Pope John XXIII, was a man full of surprises and wit. Also called “the good pope” (Papa Buono in Italian), he spent a lifetime in Vatican bureaucracy, entering priesthood at the age of 24. Fifty two years later, at the age of 76 he was elected Pope [1]. Despite this, the spark of his spirit and imagination had remained undimmed. When he reached the top, although for a short time before his illness and death, he launched the most vigorous renewal that the Church has known in a century. He was a serious man who found a lot to laugh about. The son of farmers, he once said, “In Italy there are three roads to poverty — drinking, gambling and farming. My family chose the slowest of the three.” When someone asked him how many people worked in the Vatican he said “Oh, about half.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Shyam [name changed]. A shy eighteen year old, who occasionally helps me wash my car as a cover for his father. He’s failed to clear his 10th year school board exams twice now. He’s seems to have lost hope that he can get a decent education and by extension, a decent life. While Shyam does not come from privilege, he does have a loving, supporting family that spends a lions share of its income to provide for him and his education. Only a few years ago, he was different – outgoing, athletically gifted, winning several school shields. He seems to have stagnated, even before getting started.

The contrast these stories paint is this – the assumption that the risk of personal stagnation with age is understating the problem. Age alone, does not cause intellectual stagnation. Mid-life crisis is a myth or a mirage at best, propagated by sampling bias among the privileged few, who were lucky to have a head start. A crisis of this sort can happen to any of us, anytime. Maybe it’s onset is already underway, but we don’t know it yet.

How does one stay ahead?

Start with compassion

The mirage of the mid-life crisis provides a useful prototype to understand the emotions at play. For the privileged few who worry about mid-life crisis, a strange put personal shift occurs, somewhere between your 40s and the early fifties. The skills you honed in early adulthood start to wane. Younger people, with newer and more relevant skillsets cast a mirror, reflecting your younger self and the now lost ambition. Acquiring these new skills appears daunting, impossible even. This triggers a crisis of sorts – about getting old, running out of time and questioning life choices.

To quote Arthur Brooks,

Says, the legendary John Gardner,

Many […] are just going through the motions. I don’t deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.

John Gardner [1]

This story highlights a particularly important facet of self renewal that isn’t obvious to us in foresight. The man in question was 53 years old. Most of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. In military service, he received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later he held two government jobs, succeeding at neither. At 53 he was in prison — and not for the first time. There in prison, he decided to write a book, driven by Heaven knows what motive — boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say? And the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written, a book that has enthralled the world for almost 400 years. The prisoner was Cervantes; the book: Don Quixote, the first modern novel, a crown jewel of French culture.

Perhaps, life presents us with tougher problems than we can solve at that point. It happens often, I’ve been there. Perhaps something inflicts a major wound on our confidence or self-esteem. Perhaps past failures have led to hidden resentments, making us feel like victims. We’ve all known such people — somewhat sour and cynical, feeling secretly defeated or vaguely dispirited. Sometimes, we are such people.

When that happens, you have to find belief, so you continue to learn and grow. Believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about. It is true.

Finding Flow in Learning

It is not uncommon though, to having a dis-empowering feeling stuck in a rut. As, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states in his classic book, Flow [3], “Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad. Most of these forces are outside our control. There is not much we can do about our looks, our temperament, or our constitution. We cannot decide—at least so far—how tall we will grow, how smart we will get […] It is not surprising that we should believe that our fate is primarily ordained by outside agencies. “

He goes on to remind us on where to look for inspiration. “Yet we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.“

One simple principle to find this state is well summarised by this quote:

“Inducing flow is about the balance between the level of skill and the size of the challenge at hand”

Nakamura et al, 2009

If it is too easy, we get bored and complacent. If it is too difficult, the cognitive, physical or emotional load takes a high toll, making it difficult to persevere. How do we make learning intrinsically rewarding, not a means to an end? The oft repeated answer, of following your passion is simply too vague.

