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By midlife or what we assume is our midlife

even if we've achieved most of our ambitions many of us hit a point where we wonder what really matters.

We feel that we've been missing something important,

though it may not be completely clear what that is.

Inspired by his own midlife crisis, it may not be completely clear what that is.

Inspired by his own midlife crisis,

philosopher Kiran Setia explores the meaning

and implications of this phenomenon.

Kiran Setia, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for having me.

The topic we're talking about today is the midlife crisis.

I think I'm probably in the middle of a midlife crisis, but you better explain what you mean by a midlife crisis.

So unlike a lot of familiar cultural ideas, the midlife crisis is a phrase has a definite history and a point of origin.

So 1965, psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques published this paper, Death in the Midlife Crisis.

And what he found was that his patients seemed to be doing well and flourishing, stable jobs, happy relationships,

but had a sense of malaise and futility, somehow connected with death, and he wanted to figure out what that was.

So it's not that people in midlife have become bitter and twisted because their ambitions

...