I am sitting at a bar, waiting on my dinner, eager for a quiet night alone. I am hoping the woman on my right, and her husband next to her, don’t make conversation with me — and of course they do. Once we cut through the formalities of their life in suburban Connecticut, why they are in Boulder, and that I’m a local therapist, she says that she saw a therapist once. She saw one when her first husband committed suicide. They had three young children. He waited to somehow make good on the life insurance policy. She said the only thing worse than losing her husband was how no one ever asked her about it; how friends came and went from her house and didn’t feel comfortable talking about the suicide. The silence amplified the grief. The silence intensified the shame.

*

A man I know spends his Christmas hosting parties and but feeling no connection to anyone who comes. He drinks too much. He looks like a ghost. He says the holidays are when he misses his daughter the most. Anyone in the grip of grief will tell you holidays are the worst. His daughter died young from a mixture of mental and physical health-related problems. The problem, he says, is how people pretend the child never died; how they never have the courage to explore the loss. It is the biggest theme in the house — this death — but it only exists in a wordless anxiety.

*

A suicide. The loss of a child. A man or woman coming home from a war. The house that burned in the fire.

We are taught, incorrectly, that silence is respect. We are misled into believing that by saying nothing we are only doing the decent thing. The line of thought goes something like this: the person grieving is so emotionally fragile that they may shatter if you ask about the grief. So better leave it be.

Except you are wrong. Except that the griever is so immersed in the loss that it feels like a new reality. And for you to ask them about this reality would be same as asking about a thunder so loud it shakes the walls of the house. How can you not inquire about something that is so immediate and present?

*

If you choose not ask about grief you are pathologizing their experience. You are relegating the “incident” into invisible territory. This is how a basic human emotion gets transformed into a taboo.

Until you have lost a parent you love, or a friend or a child, you also don’t understand the longevity of grief. The emotion does not get buried in the casket or burned with the ashes. It doesn’t end at the end-of-life celebration. But it lingers. It comes in unpredictable sets of waves for years. But by that point, even a good friend has stopped asking. Now the griever is on their own, wandering through the emotional wilderness on the nights they cannot sleep.

I was always amazed, as a grief counselor, when people would come to therapy years after their loved one had died. Hadn’t they grieved the loss by now, I wondered? No, they said. Because they had no one to grieve it with.

*

Grief, trauma, incalculable loss and tragedy. These stories need a witness. They need the mechanism of sharing.

According the seminal book, “Trauma and Healing” by Judith Herman, the first recorded cases of this come from Europe in the 1890s and what is now referred to as “Hysteria.” The term carries loaded historical baggage, as it should. “Hysteria” was the phenomenon of demonizing women who displayed highly emotional or reactive emotional states. But in some cases, women were put in mental institutions for symptoms that we would now called PTSD (dissociation, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, numbing).

The cases intrigued early psychologists like Sigmund Freud, who began to see an alarming pattern: the women with the most severe symptoms had endured devastating sexual abuse and violence. There is an unconscionably dark ending to this tale, according to Herman. The male psychologists were unwilling to accept that sexual abuse towards women was so rampant, so they moved on from the cases.

However, in the process of working with these traumatized women, they found an approach that seemed to work,

…these investigators had also discovered that hysterical symptoms could be alleviated when the traumatic memories, as well as the intense feelings that accompanied them, were recovered and put into words. This method of treatment became the basis of modern psychotherapy…The collaborations between doctor and patient took on the quality of a quest, in which the solution to the mystery of hysteria could be found in the painstaking reconstruction of the patient’s past.

Herman sees this sharing between victim and doctor as a microcosm of something that needs to happen on a much larger level, too. She says that communities and political movements need to also support victims. Systems of abuse need to be publicly acknowledged not just to correct the toxic behavior, but to aid in the recovery of the abused.

Finally, Herman writes,

…the survivor needs help from others to mourn her losses. All the classic writings ultimately recognize the necessity of mourning and reconstruction in the resolution of traumatic life events. Failure to complete the normal process of grieving perpetuates the traumatic reaction.

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There are common sense principles here. Don’t ask someone you hardly know about intense personal traumas. But you’d be surprised how willing people are to share about things that might feel taboo or uncomfortable — like the first woman I mentioned in this article, who just wanted to share in the fact her husband died by suicide; or the man who was waiting for someone to ask about the death of his child. As a friend or family member, have the courage to step outside your own comfort zone to provide comfort to someone you care about.

And remember, grief and trauma don’t just vanish. Keep checking in on them, years later. Find a moment to ask how they’re sitting with the loss, or how they’re relating to it differently. You’ll be amazed at the profound relief you’re offering from such simple questions.

My ears are always open for therapeutic wisdom delivered by anyone but therapists.

Which is funny, of course, because I am therapist, and in community with many others. I like our clinical literature, but it is hardly…literature; lacking soul and story and song. So, when I find the same messages delivered in other realms of life, I greedily gather and inhale it.

Psychological truths are hardly the discovery of psychologists. The themes we bring into the therapy room have been written about for hundreds or thousands of years. Just look at Jung’s fascination with world mythology — which are purely stories of a shared human psyche.

Which brings me to two writers, who, on the surface, share nothing in common. Rumi was a male Persian poet who lived and wrote in the 1200s AD. And Joan Didion, an American female essayist who just died in 2021. Recently, I’ve been turning a few of their poems and quotes over in my head with such regularity that I felt compelled to share them. They contain truths that I see every day in my work as a counselor, and therefore hope they might be helpful to you — especially those resistant to sitting with a therapist.

Let’s start with Rumi, and his poem called, “The Guest House,” which magically sums up modern psychotherapy hundreds of years before it was invented:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

Some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

Who violently sweep your house

Empty of its furniture,

Still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

Meet them at the door laughing,

And invite them all in.

Be grateful for whoever comes

Because each has been sent

As a guide from beyond.

If there is any guiding concept around therapy, it is simply that avoiding emotions will only strengthen them. Just think of this cognitive process for a moment: some thought or feeling surfaces and then then immediately push it away. This is signaling to the brain that the emotion being avoided is so threatening that it can’t even be processed. You have now amplified its threatening quality, essentially throwing more and more wood into the fire of the emotion, such that over time, it becomes too hot to touch.

Rumi instinctively understood this concept. And instead of locking the door, he opens it up to the entirety of the human emotional experience. Rumi knows that being in conversation with your different emotions is the mechanism of acceptance and healing.

Where I saw this most acutely was during my training as a grief counselor at a hospice clinic. Clients, shattered with loss, would come in and practically dissolve into the couch with relief, because finally, they had a place to express their sorrows. More than most emotions, we conceal grief because our culture is scared to ask about it, when in fact, that’s all the grieving person wants: to be acknowledged in their mourning, and to share it. Indeed, grief counseling is just that: to witness the loss and hold it together, which creates the container for release and relief.

*

Let’s now turn to a passage from Joan Didion, who I would argue is one of the most psychological writers of the modern era. This quote comes from the essay “On Keeping a notebook” in the collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Didion writes:

I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

I can’t help but read this passage through the framework of “parts,” which is the basis of a therapy called “Internal Family Systems.” The idea is this: Contained within each of our psyches is multiple parts contending for space — there might be an anxious part, or a jealous part, or confident or creative part. At different times in our lives, some combination of these parts will guide our lives. They will form our identities and determine how we move through the world. Indeed, there were years of my younger life where I was spiraling ball of anxiety; and alternately times where I was thriving with creativity.

What I hear Joan Didion saying is: don’t leave these parts behind; don’t abandon these identities that played a critical role in getting us to where we are now — even the ones that we swear we’ll never return to again. Often the people who know this the best are those in recovery, like AA. They don’t pretend the alcoholic didn’t exist, but rather “stay on nodding terms” with them, exercising empathy and understanding. It that former self that guides the current one.

Ultimately, Rumi and Didion seem to be driving towards something similar: turn away from your emotions or selves, and they are bound to return tenfold. Indeed, our only hope, in the therapy room and in life, is to keeping this conversation within us alive.

This conversation, in this guest house, will inform the one we want to have with our future.

The espresso machine is, actually, a ridiculous contraption.

I’m not referring to the new-fangled computerized ones, where you tap a screen and wait for something to happen. Those are just lazy. I’m speaking of the analog, stainless-steel Marzoccos, ECMs, Rockets, and Bezerra’s — the last of which I happen to own, and which forces you to take matters into your own hand.

What on earth inspired the Italians to engineer this convoluted box of mini water heaters, boilers, pressure gauges, steam wands, and thicket of pipes and pumps, is somewhat of a mystery. If you need a quick laugh, google “early Italian espresso machine” and you will find human-sized machines that look like some early iteration of R2D2.

All of this engineering for what exactly? For a thimble of brown liquid. For 15-30grams of coffee that can be downed in a single sip. It’s as if some mad Italian scientist kept thinking — More pressure, less coffee! More pressure, less coffee!

I’ve been a snooty espresso snob for the last five years, evangelizing its superiority to any friend who will listen, and yet in the depths of my soul, I still wonder: do I even like espresso?

*

You see, the hilarity of the machine has already taken me off target. I have real points to make here!