Don’t follow your passion, do this instead

Dan Cable, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, says, “instead of “Follow your passion” advice is “Follow your blisters.” A blister appears when something wears at you – and even chafes you a bit – but you keep getting drawn back to it. What I like about the phrase is that it implies something about perseverance and struggling through tasks even though they are not always blissful. “Follow your blisters” makes me ask myself the question, “What kind of work do I find myself coming back to again and again, even when I don’t succeed right away, when it seems like it’s taking too long to make progress, or when I get discouraged?” [5]

Martin Seligman, one of the father of positive psychology adds, ”Is there something that gets me up a little early, or keeps me working late, after others have gone to sleep? Not because the project is due the next day, but because it’s important to me to make a little more progress? Not every day and night, but reliably?” [6]

For me, one of this is writing.

It is not uncommon however, to have genuinely floated through the rushing river. Often we are simply carried by momentum of the wave, but think it is us rowing powerfully. When the momentum breaks, we can feel both disoriented and afraid of falling behind. Like I said before, faith can summon our perseverance muscle, but process needs something else.

Good hard Optimism

Sidney Rittenberg’s crucible was 16 years of unjust imprisonment, when he was wrongly identified as a CIA agent in Communist China. In 1949 Rittenberg was initially jailed, without explanation. In 1955, after his first six year term in prison and an apology from the government, he was jailed again for ten years, this time for supporting open democracy. Rittenberg did not allow for his spirit to be broken. Instead, he used his time in prison to question his belief system – in particular his commitment to Marxism. “In that sense, prison emancipated me,” he says. Rittenberg studied, read, wrote, and thought, and he learned something about himself in the process: “I realized I had this great fear of being a turncoat, which…was so powerful that it prevented me from even looking at [my assumptions]… Even to question was an act of betrayal. After I got out…the scales fell away from my eyes and I understood that…the basic doctrine of arriving at democracy through dictatorship was wrong.”

Most of us will never face such a harsh test of our resolve in our lives. When facing unexpected obstacles, the question to ask oneself is “What is it trying to teach?” I call it hard optimism. Physicist David Deutsch in The Principle of Optimism, helps us understand what hard optimism really is:

Optimism is “a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success”: If we’ve failed at something, it’s because we didn’t have the right knowledge in time.

. David Deutsch in The Principle of Optimism,

The next chapter

At age 25, a correspondent in the Boer War became a prisoner of war and his dramatic escape made him a national hero. Elected to Parliament at 26, he performed brilliantly, held high cabinet posts with distinction and at 37 became First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he was discredited, (unjustly) and lost his position. Then followed 24 years of ups and downs. All too often the verdict on him was “Brilliant but erratic…not steady, not dependable.” He had only himself to blame. A friend described him as a man who jaywalked through life. He was 66 before his moment of flowering came. Someone said “It’s all right to be a late bloomer if you don’t miss the flower show.” Winston Churchill certainly didn’t miss it.

Professor Brooks, says that when life presents the cross-road of vitality vs stagnation, we need to make two wise choices, when we face that:

“The first decision: Choose to focus on what [life] gives you, not what it has taken away. Stagnation, which can lead to a crisis, happens when you try to fight against time, whether you’re desperately trying not to look older or struggling against changes in your skills and strengths. Generativity comes from accepting […] and recognising the new aptitudes and abilities that naturally develop… [for instance, as you get older you gain] the growing ability to see patterns clearly, teach others, and explain complex ideas [simply].
The second decision: Choose subtraction, not addition. Early in life, success usually comes from addition: more money, more responsibility, more relationships, more possessions. Life in early adulthood is like filling up an empty canvas. By midlife, however, that canvas is pretty full, and more brushstrokes make the painting worse, not better.”

As John Garder [1] eloquently says, “We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change. And by taking risks. The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions […] You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.”

What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”
John Gardner, 1965 speech

[1] PBS – JOHN GARDNER – EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
[2] The Two Choices That Keep a Midlife Crisis at Bay – The Atlantic
[3] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
[4] 8 Ways To Create Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
[5] What You Should Follow Instead of Your Passion
[6] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-25554-000