Midlife Isn't a Crisis, It's a Plot Twist

You open the door to the midlife plot twist when you realize you can now be the sole author of your story.

The midlife crisis is a myth.

And yet if you look at what people search Google for related to midlife, it’s almost always about crisis. People want to know what a midlife crisis looks like to see if what they’re feeling qualifies.

The term was coined by Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965. Jaques characterized the midlife crisis as psychological distress related to growing older and facing the reality of an impending death.

The idea of the midlife crisis became mainstream thanks to a 1984 book by journalist Gail Sheehy called Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Like Jaques, Sheehy also thought the distress was caused by confronting our own mortality.

Research since the 1980s, however, rejects the notion that most people have a unique crisis at midlife. Sure, people go through crises like divorce or job loss in their 40s and 50s, just like they do during their 30s, 20s, or 60s.

Author Daniel Pink refutes the midlife crisis in stronger terms, while revealing the more common experience we encounter at midlife:

The midlife crisis is total bunk. But what does happen in midlife is a droop — a U-shaped curve of well-being. That pattern has been detected in more than 70 countries and even in great apes. In addition, other experimental research has shown that people often become less likely to comply with standards or act diligently in the middle of an undertaking.

The “U-shaped curve” is also known as the happiness curve. Basically, we suffer from a strange sense of midlife discontent in our late 40s before hitting the upslope as we enter our 50s. No red sports car or extramarital affair required… you just work through it.

That’s not to say that some people don’t freak out a bit as they realize they’re getting older. But it often has more to do with vanity than mortality. Beginning to look older impacts people in different ways, often manifesting in a fight or flight response:

That could include plastic surgery, a later-in-life pregnancy, hiring a personal trainer to get in great shape, or trying a dramatic hair color. Flight, in this case, is more akin to denial that the changes are happening, and can include reactions like withdrawing from social activities or even symptoms of depression.

It really comes down to values. Many people find the midlife acquisition of sports cars and younger spouses as tacky and shallow. Others find it aspirational.

More often than not, the discord at the nadir of that U-shaped curve stems from a loss of meaning and purpose. Midlife causes us to question the path we’ve followed as well as the path ahead.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s an important transition from who we’ve been to who we aim to become.

So don’t call it a crisis. Think of midlife weirdness as an opportunity:

“So much has changed in our culture that the term has lost much of its meaning,” says Vivian Diller, PhD, a psychologist in New York City. “This is partly because we live so much longer. It used to be, ‘I have so little time left.’ Now it’s ‘I have so much time left. Do I want to live life this way?’”

Ah, now there’s the question at the heart of the matter. Followed by, “Can I continue living life this way?” given the current economic and political situation.

In summary: That discontent and restlessness you’re feeling? That’s not a malfunction. That’s your brain finally recognizing the current story needs change.

This isn’t a midlife crisis. It’s a midlife plot twist.

The Story of You

Our sense of self is a story that we tell ourselves.

Our thoughts, memories, triumphs, worries, and regrets are strung together to form a narrative that seems like the permanent “who” that we are. But in reality, there’s no tangible essence, even though it certainly feels like there is.

Whether you consult with a neuroscientist, speak to a Zen Buddhist, or reflect upon the writings of philosopher David Hume, you’ll hear the same thing… the self is an illusion.

Cognitive neuroscientist Bruce Hood puts it this way:

Who we are is a story. A constructed narrative that our brain creates.

Think of your “self” as a mirage in the desert. The mirage is real, in that you actually see the oasis shimmering on the horizon. But it’s not really a pool of water waiting to be discovered; it’s light refraction, a trick of physics and perception.

Your sense of self is similar. The experience is real, given that you genuinely feel like a continuous, unified person. But what you’re experiencing isn’t a fixed, essential thing.

Many of the world’s great philosophies and religions maintain that the self is an illusion, ranging from Buddhism to the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta. But we’re not exploring philosophy or mysticism; we’re relying on modern neuroscience.

The finding that shook the scientific view of self came from neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s research on split-brain patients. These are people who had the connection between the brain’s two hemispheres surgically severed to treat severe epilepsy.

In one experiment, researchers flashed a command such as “walk” to only the right hemisphere. The patient would stand up and walk. When asked why, the left hemisphere (which controls speech but hadn’t seen the command) would instantly fabricate an explanation: “I went to get a Coke,” or “I needed to stretch.”

The left hemisphere didn’t tell the truth, which should have been, “I don’t know.” It created a story to explain the behavior.

Gazzaniga calls this “the Interpreter,” a function of the left hemisphere that constantly generates stories to explain our experiences, even when it has no actual access to the causes. The brain is a storytelling machine, always working to create a coherent narrative about who you are and why you do what you do.

Further, modern medicine is unable to detect a place in the body where your “self” resides. But we know where the story is generated.

When your brain isn’t focused on external tasks (such as actively working, reading, or problem-solving), a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes active.