Sometimes I wonder, in our genetic coding, if humans are split into two camps: the specialists and the generalists. Some of us are interested in going deep into the singular, and some of us are passionate about sampling the many. I am, overwhelmingly, the generalist. My first love in this world was playing music; and as early as I can remember, I wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist. Nothing was more exciting than learning different instruments. Even today, I can play a little banjo, guitar, fiddle, guitar, dobro — as if I was trying to clone myself five-times to form a bluegrass band of Jonathans. Athletically, in my twenties, thirties and forties, I couldn’t just be a swimmer, cyclist or runner, but god’s sakes, I had to be a triathlete.

All of which makes the arrival of the espresso machine strange to say the least. It was like some exotic animal had taken up residence in my house, begging me for attention, desperate to show me its special trick. Indeed, as I mentioned, this machine does one thing, and one thing only — it makes a strange squirt of coffee.

But as I quickly learned, however bad you think espresso may taste, it can get worse, fast, if you don’t know what you are doing. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve made such foul espresso that I’ve actually gagged. I have experienced the bitter end of bitterness, and now tasted level or sourness that requires washing your mouth out with Listerine. And though I may be a generalist, I am not a quitter — which sent me down a costly and deranged rabbit hole to simply make drinkable coffee.

*

The first thing you learn making espresso is that you are actually entering a throuple — which is a first for me. There is you, your machine, and then the person actually calling the shots, the grinder. The dynamic is a tense one. I quickly found that my job was acting like a couples counselor between the two machines — looking for harmony, but mostly dealing with bad communication.

Because here’s the issue: to make your thimble of espresso requires the exact right grind size and dosage. Size is how fine or course. Dosage is the amount. There is no room for error on this. The common wisdom is a 1-to-2 ratio of ground coffee bean to liquid output. So, a common espresso might be 18grams of ground coffee bean to 36grams of liquid.

I dare you to say this sounds simple. We haven’t even gotten started. Then there is the next major issue to contend with: brew or extraction time. In other words, once you’ve ground the coffee, used your tamper, loaded it into the machine, and flip the switch to send water through the system, exactly how long does it take to pour those 36grams of coffee? Hold on though, we’ve already reached our first debate! Does the timer start when you flip the switch, or when the first drop of liquid hits the cup? This is actually a very interesting debate I’ll spare you from for today (but I will not spare you from the fact that to get any of this right requires you to now buy a scale and timer, which is the least of your financial issues, FYI).

Either way, we are generally looking for an extraction time of 20-30 seconds. You might have to do a little imagining here, but remember that this extraction time is dependent purely upon the grind size and dosage. Here we are again. If the grind is too coarse, the water will flow through too quickly, and if it’s too fine, too slowly. And trust me, you can taste when things are off. If your extraction time takes around one-minute, your mouth will pucker with bitterness. Alternatively, if it’s only ten-seconds, you might as well just be drinking acrid sour milk.

I dare you to say this sounds simple. We haven’t even gotten started. Because here’s where the work really begins: every type of bean, roasted slightly differently (while taking into account when it was roasted and how long it has been sitting), will force an entirely new calibration process between the grinder and machine. What this means, practically, is that if you switch from say a Colombian dark roast to an Ethiopian light roast, you will likely waste half a bag of coffee dialing in your thimble of coffee. You will spend a morning making micro adjustments on your grinder, pulling enough shots to give you a panic attack of caffeine, double checking your scales and timers, all the while shaking your head because you just can’t get it perfect!

*

But you can get it close, and then a little bit closer. And it this exact process that is actually a philosophy: the art of tinkering towards the perfect; the refining of a skillset practiced over years and years; the constant belief in getting better at your craft. Perhaps what I’ve failed to admit thus far, in all of my complaining, is just how interesting this process is; how the tinkering takes me away from my wandering thoughts and into the moment — which is precisely why I keep at it every morning.

Unsurprisingly, the Japanese have lots of words that point towards this idea (which I wrote about earlier this year). There is Shokunin, which is the belief in lifelong dedication to an elite skill. There is Chanto suru, which is the virtue of doing things properly and with attention. And then there is the more over-arching concept of Ikigai, “a reason for being,” which is closely tied to your intentional actions.

In western psychology we might just call my espresso making as a practice of Flow, or mindfulness, or presence — which are all leading towards the same concept, which is simply being fully engaged in the moment. And this I know to be true: a mind that is engaged is a content one. Whether we are problem solving the relationship between a grinder and coffee machine, or the color of paint to put on your canvas, or how to fix the engine of a car, these experiences are what make us feel alive, and ultimately, thrive.

*

What’s funny is how I’ve said virtually nothing about the quality of the espresso itself, aside from how truly awful it can taste when made improperly. In fact, what I’ve described thus far has everything to do with the process, and little to do with the result — which by the way, is another pillar in the psychology of happiness, suggesting that results (and the pleasure they give us) are fleeting.

Fleeting is actually a perfect word to describe a shot of espresso. The experience is over in about three sips. For some, it’s over in one modest swallow. What this means is that if you’re really going to taste the espresso, you need to be completely present. Each drop of liquid needs to be received with inquisitive awareness — what exactly am I tasting? Does the shot have chocolate notes or cherry notes? How much is my mouth noticing whether it has the thin, delicate quality of a light roast, or the earthy thickness of a dark roast? How much am I even noticing the crema (or foam) of the espresso before I consume it?

Blink, and the experience is over. Be engaged or don’t bother at all.

Espresso is to coffee what fine spirits are to alcohol. So, it might not surprise you that I also enjoy ludicrously expensive whiskey and tequila. And I like it served the same way. Not in a whiskey sour or margarita, but served neat in a glass. Just a tiny amount of liquid that asks everything of you.

Here we encounter another philosophy or aspect of the human condition: we get used to things very quickly, and then we stop paying attention to them. Dori Khakpour, research scientist at the University of Washington surmised, “The third bite, you start to wear down those taste buds that are now giving you that pleasurable taste sensation. After the third bite, you’re really not tasting much, you’re kind of just eating those calories.” High-end restaurants and chefs have been onto this for years: they offer tasting menus that keep your taste buds activated for an entire meal. A good scotch or espresso is also a way of doing this. And for that reason, wherever I travel, I hunt down the best coffee shops and often order an espresso, to continue expanding my sense of what people are brewing — and to enjoy my little micro-moment of being in the moment.

*

My fraught, but occasionally delicious, relationship to my espresso machine has also made me question an assumption that I started this essay with: that we are divided into specialists and generalists. What I’ve begun to wonder is whether, at a certain point, it’s all the same thing. To go deeply into any craft or question is to reveal the complexity and diversity within it.

I started my journey thinking I was doing one thing: pushing a few buttons to pull an espresso shot. What I actually learned was a little about a lot of things required to pull that shot: how grinders work, the science behind dosage and weight, the implications of this on taste, and the vast varieties of coffee and roasts. So, am I a specialist or a generalist? You tell me.

Maybe in the end, it’s all much simpler than this. My intellectual guru, the therapist Irvin Yalom wrote, “We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life.”

I’m not going to convince you that making espresso is the meaning of life — but it’s a gesture towards smaller meanings that begin to add up. To make anything worthwhile, we need to apply effort, and then we need to apply more. Because contained in the depth of any process is also wonder and curiosity, and if we’re lucky, community and people, too. These attributes are now sounding “sturdy enough to support a life.”

But if you take anything away from this essay, just please, whatever you do, do not call my holy liquid Expresso.

Relationships are like cement. In the beginning of a relationship, there’s maybe some flexibility around how you interact and what you can ask for. But if you don’t set up those patterns, like cement, it dries very fast. And once it dries, it’s very hard to change. It’s very solid, those patterns. And so, people will get into these relationships, where they don’t ask for what they need, they’re not really open about what they truly want. And then they are in these cemented relationships, and then they try to preserve the relationship, or they try to change the relationship when it’s too late. It’s not the right relationship, and it’s not going to change.

This is a really interesting point about early patterns. Because, at first, love is like being on some kind of a drug trip. So, it’s hard to really make sense of things when you’re in this kind of infatuation phase….

I think that when people go into relationships, they’re projecting onto the other person what they want that person to be. So, they tend to overlook a lot of red flags. And I think it’s really important that you can sit with it and say, Okay, here’s a red flag, let me try to understand what this means. So maybe I’ll talk to the person about it, maybe I’ll talk to my therapist about it. But I’m not going to ignore it, I’m going to kind of put that there with all this other great stuff that’s happening. And then I’m going to decide what to do about it, and how to communicate about it to this new person that I’m getting to know. So, I’m not just projecting this idealized version of what I hope this person is on to this person, when that’s not really who they are.

I think another thing that comes up is what gender roles are supposed to be in a relationship. And I think that a lot of women in particular are really having trouble squaring what they want in terms of any egalitarian relationship, and what that actually means. So, an example of that is, when I see couples, often if it is a heterosexual couple, the woman will be the person saying to the guy, you know, I really want to feel closer to you, I want you to open up to me, I want to really understand your inner life. And right there on my couch, he will open up to her, and maybe he might tear up or start crying. And inevitably, some version of this happens: She will look at me like a deer in headlights, and what will come out is I don’t feel safe when he doesn’t open up to me because I don’t I don’t feel connected to him, but I don’t feel safe when he’s crying in front of me either. So, there’s this kind of confusion around what do we want in a partner? What does that look like?

You mentioned red flags to look out for….

Well, if you look at studies that the number one predictor of whether somebody is going to be a good partner, is emotional stability. And, and the number two, by the way, is flexibility. So, you don’t want to be with a very rigid partner, and you want to be with someone who’s emotionally stable. This may sound incredibly obvious, but at the same time, look at your friends, when they get into a new relationship. And listen to what they say sometimes, right? Like, yeah, this person is, you know, clinically depressed, and they’re not getting help for it. But it’s okay, because I understand or I’m there for them, or I’m going to help them get help.

I think that to start a relationship that way is really dangerous, especially if the other person is not willing to really take ownership of their mental health and to say, Yes, I am going to go see someone about this, or I’m going to go see about medication, whatever they might need to do. You know, somebody who has some kind of addiction, people think, Oh, it’s not that bad, or they minimize it. You’re going to be living with this, and it will be that bad.

You know, red flags in terms of how they treat you. Do they tell you the truth all the time? Not most of the time, not 99% of the time. But do they tell you the truth, I had this couple where he would lie about little things all the time, because he didn’t want his partner to get upset with him. So, they were just these tiny lies like, oh, yeah, I didn’t pick up toilet paper. Because they were out of it. I went and they were out of it. No, actually, I stayed at work late, but actually, like, the person wanted to go to the gym, but they were afraid to tell their partner that they actually wanted to go to the gym. And this would infuriate his partner. And so, we talked about what would happen if you were just honest with her, even if she was frustrated with you what would happen.

So, one day, he came home, and he didn’t have what he was supposed to get [at the supermarket]. And he just said told her: I forgot. And that was the truth. And she just started crying and said, Thank you for telling me the truth. Wow, thank you for telling me the truth. If you can’t trust what the other person says, that is a huge red flag.

But I think that trust isn’t just about whether people think about infidelity. There are a million other ways we can betray our partners that have nothing to do with another romantic partner. It’s about the little lies. It’s about the ways that we don’t see them. We don’t listen to them. We don’t hear them. So, if somebody can’t show up, if somebody can’t have a hard conversation with you, if someone can’t be respectful when you’re having hard conversations, if someone doesn’t deal well with stress, these are all red flags — because these are things you’re going to encounter in the course of your lives together.

But for people in securely attached relationships, it can also be easy to dismiss and forget about some of these core things, and then you want more and more out of your partner…

I think so often what happens is people say, You know, this person is boring, right? Like, this is boring. And I always say like, if you think the other person is boring, maybe look at yourself, have you become boring? And so often they’ll say, Oh, maybe I have, they hadn’t thought about that. I think that we expect so much from our partner, we expect them to kind of be the person who makes us happy. And nobody can do that for you. You have to be the person that makes you happy. And the other person has to be the person that makes them happy. And then you to come together as people who are people who are satisfied in life, people who find ways to keep things exciting for yourselves. And then you bring that into the relationship.

But when you rely on your partner to be that person for you, that’s when people get into dangerous territory. So, whenever someone says to me, like I think my partner I think this marriage is boring, or I think my partner’s boring, I’ll say, Have you gotten boring? And it’s a great question to ask yourself, what are the ways you’ve gotten into these patterns that are you know, that where you’re not going outside your comfort zone? You’re not growing in any way?

Lori Gottlieb, thank you for your time.

Oh, well, thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.

(This interview was edited for clarity and style)

As we reach the end of this four-part series, I’m reminded of where it began: with calls I didn’t want to receive from friends, colleagues, clients. Their lives were falling apart; and the change would be ruthless. Marriages, jobs, places of living — everything up for consideration, or evisceration. I was seeing the uncomfortable truth that arriving into midlife was not bringing answers but only more questions. And in what time remained, people were starving for change.

One recurring theme in this series has been exploring the Millennial ethos of individualism: how many of us were to taught to lean into our innate specialness, and find careers in which our gifts would flourish — only to be presented with a harsher reality: The work neither resulted in profound fulfillment nor economic security. I would argue the Millennial brings a similar ambition to relationships, namely that our partners must somehow be our best friends and while still supplying a romantic-sexual charge; that our partners must be emotionally attuned and also financially attuned; that our partners are willing to accept us fully even as we continue to change over our longer lifespans. It is a dizzying, and often, incompatible list of requirements; the weight of the expectations doomed to buckle the union. All of this is complicated by a lack of guiding institutions, like religious or spiritual communities, clubs or groups we identify with, and geographical isolation from families — creating a feeling of existential loneliness, and even lack of meaning.

Perhaps beyond the veil of the Millennial psyche is a delicious fantasy: that life will be a never-ending series of personal victories with no tradeoffs; that each day will be filled with creative challenges; that our partners will seamlessly glide alongside us, anticipating our every need; that somehow, we’ll naturally cultivate community and meaning along the way. This guiding individualist philosophy, suggesting we barrel head-first (or me-first) into the first half of life makes sense, actually. A person needs to make decisions, and make their way. There should be a certain selfishness with time: go see the world, have experiences, read books. But eventually there comes a tipping point in this endless acquisition — namely that it is indeed, endless; that the cup we are filling will never actually be filled. And moreover, that some of the beliefs we clung too might have led us astray.

So, what if the second half of life could be a wise response to the first half? What if we had the courage to shift our perspectives a bit? What if we opened up to new ways of approaching relationships, work and meaning? While I don’t have the solutions, I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat to some of the ideas being considered be people who studied the answers.

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For the past five years, I hosted a program on KCRW (NPR Los Angeles) called Life Examined (sound familiar?). I interviewed hundreds of the world’s leading experts on what we know now about human flourishing: Esther Perel on navigating modern relationships, Michael Pollan on psychedelic therapy, Deepak Chopra on spirituality, Sharon Salzburg on meditation, Bessel van der Kolk on processing trauma.

What I eventually began to see from all the guests I interviewed was how they naturally diverged into three rivers of thought, all flowing in the same direction, but taking slightly different routes. These rivers might better be thought of as relationships. There is our relationship to other people, or more broadly, love: our romantic partners, our friends, our family. There is our relationship to actions: our work, our hobbies, our way of spending time in the world. And then finally there is our relationship to something greater than ourselves: this could be service, spirituality, awe, nature, meaning, profound beauty. Together, the braid into what we might consider to be a full life.

These three relationships — people, action, something greater — are nothing new. But the way we understand them now has changed. We have updated versions, from decades of studies and applications. Therefore, the task is to begin relearning, for example, what the qualities of good relationships really look like; or what types of actions actually stimulate our brains; or approaches to feeling connected to something bigger than ourselves.

Here’s the interesting thing I noticed: the more we lean into good people, or activities, or connective experiences, the smaller our sense of “self” becomes. These ways of being also have nothing to do with what plagued the Millennial to begin with: career titles and accomplishments, the tyranny of specialness, the feeling of never living up to some imaginary potential.

Think of these as thematic guideposts. The task at hand is not to “ace” them, but to keep them in the foreground of our thoughts, allowing them to grow richer over the second half of life.

1) Redefining (and re-centering) relationships

“Happiness is only real when shared,” the famous final message from Christopher McCandless, the protagonist of “Into the Wild,” serves as a nearly perfect Millennial parable. McCandless died alone after venturing solo into the Alaskan wilderness, in search of a better life. Little did he know that this phrase, which is actually rooted in something Tolstoy wrote, would become a pillar of modern psychology. Indeed, inconvenient to the Individualist mindset is this emerging truth: The quality of our relationships to others will have the biggest bearing on our happiness, especially as we age.

This is the takeaway from The Harvard Study of Human Development, in which researchers had access to three generations of 724 families over 85 years. Over and over, they found that those who maintained positive, loving bonds with family and community not only reported being happier, but had better long-term health outcomes.

The immediate takeaway is an obvious one: however much you think you’re leaning into relationships, lean harder. Make an inventory of people you love; people with whom you feel there is a healthy bedrock of care. Realize that they will become even more important in the second half of life.

Spread your needs out among as many people as possible

The notion that your romantic partner will be your everything (i.e., lover, best friend, business partner, co-parent) is a deeply unrealistic and often damaging position to take. This is a modern invention of marriage. Instead, we need to create large networks of relationships with whom we can explore different types of connections (i.e., friends to do certain activities with, friends who are good with deeper conversations, etc..).

The paradox of partnership is that is begins with loving yourself

Another falsity of modern love is that finding love will cure you of loneliness or depression or a boring life. It may temporarily relieve these symptoms, but it won’t solve them. Here’s what therapist and author Lori Gottlieb told me: “You have to be the person that makes you happy. And the other person has to be the person that makes them happy. Find ways to keep things exciting for yourselves. And then you bring that into the relationship.”

Stop looking for similarity, and start cultivating curiosity

Another trap of modern love is thinking that we should essentially date a version of ourselves: same hobbies, some viewpoints, and so on. But these similarities say nothing about the quality of the relationship, or how it actually feels to be in their presence. True qualities of enduring relationships include: empathy, deep listening, and curiosity in the other.

2) Redefining our actions (which may or may not be our careers)

Somewhere in the basement of a Millennial is a dusty box of trophies and ribbons. This box is an interesting symbol of generational belief: climb ladders and collect accolades; eventually swap ribbons for degrees and promotions. Little did we know that ladders wouldn’t lead us to the winner’s’ circles, but only to more (underpaid) ladders.

One of the great temptations of happiness is to delay it; or rather, to push it off into the future. The sentence structure of this way of living contains lots of “if’s” and “when’s.” This is a safe position to take, but it gets us off the hook of being happy in the present. The gift of the midlife crisis is urgency. If you keep delaying, you will run out of time. Waiting around for another promotion, or your partner to agree to move to a new place, or money for a house remodel, isn’t going to work. Therefore, you have to ask: how exactly do I want to spend my time right now?

Fall in love with process, not results

Whether it’s work, or just a hobby, the leading question becomes: what type of activity do I enjoy regardless of the outcome? Or to get more granular, what kind of process requires my creative attention in the second-by-second unfolding of it? This is where so many of us went astray with work. Perhaps our values or general interests aligned with being, say, a lawyer. But then we quickly realized the day-to-day activity of the work was a profound letdown.

A central psychological tenet of happiness is that a stimulated, challenged, in-the-moment brain is a happy one. This is, in fact, why nearly every person on earth claims to love travel. Because when we drop into a foreign country, we are immediately stimulated by our environment. And indeed, the goal of travel is not to get a trophy for simply arriving, but for the pure immersion of the experience itself. This is the quality of mind that needs to be replicated — not just by flying to Japan — but closer to home, in activities we love.

Pick an activity with progression and levels of mastery

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times... The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” writes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied and coined the concept of “Flow,” which he is describing here.

Flow remains one of the most studied, verified and actionable ways to increase happiness in our lives. The only problem is how loosely we throw the term around — as if any relatively positive experience creates “flow states.” But that’s not actually true. Csikszentmihalyi was very precise in what these states are and how they come about: “Flow tends to occur when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.” The last three words are the most critical. The task needs to be on the edge of possible and impossible. If it’s too easy, it’s boring. If it’s too hard, it’s a waste of time.

The goal therefore becomes twofold: pick an activity you enjoy, and then seek out new challenges that force progressive levels of mastery. During my own midlife meditation — following an unexpected divorce and the implosion of my journalism career — I found this activity in endurance sports, and specifically triathlon. Not only did I love the activities of swimming, biking and running, but I loved the path of mastery laid out before me. A sprint distance triathlon turned into an Olympic distance, which turned into a half-Ironman and then a full Ironman. Every race forced me into a “a challenge that is just about manageable,” as Csikszentmihalyi suggests.

Of course, this activity doesn’t have to do anything with sports or extreme triathlons. It music, art, writing, crafts, you name it. Ceramics is one I see in constant bloom around me, for reasons that make intuitive sense. Between the clay, the glaze and the kiln, it is its own triathlon of material, design and science. There is always something new to learn and refine. And that is one of the key takeaways: whatever you pick, have the courage to make a plan and push it forward; put yourself in place of utter absorption which, as psychology instructs us, is where skill meets challenge.

3) Rediscovering meaning and contemplation

Last week I wrote about the fact that Millennials are on pace to be the least religious generation on record. The Pew Research Center says 40% of Millennials are religiously unaffiliated, compared to 20% of Boomers. I wrote that scholars like Robert Putnam see larger trends in declines in overall civic participation (service clubs, parent-teacher associations, etc..). Millennials also give less to what we might think of as our most natural group affiliations — the colleges and universities we attended (if we had the privilege of attending higher education).

While I’m certainly not suggesting everyone suddenly join a church or start participating in Alumni groups, I do wonder where the Millennial will find meaning, support, and guiding beliefs about how to live. Because the harsh reality of aging is this: things are going to get harder in the second half of life. Parents will die. Either we or people around us will get terminally ill. If we have families, more and more people will begin relying on us.

My therapy-intellectual mentor Irvin Yalom wrote, “We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life.” The creation of meaning (which religion offered very naturally) can very easily turn into a choose-your-own-adventure mission, but the trick is to choose something. And while I have no perfect blueprint to build upon, I would suggest a few ideas:

Make intentional space for contemplation and wonder

The only way you realize that you’ve been on a treadmill of achievement for the first half of life is by stepping off it for a moment. In the thirsty acquisition of experiences, careers, relationships, how often do you step back and simply ask: where exactly am I heading if I continue down this path? And to what extent does that align with my values and dreams?

Humans may not be religious beings, but we certainly are spiritual beings. The history of mankind — from cave paintings to Notre Dame — points to an aspect of our psyche that is hardwired for existential contemplation. Learn to sit with big questions: How do I actually feel about death? What would I regret if my life ended now? What part of myself have I abandoned up until this point in my life? These are the types of questions that religions or institutions would have tried to answer for us, for better and worse. The job of the Millennial is to begin weaving these questions into their own lives, or better yet, with people they care about.

Give yourself to something that is bigger than your own pleasure

Let me tell you why I left media and hosting programs on public radio: because I saw how the generation above me was faring. I saw older hosts cling harder and harder to their microphones; welding their identity to their program because they were scared to lose whatever power or influence they had in the world. Instead of stepping aside for the next generation, their egos grew fiercer. Is this not also the story of current American politics? But there were other things I grew jaded by working in media for so long: the obsession with checking my downloads or page views (which became indicative of my self-esteem), the scrambling to stay relevant in such a competitive market (at the cost of pursuing content I actually cared about), and the open-ended questions of whether or not I was doing anything helpful to the world.

So, I became a therapist. I did it because I realized I likely have another forty years of life left, if I’m lucky. What’s weird is how little I miss the “old perks” of my job. I don’t miss hearing my voice in Los Angeles on public radio, or seeing that 60,000 people downloaded an interview I did. All of that was just a way to fluff my ego and justify my existence.

Things look a lot different now. A big week of therapy for me is sitting with just ten clients. But I would rather sit with ten people as they navigate the hardest moments of their lives than I would making some ephemeral media for 10,000 people. Because, finally, it’s not actually about me. To even say that out loud elicits an exhale of relief. It’s about a much larger mission of mental health in a country of profound loneliness, unjust social systems, and generational trauma. This is how I want to spend my last decades, as little or as big as that seems to anyone reading. And please believe me when I say that I’m not looking for praise, or backslaps, or imitation, or anything of the sort. I’m just telling you what aligns for my values in my remaining life — which as it turns out, corresponds with many of the things I’ve written here: The work brings me into deep contact with other people, it forces mindful engagement, it’s where skill meets challenge (because every therapy client is different, and every therapist can get better), and the nature of the work forces contemplative conversations.

Not everyone needs to become a therapist, of course. But my sense is that most of us have something we believe in beyond ourselves. Let your life experience guide you. It could be coaching a team of a sport you love; leading a cancer support group; becoming a sponsor in AA. In a modern world devoid of obvious meaning, these are ways to create it. They put us in touch with larger causes and greater communities; they give us something to hold on to when life feels cold and untethered.

And somehow, this final sentiment feels like the right one to close out this four-part series on the Millennial midlife crisis. I hope none of this has felt pedantic or prescriptive, but rather just an opening of ideas and observations. I am also fumbling my way into the future, making it up as I go; and yet somehow just exploring these ideas with you has turned down the anxiety buzzing through my brain. So, thank you for reading, for pondering, for disagreeing, for sharing, for all of it. My sense is I’ll continue to explore all these themes into the future here on Substack, so stay tuned. But for now, so long.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written about the tension of arriving into life’s middle section. I’ve posed some larger theories about our modern moment of living: longer lifespans, unrealistic expectations around relationships, the need for change and novelty. I’ve also wondered what might be unique to the Millennial generation, such as visions of passion-filled careers that collided with a colder reality of work, as well as unique economic factors that have delayed certain parts of adulthood: owning a house, getting married, having kids.

My intent is to begin moving out of this critique of generational discontent and towards a place of optimism and growth: What are important questions to ask in this phase of life? What do we know about cultivating meaning and happiness?

But before we get to that, I would like to address a piece of criticism I received from my first essay. Some readers said that I failed to note that underlying the Millennial’s ambitious relationship towards work and romance is a certain obsession with individual happiness. For example, people leave their spouses or employers because they — the very singular they — are not totally fulfilled (versus sacrificing their own happiness for something greater). At best we call this personal growth or self-actualization, and at worse we call it selfishness or narcissistic behavior. I agree that I not only failed to mention this as an important attribute of the Millennial’s psyche, nor did I explore why this mindset would result in a midlife crisis. So maybe we should just start with some data and general observations.

There have been compelling arguments that Millennials were part of a profound shift towards individualism that was already well underway in the cultural ethos. If you want an espresso-level jolt into these ideas, pick up “The Selfishness of Others: an essay on the fear of Narcissism” by Kristen Dombek. She says you can see this shift in language trends, “American writers are using I and me 42% more than they did in 1980.” She goes on to cite a meta-analysis psychological study that concludes, “Millennials are testing higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory than any generation before, at a rate greater

than the increase in obesity. One in ten [Millennials]…has ‘experienced symptoms’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and one in sixteen Americans in general.” Narcissistic Personality Disorder, for reference, is defined as, “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy of behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

Dombek makes a very clever argument here, which requires a little psychological jargon, so bear with me. A personality disorder is defined as, “behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.” This is different from generally fitting in with the norms of society but having, say, anxiety or depression. “Those are things you have; they may come and go,” Dombek writes. “A personality disorder is something you are.” What Dombek suggests is that changes in our dominant culture (technology, beliefs, etc..) are actually leading us towards narcissistic behavior. This is happening so much that “the individual’s culture” is operating by a new set of rules. We are not randomly discovering narcissists, but creating them.

But to be obsessed with the self, almost by definition, means to care nothing for the group or institution. Therefore, it may not surprise you that the rise of individualism correlates almost perfectly to a drop in religious belief. The Pew Research Center says 40% of Millennials are religiously unaffiliated, compared to 20% of Boomers. Religion, on a very basic level, is quite literally the belief in something bigger than yourself, and is often connected to caring for your spiritual community. Scholars like Robert Putnam see larger trends in declines in overall civic participation (service clubs, parent-teacher associations, etc..). Millennials also give less to what we might think of as our most natural group affiliations — the colleges and universities we attended (if we had the privilege of attending higher education).

But don’t worry, I’m one step ahead of you in terms of standing firm with our generational apprehension of the institution. There’s a good argument to be made that most of them have let us down. Why donate to a university that has saddled you with $50,000 in debt and not actually provided a great job? Why participate in America’s dominant religion — Christianity — when in our lifetime we’ve seen utterly atrocious behavior in the form child sex-abuse scandals? Not to mention that so many of our religious institutions remain exclusive when it comes to gender or sexual orientation. As our generation shifted towards open-minded attitudes towards identity, many intuitions have been slow to follow.

I am all about taking the hatchet to larger groups that have failed us, only if we recognize that there will be self-inflicted wounds somewhere in the process. For thousands of years, institutions provided humans with a structure to live and find meaning. They guided us through the stages of life, and steadied the boat in turbulent times. Even if these groups provided a rather antiquated version of how to live or spend your time, it was something. But when you completely turn your back on them, and step through the door of pure individualism, you enter a very natural void of meaning. Who exactly will walk alongside you in difficult times? What will you feel connected to beyond yourself?

What I see in my own individualist, secular life (and in friends around me) is trying to lean into some “natural” pillars of meaning. Family is a good one. Hard to refute that caring a lot about family is bad for you. Except we’ve made that task exceptionally hard on ourselves as well. In chasing sexy careers or attractive lifestyle, we have geographically isolated ourselves from the people we purport to care so much about. The existential isolation is even more heightened when we realize that chasing the cult of career (which I wrote about last week) has provided mixed results. This is a paradoxical inflection point for a Millennial: being taught to chase meaningful work at the cost of being separated from family or friends (which remain one of our bullet-proof sources of meaning).

All of this is amplified by something utterly unique to growing up in the 80s, 90s: The arrival of the internet. The Millennial will be the last generation who lived in a “before and after” relationship to the web. I’m not even going to try and sum up some lofty final analysis of what the internet has done to humans, but rather highlight one aspect of it that relates to this question of individualism. It is hard to deny that social media hasn’t forced upon us some unnatural self-consciousness. Instagram is itself a Narcissist Personality Disorder. There is a new public curation of the self that has resulted in what feels like a world of self-inflation. And the emerging ethos translates into something that sounds like this: either promote yourself or get left behind; either become a loud voice or become invisible.

Forgive me if I am extra sensitive to this last point. It’s only that I have to partake in this unholy market on a daily basis. The second after I hit “publish” on this article, I will have to spend the rest of my week re-packaging and re-posting it to Instagram, Facebook, Apple podcasts. This is not even interesting work, but rather the cost of doing business in a world that forces you to spend your time saying, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” — as if the more you repeat the mantra, the more credentials you have to be a respected figure in this world. Let’s revisit the definition Narcissistic Personality Disorder, “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy of behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.” This is starting to sound a bit uncomfortable.

But am I suggesting that all my Millennial friends are narcissistic monsters, incapable of empathy? Hardly. Rather I am describing a system that we are constantly rubbing against, which means a small piece of it may inevitably rub off on us. In fact, most people I know detest social media and abhor posting on LinkedIn. But we contribute for the sake of contributing to some aspect of a social experience, fully aware that we sacrificing some part of ourselves in the process.

All of this — the rise in individualism, the decline in all types of guiding institutions, all hyper-charged by internet selfie culture — adds up to a certain feeling of being un-tethered and rather lonely in a chaotic world. We are encouraged to boisterously pursue our own version of personal growth, but to what end? When is our subjective sense of happiness….enough? Because, in a world of (falsely-perceived) limitless choice, couldn’t we always be a little happier with a new partner, a new job, or living in a new place? And like social media, we participate in this line of thinking not because we even think it’s good for us, but because it’s the culture being offered up and sold to us — which sadly has no actual set of directions or map to follow. If anything, it just devolves into the cult of consumerism. Why consider any of this when you can plan a trip to Japan or just start scrolling for sauna-cold-plunge combos?

Part of the midlife journey is popping up for air to ask: wait, where the hell am I actually trying to go? What am I connected to? What do I believe in? What roads have I walked down that turned into cul-de-sacs?

It doesn’t surprise me how many in my generational cohort have discovered psychedelics in this phase of life. Because the psychedelic experience is a release from the exhaustion of individualism. It’s an obliteration of the ego and connection to something greater. It is spirituality without religion. It is meaning without the institution. It is an experience, not for the sake of an Instagram post, but the sake of the experience itself.

And all of this provides some clues as to how we might manage this midlife crisis with a little bit of elegance and authenticity — which is the topic of next week’s final installment of this series.

A few weeks ago, I wrote Part I of this series, and was overwhelmed by the response — hundreds of comments across social media, tens-of-thousands of views, and strong opinions in every direction. I wrote the piece from the perspective of what I am seeing, which is the sudden unraveling of lives around me, whether that be friends, therapy clients, or even myself. I explored a few questions or theories as to why this might be happening: unrealistic expectations around marriage and career? Vastly longer lifespans? Feelings of existential boredom?

The piece struck a nerve, perhaps, because many of us are struggling. Deeper dilemmas are arising at this midway point. That doesn’t mean everyone is getting divorced and going to Burning Man (although I did!), but that something feels uneasy in our souls. There is a very specific and acute form of stress that develops at this phase: feeling pressure from both ends of life. By this I mean, parents are dealing with the stress of raising children (in a country that gives them virtually no support) and they are also dealing with their own aging (or dying) parents. An abstract theme becomes a hardening truth: We are all mortal. Time is limited.

What a strange conundrum to find oneself: completely overwhelmed by managing life and yet aware that life is fleeting and the years are numbered. An internal tug-of-war takes hold, until the rope can’t hold the load. Something is bound to snap somewhere: a relationship, a career, an identity. Even if the entirety of life can’t be dismantled, smaller pieces can, if only to open up new channels of feeling alive: keep parenting but find a new partner; keep the partner but find a new career; keep it all (good luck!) but try and qualify for the Boston Marathon.

To find yourself wobbling at midlife is only natural. You are now having to explain how the world works while still not fully understanding it yourself (because nobody does). You will have to explain death to your children while simultaneously having no idea what actually happens when someone dies. You will start managing employees or taking on leadership roles while still learning how to manage yourself. A smile comes over my face when I recall interviewing the great poet David Whyte, who reminded me that the word “manage” comes from Italian word manegiarre, which means “to handle or train horses.” This seems like a far simpler task than corralling humans — because do we even know what’s best for them anyway? Do we have any authority outside of the exhausting task of making sure they are doing their jobs correctly?

*

A number of people commented on the fact that the midlife eruption is the result of Millennials being sold a bill of goods that were, indeed, bullshit. I think that our notion of a “career” might be the biggest falsity of all. I see this happening on two levels:

1) How “work” was marketed to the Millennial

To grow up with some privilege during the 80s and 90s was to be fed a certain myth about how to approach your vocation: follow your passion, love your job, and, as they say, “you’ll never work a day in your life.” There was this ethos that work could be deeply fulfilling; that work would feed your soul and be mission-driven. You just had to tap into your innate specialness to figure out exactly what color your parachute was, and proceed with vigor. And there would be jobs! Plenty of jobs! There for the taking.

Sometimes I wonder if Millennials came of age as our teetering belief of meritocracy was cresting. There was this abounding optimism that any job you wanted could be yours if you worked hard enough. But the problem with believing in a meritocracy is that not reaching the “winner’s circle,” however that is defined in your career, is considered a moral failing on your part — should’ve worked harder in that unpaid internship! Never mind classism. Never mind nepotism. Then, there was this sense that these passion-filled careers could actually afford you a living, in a place you actually wanted to live. In other words, the bill of goods being sold sounds something like: you should love your job, that job exists if you work hard enough, and it will provide for you and your family.

When exactly did this house of cards encounter its first earthquake? How about during the great recession when Millennials were just graduating college and trying to find work? Or a second tremor during COVID when the economy convulsed again? What should have been critical years of career growth were instead a slamming of the brakes.

