is returning to the state in which they began their marriage, where the “family” centered on just the two of them. If the spouses have “kept in touch” with each other over the years, this transition can be fairly smooth. But if they have been leading largely separate lives, it may be difficult to reconnect, to concentrate more of their relational energies on each other.

Flaws which have existed in the marriage for some time, but which were deprioritized in the busyness of the spouses’ thirties and submerged to create a joint front in raising their children, may come to the fore at this time. To the extent that these flaws were countenanced by the husband during his Becoming One’s Own Man Period (age 36-40), he was apt to blame the problems on his wife. During the Mid-Life Transition, when a man’s thinking is becoming more nuanced, and less either/or, he is more likely to see the ways they have both contributed to their marital issues.

In struggling during this transition both in his marriage and with rebalancing the Old/Young polarity, a man may go the route so stereotypical of the “midlife crisis” in having an affair with a younger woman. Alternatively, he may recommit to working on his current marriage, strengthening it for the decades to come.

Unfortunately, the series pretty much concludes at this point. There is a lot more discussion about some of the intricacies but there is nothing about the future eras.

The phases of adult development do not stop after the Mid-Life Transition; in the years to come a man “will go through a similar sequence of building, modifying, and rebuilding the life structure.” But as Levinson’s study largely concentrated on the lives of men up until the age of 45, and the hypotheses he made about subsequent phases are more speculative, we will end our series here. Those interested in Levinson’s hypotheses on the landscape of midlife and beyond, should pick up a copy of The Seasons of a Man’s Life.

I've seen quite a bit of my life in the preceding phases. And it's interesting to think about how these phases relate to the turnings in life.

Be sure to check out the entire series: