Interview with Carlo Strenger on Midlife Crisis
February 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Carlo Strenger
Carlo Strenger, Associate Professor at the psychology department of Tel Aviv University, a member of the institute of Existential Psychoanalysis, Zurich and of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientist.

The first myth is that of midlife as decline. In our culture that tends to celebrate youth, midlife is associated with nothing but the loss of abilities and opportunities – despite growing evidence that mentally active people becomemore capable rather than less. Dismantling this myth is crucial, because it prevents people from initiating any new ventures, careers or activities, as they feel that this is useless.

The second myth is that of magical transformation: you can be anybody you like, if you just want it enough.This myth is detrimental because it makes realistic change seem trite rather than exciting. Midlifers get lost in fantasies of total, radical change, and they don’t see that a realistic plan for midlife changes needs to be evidence based. At midlife we have a lot of evidence aboutwhatwe are good at and what we like, and this is what we should base our second lifecycle on.

• While many have talked about midlife crisis, you have observed, “midlife is exciting because it is a time when people have the opportunity to reexamine even their most basic assumptions.” What is the basis of this argument?
  The reason midlife is exciting is that we have so much more self-knowledge and experience than we ever had, and at the same time still have our full abilities. For many of us this is the opportunity to move on to do something that is more deeply meaningful to us. After all, in our twenties we make choices without knowing much either about ourselves or about the world, so this is a great opportunity for a “Life-Take2”!

  We often forget that in youth we are far less free in making decisions than we are at midlife. We depend on external authorities, like parents, and we are under much more pressure to live up to social norms and expectations. In psychology we call the process of becoming more self-reliant individuation, and midlife can be an important step towards this goal.

• Therefore, what are the advantages of midlife?
  Themajor advantage ofmidlife is selfknowledge, as I just said. In early life we are somuch more preoccupied by social norms and the expectations of our environment – and we have little life-experience. Add to this that most of us are bound to know much more about the world, and we also have plenty of connections we didn’t have in early life. Hence there are good reasons to believe that we will be able to make a difference both to ourselves and to the world by judiciously choosing our second life-cycle.

• What is the risk of not managing midlife?
  The major risk is that of burnout; we may cling to what we do for too long and simply find that we’re tiring out. The other big risk is that if we wait too long, we may find ourselves in difficult situations (like organizations breathing down our neck to leave, or to be out of a job) relatively late in life, without having built a toolbox needed for our second lifecycle.

  As in most fields of life, being proactive is better than being reactive. Our suggestion is not to wait until we are in trouble.We believe that thinking in two lifecycles should become a cultural norm; it should become amatter of course that people in their forties talk to each other aboutwhat theywill do with their second lifecycle rather than waiting until the trouble has already set in.

• Is there any difference between the midlife change that a corporate executive goes through and others (an entrepreneur, a politician, a civil servant, a secret service agent, an artist, a sports person, etc) go through? What are the unique features of a corporate executive’s midlife change?
  Corporate careers are strongly defined by the ever narrowing pyramids of corporate structures. Hence many executives atmidlife are bound to know that they will not make it to the top. This is often a painful realization, but it is better to be clear headed about one’s future prospects instead of waiting for reality to make us realize what we don’t want to see.

  In addition corporate careers are defined by the perks and the status symbols that are very difficult to renounce. This makes it more difficult for corporate executives to realize that it’s time to move on, and to leave the comforts of the present position behind before the corporation willmake us leave without preparation.

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