But there were other growing cracks in the system: the price of housing kept ballooning when wages didn’t. According to a Pew Research Analysis, between 2019 and 2024 housing prices increased 30% while wages only increased by 9%. The mission-filled jobs of teaching, journalism, non-profits, arts, etc., were less plentiful and paid unsustainably. Student debt became a defining aspect of the Millennial’s pocket book, with college tuition rising, adding another crippling layer to an already tenuous financial future.

All of this contributed to an anxiety of falling behind, and sprinting to catch back up financially. Blame it on the economy, or not, but Millennials also married later. Another interesting stat from Pew: In 1980, about 61% of adults ages 25–39 were married. By 2021, only 38% of adults ages 25–39 were married.

Indeed, it can be hard to even conceptualize marriage, or more so, the rearing of children, when you are struggling to make rent in a career that is shapeshifting below your feet. Stability begins to feel more like a luxury than a reasonable expectation for working hard.

2) The questionable reality of what a “good” job would be

Here’s an uncomfortable thought: what if we were wrong about the entire premise of work being fulfilling to begin with? What if we were looking in the wrong place to find meaning in our lives?

Work poses a profound philosophical dilemma. Just from a very practical standpoint, we give our jobs the best hours of our days — when we are energetic, focused, ready to contribute (to something). In fact, we give more hours to our work than we do to our partners, or kids, or hobbies. Idealistically, one would therefore hope that those hours are meaningful, engaging, worthwhile. To a certain extent, we were taught to believe that this would be possible.

What I am observing now among my peers is a very deep reckoning with this issue. It is across the spectrum of work: the professor that finally hit tenure but is still maxed out; the therapist or doctor who has a full practice but is burned out; the public defender lawyer who glimpses the impossibility of the system. There is adrenaline and romance in the early years of work, particularly underpaid work. But hustling at 25 feels different than hustling at 45. I’ve seen this often in journalists. Their disposition begins to sour as they realize they are quite literally still chasing breaking news, but unable to afford a house.

There is this creeping sense that the reality of work was far different than the hopeful projection; that there really is no winner’s circle; and that the ladders we were climbing don’t actually lead to new floors to rest, but rather to more ladders. Maybe for this reason, Gallup found that roughly 60% of Millennials are open to changing jobs at any given time—much higher than previous generations.

There was no better place to see this than working in media and specifically public radio, my employer for fifteen years. These stations are filled with highly-educated, under-paid, well-intentioned people, who are doing moderately challenging work for a mission-driven organization. There is a pervading malaise of: is this as good as it gets? Have I reached the end of the career rainbow?

Perhaps the greatest recent book title on this subject is “Work Won’t Love You Back: how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted and alone” by Sarah Jaffe. She argues that hitching our identities to work is a losing game plan; it’s a modern-day construction that is a nice idea but a disappointing reality. “Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love,” Jaffe writes. “If we recall why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.”

I certainly felt that way, exactly one year ago, when after giving my life’s energy to major NPR stations across the country, I was blindly led into a meeting with my boss and HR reps and laid off. Loyalty? Love? Passion? All the things I was told to pour into my work? Those are all nice ideas until budget cuts roll around, and you realize that you are, after all, just a number to be trimmed to keep the ship afloat.

Work doesn’t love you back. Say it out loud. How does it feel? It’s a hard pill to swallow after taking your prescription for twenty or so years.

What I am suggesting, for at least some of my Millennial brethren, is that a sobering recalibration around work is happening. We are facing up to this reality, eye-to-eye, and wondering where we lost the trail — or if we were sent off in the wrong direction to begin with.

And with the now looming reality that our lives are finite, some of us are not content riding this one set of railroad tracks to our graves.

Maybe there is a bit of grief in this notion: that our careers will ultimately be a smaller source of meaning and happiness in our lives than we might have hoped. Therefore, in what time that remains, we will need to change course a bit. And it is precisely in the redrawing of this map that we encounter one of the dizzying challenges of reaching the middle of our life’s voyage.

(Considering the illusion of choice, and where and how we find meaning will be the topic of the next installment)

Somewhere in our mysterious bodies, we carry around a belief — that we are good, that we are bad, or often, somewhere in between. This belief serves as an internal compass of sorts. It sets the course of our relationship towards others and ourselves. It is a filter through which inhale the wild journey of life.

I never thought much about this idea of self-love until I became a therapist, and the theme kept forcing its way into my office. Clients referred to themselves as bad, broken, injured; they worried that deep within them was something dark and dangerous. These beliefs then dictated how they operated in the world, and often their attachment styles. If they felt unworthy of love, they constantly fought to prove their worthiness. If they felt broken, they chose broken partners, which created cycles of chaos within the relationship. If they felt haunted or doomed, they ran from healthy love out of fear that their darkness would eventually show itself, and therefore self-sabotage felt a safer road to take.

How we feel about ourselves is rarely articulated or made conscious; but rather lives, like most things, as a confusing elixir of emotions and subconscious half-thoughts. We feel our way through the world even if we are not aware of what we are feeling.

The role of therapy (or writing, or any honest excavation) is to address this exact issue: to finally come into contact with how think and feel about ourselves; or as Carl Jung famously said, “to make the unconscious conscious.” And in doing so, the client and therapist might be able to follow the autobiographical thread back in time to ask: when did these questions of self-hate, self-love, or self-questioning really begin?

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So much of this can be understood with how a child or teen makes sense of the world. The early iterations of our brains are, strangely, self-centered. We understand the world only in relation to ourselves, and not as a set of independently operating phenomena. Here’s a classic example: parents get divorced for reasons purely to do with their relationship, but the child somehow interprets it as their fault simply because they are part of the family. The child begins a process seeing themselves as bad or unlovable. You would be amazed how often this conversation arises in a therapy room among highly intelligent people who can understand this concept intellectually, but not from a first-person emotional standpoint.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the complicated plight of the overachiever. Here we see a similar theme arise often in childhood: in a strained or unhealthy family system, a child develops a talent. The talent supplies a feeling of love and safety. But without the talent the child wonders: who am? Surely, I must not be worthy of this love without it. Perhaps it is the outsized worrier part of the human brain that always fills in the blanks with negativity; by this I mean, when we stumble upon existential fill-in-the-blanks, we often resort to dark answers: If I can’t explain a divorce, or who I am without achievement, then it must have something to do with my badness.

Then there is the even more misunderstood role of trauma in judgements we form about ourselves. It is one of the great

est moral paradoxes of being a human that bad things happen to good people. But that sentence should continue with….and make them feel bad about their lives. Where do we even begin with the unfair atrocities? Sexual abuse, sexual assault, neglect, completely random bodily injury, the suddenly emergence of incurable disease. The victim can begin to reinterpret the trauma with thoughts or questions of: was there some part of me that deserved this? Am I now forever tainted or corrupted? Am I just a cursed person?

*

Self-love begins by understanding our actual story.

It begins by following back the thread of our lives to when we began to develop certain stories and feelings about ourselves. An important question to ask: in what way did life events (that had nothing to do with you) impact how you began to feel about yourself? Did you mistakenly internalize a divorce, an illness, a random trauma as a reflection of your inner nature?

So much of the therapeutic process, or whatever we call this exploration, hinges on a very deep sense of forgiveness. Can we forgive ourselves for reacting so harshly towards ourselves? Can we forgive people and circumstances that deeply impacted us? A truth that arises over and over in my therapy office is how the people who were supposed to raise us, protect us, guide us, failed on some level, but were doing the best they could with the skills (and capacities) they had. Buddhists would see this as the notion that we are all tied into a karmic web. We come into contact with another’s karma, impacting us in ways we can’t control.

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What I have described so far is a courageous (and often terrifying) excavation of sorts. We are exploring how layers of life began form upon us and harden over us. And this process hinges on a certain belief — that is equally spiritual as it is psychological — which is this: that at the core of our being is something that is innately good and lovable. That the ultimate essence of our psyche or soul is pure, in the way that holding newborn baby feels this way.

This framework of understanding ourselves is echoed in perhaps the most influential modern school therapy called Internal Family System (IFS), created by Richard Schwartz. Whereas I’ve just used the metaphor of “layers,” IFS would use the concept of “parts.” But at the center of this solar system of parts is the Self, which contains the following attributes, also called the “Eight Cs):

· Curiosity instead of certainty

· Compassion instead of judgment

· Calm instead of panic

· Clarity instead of confusion

· Confidence instead of defensiveness

· Courage instead of avoidance

· Creativity instead of rigidity

· Connectedness instead of isolation

What you find in IFS is a certain optimism about the nature of being human. The underlying belief is that our minds and emotions seek peace and not chaos, but are contending with the ways in which the world has shaped us. The is beautifully resonant with, again, Buddhism and “Buddha Nature,” which suggests that our essential goodness is obscured by ignorance, attachment, and suffering.

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For many, cultivating self-love will be an active process and not an instant realization.

One way to begin this process is through a simple exercise that exists throughout psychotherapy, but has been widely written about by the Psychologist Kristen Neff, “With self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.” On the surface, this sounds too simple and almost quaint. But there is a deeper truth at play here: we are often cruelest to ourselves, and kindest to others. We hold ourselves to different standards. We question our own achievements and motivations. This phenomenon is like a strange illness of the human psyche, or like an unexplained pattern of self-inflicted wounds. All we can do, first, is bring awareness to the pattern, and then second begin a process change.