The DMN is what’s running when you’re in the shower ruminating about a faux pas from a year ago. It’s the maddening mechanism causing your thoughts to race while you’re lying in bed at night. It’s running the show when you’re staring out the window during a meeting that should have been an email, constructing elaborate scenarios about the future.

The DMN’s specific job is self-referential processing and autobiographical function. It’s constantly working on the story of you, which means reviewing your past, imagining your future, and constructing and reconstructing your identity.

This is how the story of you is not only conceived, but how you recursively refer back to it. It’s a metaphorical mental hall of mirrors made up of memories of the past and imagination about the future.

Understanding how your brain works doesn’t make the self disappear. The mirage doesn’t vanish when you understand the optics. But it does change your relationship to it when you understand that it’s not fixed in the sense that you feel it is.

In other words, you’ve been unconsciously revising the story of “you” your entire life. And if what you really are is a story, then you’re not stuck. You’re not trapped by some essential nature or a static psychology.

You’re a work in progress, and you always have been. Now you finally get to hold the pen.

The Committee That Wrote Your First Draft

What we’ve historically called “success” is usually a story that follows a script written by someone else. Upon reflection, you’ll realize that your “first draft self” wasn’t really a story of your sole creation.

Think about the forces that shaped your early narrative:

• Your parents wrote chapters about who you should be. Their unfulfilled dreams, their fears, and their vision of success all got baked into your story. Maybe they pushed you toward security when you craved creativity. Maybe they valued achievement when you needed freedom.

• Your teachers, coaches, and early bosses added their expectations. Be a team player. Color inside the lines. Climb this ladder. Follow this sequence. Some of their guidance was valuable, while other aspects were just their own story projected onto yours.

• Your friends and peer pressure shaped which character you played. The cool kid. The smart one. The responsible child. The rebel. You performed the role that helped you fit in, even when it didn’t really fit you.

• Society and culture added to the expected plot points. Go to college. Get a stable job. Buy a house. Get married. Have kids. Hit the milestones. Retire at 65. The American Dream comes with a pre-written script that is always playing in the background.

• Our entire generation’s zeitgeist influenced the story. Gen X grew up as latchkey kids with divorcing parents, MTV, and economic uncertainty. You learned self-reliance, cynicism about institutions, and a certain ironic distance from grand narratives. Even your rebellion against expectations was scripted by circumstance.

And the most dangerous phrase in your first-draft story? “Supposed to.”

• You were supposed to get that degree.

• Supposed to take that job.

• Supposed to want this lifestyle.

You internalized these as facts, as part of who you fundamentally were. Some people question the “facts” early, but the questioning becomes much more common and intense at midlife.

The important thing to realize is that the exhaustion you’re likely feeling doesn’t mean you’re ready to be put out to pasture. It just means that you’ve spent decades performing a story written by a committee where you didn’t have creative control.

Some of the committee’s suggestions worked. But many didn’t. When you were young, you might not have realized that you had sole authorship rights. Now you do.

Forget Authenticity (Choose This Instead)

Before we go further, let’s address the advice you’ve heard a thousand times:

Just be authentic… be your true self.

It sounds great. It’s also complete nonsense.

The authenticity myth assumes there’s some pure, uncorrupted version of you buried underneath all the social conditioning. That your “true self” is just waiting to be excavated if only you could clear away all the detritus.

But here’s the problem: If authenticity means expressing your completely unfiltered temperament, then being “authentic” might mean you’re impatient, anxious, easily annoyed, overly critical, or any number of raw traits that don’t actually serve you and your future goals.

Is that really the story you want to live?

Plus, we play numerous roles in life, each with countless subtle and not-so-subtle variations. Are you “authentic” with your buddies at the bar after midnight, or is it when you take your mother to dinner? Why or why not?

Remember, you’re a story. Like that mirage in the desert, your “self” feels completely real and present, but it’s not the fixed thing it seems to be. Your various roles are all part of the overarching narrative.

Yes, you have traits, tendencies, and temperament. But those aren’t instructions. They’re raw material.

Authenticity is a red herring. What you want instead is alignment.

Alignment means:

• Your revised story works with your actual temperament, not against it.

• You’re honest about your wiring while making conscious choices about how to express it.

• The gap between your internal experience and external presentation is intentional.

• You’re not suppressing who you are, but you’re also not letting every impulse define your narrative.

Maybe you’re naturally easily annoyed. You’ve got a short fuse and low tolerance for inefficiency and incompetence.

Pretending you’re endlessly patient would be misalignment. Forcing yourself into a “chill, go-with-the-flow” character will not make you happy. Choosing work that requires constant tolerance of chaos and incompetence is not about “growing” as a person. This misaligned approach is exhausting because you’re fighting your wiring every single day.

Acknowledging your lower tolerance would be the first step toward alignment. Designing your life and work to minimize unnecessary irritants allows you to thrive. But at the same time, you’re also channeling that sensitivity into something useful: discernment, high standards, quality control, and sharp critical thinking. You’re not suppressing that natural trait, but you’re also not unleashing it indiscriminately.

The committee, on the other hand, often wrote you into stories that fought your natural temperament:

• The people-pleaser when you’re naturally direct.

• The corporate team player when you work best alone.

• The extroverted networker when you’re fundamentally introverted.

• The “flexible, go-with-the-flow” character when you desperately need structure.

You spent decades fighting your own wiring because that’s what their story required. This is why people are exhausted in their 50s and think retirement is the only possible reprieve. It’s not.

It’s Time to Fire the Committee

Midlife is when the plot twist arises. And the only reason we resist is the myth of the midlife crisis. You worry that people will think you’re losing it, but that’s just giving in to the committee once again.

You finally have enough chapters behind you to see the patterns. You can distinguish what’s actually yours from what you borrowed. You know what energizes you and what drains you.

What mattered to the committee — their approval, their markers of success, their definition of a life well-lived — stops mattering to you. Or at least it matters a lot less.

The career that looks impressive on paper? You realize it’s been draining you for years. That role that earned everyone’s approval? Exhausting to maintain.

Your tolerance for performing someone else’s story hits zero.

There’s something particularly Gen X about this timing. We came of age questioning authority and grand narratives anyway. Now we get to turn that skepticism on the status quo narrative we’ve been living. You open the door to the midlife plot twist when you realize you can be the sole author now.

You’re creating your next chapters with context, of course. You’re not creating in a vacuum. You have responsibilities, relationships, and realities to navigate.

But the authorship? That’s yours. The committee doesn’t have a say anymore.

What This Means from a Practical Standpoint

The concept of “finding yourself” is flawed. Life is about creating yourself.

Your aligned self isn’t something you uncover like an archaeological artifact. It’s something you consciously construct, using everything you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t.

This explains why the midlife plot twist feels both scary and exciting. Scary because you’re taking on new responsibility, and you can’t blame the committee anymore. Exciting because you finally have actual agency.

You’re no longer following someone else’s script. And you’re not betraying some essential self.

But also… revising your story doesn’t mean the first draft was wasted.

Those earlier chapters taught you what works and what doesn’t. Your expertise, your skills, and your wisdom — all of that came from the first draft. The relationships you built, the lessons you learned, and even the mistakes you made are all material for what comes next.

You’re not discarding the first draft. You’re editing it.

Your “second-draft self” is almost always better, because you actually know what you’re doing. You’ve got decades of experience, and you intimately understand your craft. You’ve seen enough to know which plot points work and which ones don’t.

An Invitation to the Midlife Identity Remix

I’m kicking off a series of Further articles about conscious authorship of your life story.

Not self-help platitudes about “finding your authentic self” or mystical nonsense about your “true purpose.” And certainly not another midlife crisis thinkpiece about buying a motorcycle or why you should compete in a triathlon (unless that’s what you actually want to do).

Instead, we’ll explore practical methods grounded in psychology and neuroscience:

• How to distinguish what’s fixed about you from what’s flexible.

• How your temperament shapes which stories actually work for you, not just which ones sound good or seem impressive.

• How to create strategically outside your comfort zone when it serves your goals.

• How to create a Performance Persona for goals that require different or enhanced traits.

This is The Midlife Identity Remix: Keep the groove, enhance everything else.

Yes, I’m switching metaphors on you, from writing to music production. Sometimes you need different lenses to see something clearly. And Gen X loves a good remix (just like we used to make the perfect mix tapes).

The point is you’re not throwing away who you’ve been. You’re not starting from scratch. You’re taking what works, cutting what doesn’t, and consciously creating the next version of you on your own terms.

Coming next week: “What’s Fixed and What’s Flexible: The Architecture of Your Midlife Story”

We’ll explore research on personality and identity. This will help you understand that your temperament is the genre you’re creating in, and why some story changes work while others exhaust you. You’ll discover how to distinguish what’s genuinely unchangeable from what just feels unchangeable.

If you’re not a subscriber to Further yet, join us to get each weekly installment.

For now, here’s your assignment:

Start noticing the story you’ve been telling yourself. Identify the aspects that feel aligned with your actual wiring:

• Where things flow

• Where you’re energized

• Where you’re not constantly performing

Also, notice which parts sound like the committee’s voice, not yours:

• The roles that drain you

• The expectations you’re meeting out of habit

• The “supposed to’s” that no longer make sense

Just observe for now. We’ll get to remixing soon enough.

The committee had its turn. Now it’s yours.

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. If your midlife plot twist involves starting your own location-independent business that allows you to live the life you want much sooner, you’ll find amazing synchronicity between the Midlife Identity Remix series and the high-impact courses and webinars in Further Premium.

further: flashback

🎶 Night Ranger - Sister Christian, Midnight Madness, 1984 🎶

Night Ranger drummer Kelly Keagy wrote and sang “Sister Christy” after being astonished at how quickly his little sister was growing up. Lead singer Jack Blades thought he was saying Sister Christian, so that’s what it became. If listening to the song stresses you out thanks to the drug deal scene from Boogie Nights, you’re not alone. (YouTube)

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