Neff talks a lot about the importance of how we speak to ourselves particularly during hard times. This is when the volume of negative self-talk really gets cranked up. We call ourselves failures, losers, or weak, as if somehow this will serve as inspiration to change our ways or our circumstances. But according to Neff, it only does the opposite — plunging us deeper into the pool shame.

There an interesting corollary here to one of my other great passions, endurance sports. For decades scientists and psychologists have studied techniques (outside of training) to boost performance. Eventually, they stumbled upon what is now a pillar of sports psychology: positive self-talk. More specifically, they found when an athlete really begins to suffer in a race, they need to start repeating uplifting phrases that inspire them to keep going. And here’s the crazy thing about this concept (that feels, again, too simple to be true): athletes began to post better times. In other words, the language or thoughts they cultivated resulted in physiological changes.

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If there is any final reason to explore your relationship to self-love, it would be because it can have a profound bearing on your romantic relationships. This is something I wrote about a few weeks ago. And in that piece I quoted the writer bell hooks, who I will continue to quote until my final days. She wrote, “Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” Perhaps phrases like “self-love” and “self-compassion” are really just tools to get us to that exact point: the ability to be alone and not feel lonely.

My favorite therapist-writer Irving Yalom wrote, “There is an infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.” Falling is the temporary sensation of losing yourself. Standing the sustainable path of loving yourself, and the other.

Over the past year, I have started receiving calls that I would rather not take. I have had conversations in my therapy office that send a chill through my system. They all center around a primary theme: the life people have constructed they would now like to deconstruct. The marriage, the career, the place — they are all up for consideration, and evisceration. These conversations tend to be with friends, colleagues, therapy clients, all around my age: 42-years-old, a number that sits near the center of a modern lifespan. So what else can we call this but the onset of midlife crises?

What’s interesting, on a very personal level, is how avoidant I feel wanting to recognize any of this as potentially true. I don’t want to admit that 42 is middle age. I don’t want to understand these cataclysms as midlife crises. These truths make my stomach churn. But the churning comes from a deeper place in my psyche, which is doing something quite natural: my discomfort is an act of self-preservation. To admit or believe any of this means that I am subject to the same truths: of aging and mortality. Perhaps my favorite therapist-author, Irving Yalom wrote,

I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness, the other the belief in an ultimate rescuer.

This is a fascinating and profound realization about human nature: that there is some part of us that feels that the natural rules of life don't apply to us, and second, that if something does indeed go wrong, we will somehow be rescued by some greater person or spiritual entity. Which is all to say, built into our psychological architecture is some pushback device; some mechanism of magical thinking — when the truth around me is still abundantly clear: my friends and I are growing older, and many of our lives are voluntarily falling apart.

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The first realm of implosions I’m noticing is happening in marriages. Many couples, married in their late 20s or early 30s (so about a decade into firm partnership) are encountering extraordinary tension. These are bright, highly-educated people, often with young children. There is a sense that after years burying their heads in the sand to keep the whole partnership-family-career triad afloat, they are now unburying themselves, taking a good look around, and are deeply displeased. New sexual urges are emerging. Some women are more interested is now being other women. Some men are seeking sexual gratification outside of the marriage. Polyamory is now being seen as a viable option. For some it may work, but for others it’s just a culturally appropriate way to explore new connections and inch towards divorce.

At best, these conversations are happening openly within the married couple, or within a therapist’s office. At worst, these desires are leading to secrets, and double-lives. This has been perhaps the most shocking revelation of all to witness: how such good, smart people are somehow replaying these old disgruntled tropes: having full-blown affairs and secretive flings. To be clear, I am not some puritanical martyr about sex and monogamy, but what hurts is simply the deception. Maybe I’m alone in feeling this way, but I always believed that somehow each generation of people would grow wiser. We would learn from the mistakes of our parents and parents’ parents, and there would be a natural course-correction. And yet, there seems to be a greater truth emerging, almost mythical in its nature: that the human story repeats itself, over and over; that we are lovably fallible mortals, doing our best, but stumbling around in the dark.

I’m also not going to convince you that I have any moral authority here, but rather, major empathy. I was divorced at thirty-eight, but without kids, for reasons that seem similar and unique (which is how everyone feels going through major separations). My only vantage point is simply that I am a therapist and writer, which are trades of observation; and through repeated observation one begins to find patterns; and through pattern, dare I say, I am seeing the midlife eruption.

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It is not so different in the realm of work, either. To arrive into your forties or fifties, for some, means cultivating a career that has lasted upwards of twenty years! It is at this juncture that the nature of work begins to change for many. They become managers, and by doing so, either thrive or realize they are actually moving further and further away from doing the activity that brought them into their career. For example, in journalism, you start as a reporter, doing actual storytelling, but advance to an editor, which is literally editing other reporters’ stories, and then advance again into some executive role where you are just managing editors.

Then, there is something deeper but more obvious at play here: twenty years into a single career means it is no longer new in any capacity. Two decades is a significant amount of time to “learn the ropes” and very naturally, begin to operate in well-worn grooves. When someone reaches the autopilot stage of work, there is room for a new question to arise: what the hell am I doing? Is this the end of the line? And perhaps the even more dangerous but vital question: Do I even like the work, anyway?

Choosing a career, like a marital partner, is such a fraught endeavor to begin with. The stakes are incredibly high, but our life experience is incredibly low (especially in our twenties). Instead, in work, we often just get lured in by prestige, which is the easiest thing to fall for, but the fastest thing to let you down. Perhaps this is why so many of the midlife eruptions I see around me are happening to lawyers and bankers. All of which leads me to this:

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Question #1: How much of this can be attributed to boredom?

As I was writing this article, I kept wondering if there was anything unique about the Millennial midlife crisis? Or rather, did the midlife crisis arise from a set of causes and conditions specific to this generation? I keep turning these questions over and over in my head, but can’t seem to stumble upon a tidy answer (feel free to give me your theories in the comments!)

Instead I’m going explore an idea that might seem a little boring….which is, in fact, boredom itself. A few weeks ago I wrote about the clinical findings of boredom through my interview with leading expert James Dankert. Here’s a one summary from the piece that continues to haunt me:

Dankert told me about one experiment with rats that I will never forget. They put rats in isolation (no toys, social interaction, etc.). They had the option of doing quite literally nothing, or, they could stick their snouts through a little hole in the wall, that would trigger a machine to administer a little of puff of air to their nose. Rats generally dislike this sensation and would avoid it (this was shown, for example, when they put toys in the room). But when the boredom became too prolonged, a number of rats developed what looked like an addiction to this unpleasant sensation of the puff of air. The takeaway being: when choosing between feeling nothing and feeling something painful, we may choose the pain.

But what if we put this in the context of a marriage, and replace the word “pain” with “novelty.” This is a word heavily used by the great couples’ therapist, Esther Perel, who suggests that a large aspect of our lives is dictated between the tension of safety and novelty. Each of us is wired a little differently in terms of wanting one or another. Moreover, it would make sense that our needs would shift over long periods of time. For some, they may always just want the safety of a healthy, low-drama, predictable marriage. Others may want this for a while, but then suddenly want to the rattle the cage a bit a shake it up a bit. Indeed, for some, safety can eventually begin to feel akin to boredom. And boredom, if it is not attended to properly, can result in destruction simply for the sake of feeling alive.

Could this be a plausible explanation to a midlife crisis? Maybe for some. But I think this argument hinges on something that is quite unique to the *modern* human condition: lifespan

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Question #2: How much of this can be attributed to living significantly longer lives?

Compared to most of human history, we now get to experience a lot more of life than our ancestors — with lifespans even doubled for many. Everyone reading this knows this. But how often do we consider the psychological implications? If for thousands of years it was common to die around the age of forty, then marriage suddenly begins to look and feel a bit different. Your time with that person is not just halved, but would also just feel more tenuous living a world that was less predictable and more dangerous (i.e., disease, lack of antibiotics etc..). It seems unlikely that a married couple would share the anxiety around the concept of: holy shit I’m going to be married to you for fifty years? Here again I call Esther Perel to the witness stand, who suggests that in modern life, it’s likely that we will have not just one, but two or three long-term enduring romantic partners.

The theory here being: the longer we live, the more we are going to change. And the more we change, the more our desires will change, too. It may make sense for some of us to be married for fifty years, or it may make more sense to split that up.

The same logic could be applied to a career: Why would we continue to be interested in the same thing when our lives are vastly longer? I’m a perfect example of this. I worked my first twenty years as a journalist, and now I’m a fulltime therapist. Our interests evolve. And to not accept that can create a profound amount of tension within ourselves.

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Question #3: How much of this can be attributed to our radically different (and modern) definitions of marriage and work?

Immediately I recall my interview with great philosopher Alain de Botton, who told me this:

For most of human history, people were okay with just having bearable relationships, they didn’t expect to deeply love the people they got together with. Love was imagined as a passing ecstatic state, not something that would last beyond six months when you were young. We’ve now become so ambitious about what our relationships could be.

There is a lot of truth to this statement, which researchers would confirm. Our concept of what a marriage should be in a distinctly modern invention. Certain attributes would include that our partners must somehow be our best friends and while still supplying a romantic-sexual charge; that our partners must be emotionally attuned and also financially attuned; that our partners are willing to accept us fully even as we continue to change over our longer lifespans.

This is a dizzying list of requirements, and perhaps you are thinking something similar to me: this is a system that is doomed to fail on some level. I’m not saying it’s impossible, nor am I disbelieving in the fact that there are happy marriages out there. I’m rather opening up a space to suggest that a modern marriage takes an inordinate amount of work and care. Some will be able to sustain this (with compromise) for ten or twenty years. Others, as they crest into their forties (like my peers and clients) may begin to exit the arrangement. They will seek a new start, or even a new figuration of love. `

Once again, it is not so different than attempting to select a profession that will make us feel fulfilled for decades. This has also become a modern mantra: that such careers even exist, and it our fault for not selecting the right ones. Here again I call upon my own experience with feeling that I had run the course of the journalism career, and it was time to find something that ignited new parts of me.

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A conclusion of open questions

Do my three questions give us further insight into the midlife crisis? Do they each contribute something (even if small) to understanding our need to grow in new ways? For me, it is helpful to just name a number of these factors, and accept them as something real we must contend with in this life. Indeed, the more I consider these factors, the more I am filled with a surprising emotion: empathy. I am reminded that life is wildly dynamic, and that our current moment of being alive presents us with unique challenges.

Empathy is an important emotion here, I think, because many of us live with excruciating shame for making drastic changes in our lives. We really beat ourselves up for getting a divorce, or for leaving a job that was good on paper, but bad for our soul. One of the prerequisites for empathy is understanding the detail, context and complexity of a life. And I hope this little essay has helped to bring some of those to the surface. Perhaps there is another essay to follow about what exactly to do about the midlife crisis, or ways to avoid it to begin with. But as we writers like to say, that is another story, for another time.

I live in the land overachievers.

Boulder, Colorado was once known as the place with the highest number of PhDs and triathletes per capita. Most days I come into contact with professional athletes, start-up founders, and professors. A few of them end up in my therapy practice — when far more need to!

These are extraordinary people, to be fair. Many are former college athletes who continue push the boundaries in every arena of life. They are qualifying for the Boston Marathon while working for Boston Consulting Group, or preparing for the Ironman World Championships while using their PhD in economics to build new companies. They have no personal dimmer switch, and instead remain locked in the “on” position. Their work ethic is, actually, unbelievable — squeezing efficiency and progress into any available window of time.

I gravitate towards these people because, if I’m honest, I see aspects of myself in them. Although I am the watered-down, “light” version, more prone to naps, an extra Negroni, and donut breakfasts than my superior peers. But recently, I have been reflecting on the types of conversations I have with these superhumans, whether in the therapy room, or as I ride bikes with them together into the mountains. Because there is something important worth acknowledging in the interior lives of these people: an underlying confusion and sadness for why they push themselves so hard; and a haunting question of what would happen if they stopped.

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Observation #1: Achievement as double-edged sword

There is a natural inclination for children to an establish an identity by doing something well. Especially these days, children are pushed into sports, into music, into accelerated academic programs, in hopes that they will shine in one arena or many. Who wouldn’t want this for their kids? It builds self-confidence, community, a way to healthily spend their time. But when achievement is unlocked, it creates some strange cognitive dissonance. The child is suddenly being praised, but for what exactly? Is it for the impressive outcome itself, or the effort that produced the outcome? And can a child even tell the difference?

I would be the first person to admit to you how intoxicating it is to be praised. But I would argue that this pleasure can become a dangerous building block of a young person’s psyche. In fact, it can become the foundational mechanism for how they approach the world: more achievement, more praise, more feelings of acceptance and love.

There is a profoundly obvious problem here: self-worth is now determined by achievement, which is often ephemeral, versus the development of “character,” which is not ephemeral. Take being an athlete. It only takes one injury (or two concussions!) to completely derail a career. Not only that, 99% of athletes will eventually realize they are the not the best, and will have to make peace with that. This is in opposition to developing inner qualities, like learning to be a good friend, cultivating curiosity about the world, and being of service, which have nothing to do with achievement, but rather just ways of being. For me to even list these feels like some cliché, quaint exercise in human development; I believe my observation is true, but dominant culture makes this feel impossible. Just turn on the TV and watch the World Cup: our

heroes are athletes (with millions of Instagram followers) not therapists and good parents.

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Observation #2: when achievement is unlocked, it is easily replicable

Have you ever noticed how some “talented” people tend be good at multiple things, not just one? I think there is a reason for this. Whether they can articulate or not, high-achievers have cracked a very simple code, which is this: success relies very little on talent, but on work ethic. Or to explore that a little further, achievement is dependent on consistent efforts, sometimes daily, over long periods of time. The underlying super-power here is focus and determination. No doubt it helps to have a little natural talent at something to create positive momentum, but after that, it is about will power.

What I have noticed among my Boulder brethren, is how this skill of focus and determination is like a “plug-and-play” game. It can be applied to nearly everything (except emotions and relationships, which I’ll get to shortly). This is why the determined college athlete can transition into demanding, competitive work (finance, law, consulting) and generally flourish. This is why the college soccer player can suddenly switch to triathlon and qualify for the Ironman World Championships, because they are (no pun intended) exercising the same muscle they have built over a lifetime: wake up early and go run, learn how to become a good swimmer, bike on the weekend, and replicate this over and over and over.

It is shockingly simple. But the overachiever has access to something that we don’t: they actually know this formula works, which creates incentives to keep going. They are also reaping the rewards of something else: momentum creates momentum; success in one realm gives one confidence in another realm; compound interest is not just a theory in banking, but in life, too.

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Observation #3: This system of living often results in emotional and relationship failure

What I have described so far has everything to do with external actions, and nothing to do with emotional intelligence. That is for a simple reason: these are different systems that operate by different rules. Waking up at 6am to train for a marathon has nothing to do with learning to sit with a partner as they cry after losing a parent. Pounding out billable hours to a client has nothing to do with tapping into how you emotionally feel about a situation or person. Brute determination is often an anti-feeling way of operating in the world.

There is another important distinction here: success in something like sport if often reliant upon individual effort and not always social collaboration. This is what makes endurance sports so appealing to overachievers: effort in, result out. Copy, paste.

Think about how this type of motivation is not just useless, but often corrosive in an intimate relationship. More often than not, what is being asked of partner is the ability to just listen, empathize, and hold space. What is being asked is actually a form of inaction. That’s become emotions don’t need effort, they need space to just be. When the overachiever has been taught that success is purely dependent on effort, they immediately move into problem solving and fixing. They literally do not have the language of emotional connection.

Not only that, but ruthless determination is often an exercise is not listening to your emotions in order to get something done. This is poses greater problems in the therapy room down the line: is the overachiever even able to recognize any emotions? Or, have they developed unhealthy coping mechanisms to blow off misplaced emotional steam: alcohol, drugs, secret lives, or very often, physically training themselves into the ground to mask the onset of emotional turbulence.

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Observation #4: The therapy starts with a meditation on self-worth

The most honest questions an overachiever can ask are: who am I without all the medals, the degrees, the accolades? How do I feel about the person who is no longer grinding out all the successes?

When I put myself in their shoes, the first emotion that comes to mind is fear. It may take them a moment to make sense of this question, and when they do, it could understandably open up an existential void. The achievement-based life is like oxygen; it like a tattoo worn deeply into one’s skin. To remove it is like severing a limb.

The deeper level of questioning, from a therapeutic standpoint, would be: when do you first remember feeling this attachment to achievement? What role did it play in your young life? Did it bring order and peace to a messy family situation? Did you have a parent who was overly-focused on your achievement, and therefore the achievement felt like a stand-in for love between the two of you?

But what if we take our parents off the hook for a moment, because in many cases, they were doing the best they could, and I truly believe that at a certain point of maturation, we need to forgive them and take responsibility for our own lives. What if instead we just acknowledge that being a person is hard (especially a young person), and success just felt good to our little social brains, gave us purpose (and even status), and we just got hooked? That’s ok, too. The purpose behind this excavation is to bring empathy to why we developed the way we did. So often we see our deficiencies through the lens of shame: what’s wrong with me that I couldn’t figure this out!

From this place of warm neutrality and understanding can we begin a process of rebuilding parts of our lives. A central tenant of this for the overachiever will be to understand this: we are all worthy of love regardless of our external successes. The quality of feeling and receiving love has nothing to do how high we pile our trophies.

For many overachievers this will be a lifelong journey into what some call “spiritual reparenting.” This means actually learning to speak to yourself from the perspective of a loving, wise parent, in hopes of reshaping the younger part of yourself still caught in the world of validation. Therapy is a great starting point because it forces this level of conversation and honesty.

There is no reason to think this transformation should be fast. We are gently setting aside the world of external action swiftness to internal emotional slowness. We are creating a new operating system, or (because I hate tech analogies), walking into a new ancient country with very different rules. The culture shock will be immense, but so will the rewards of living a full, rich life.