How to Navigate a Mid-Career Crisis | HBR IdeaCast | Podcast

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1:07Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.

1:18You might have heard my voice on the show a few times before, but this is my first episode as an official co-host, joining the amazing Kurt Nickish and producer Mary Du, and I'm really happy to be here. We want to bring you the best management ideas from the world's leading thinkers and help you connect them to your own lives so you can run your businesses more effectively and better navigate your workplaces. Today I'll be talking about mid-career crises with Kieran Setia. He's a philosophy professor at MIT who wrote a book called Midlife and the HBR article Managing Your Mid-Career Crisis. I'll admit that I tracked him down partly for personal reasons.

1:53I've spent my whole career in journalism, a year at a newspaper in Virginia, a decade at the Financial Times, and for the past nine years as an editor at HBR, which is a terrific place to work. But a few years ago, around the time I turned 40, I started to ask myself if I was really doing the right thing with my life. Had I advanced far and fast enough? Was I happy in my job? Did I want to do something different? Of course, it's common to feel this way at midlife. Just listen to Billy Crystal describe it in the movie City Slickers. When you're a teenager, you think you can do anything, and you do.

2:26Your 20s are a blur. 30s, you raise your family, you make a little money, and you think to yourself, what happened to my 20s? 40s, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud. One of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. 50s, you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Now, I wouldn't normally turn to a philosopher for help, But when I read Kieran's book, I found it really helpful. That's why I wanted him to be my first guest. Kieran, thanks so much for coming on the show.

3:00Kieran Setiya:Thank you for having me.

3:08So what evidence do we have that lots of people suffer, not just from a midlife crisis, but a mid-career crisis? Are they two different things or linked?

3:18Kieran Setiya:I think they're linked and they run in parallel. So there's the most recent sort of reliable research on people's life satisfaction by age comes from economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald. And it suggests that in general, life satisfaction has this sort of gentle U shape. So it starts high in youth, it bottoms out in your 40s, and then it picks up again in older age. But some of the earlier studies were specifically of work satisfaction, and it also has the same shape. So it bottoms out, I think, in the work satisfaction studies, it bottoms out a little earlier, around 40, exactly the right time for you.

3:53Kieran Setiya:So I think these two do run in parallel and probably have some of the same kinds of causes and explanations and maybe treatments. What are some of those specific things that start to get in our heads when we hit middle age? I think it's a cluster of different things. I think talking about the midlife crisis or the midlife malaise is a little bit misleading. There's really many midlife crises. There's plenty to go around. And I think some of it has to do with a sense of sort of backward-looking regret or missing out or things you haven't done or mistakes and misfortunes, parts of your past that you now have to come to terms with that constrain what options you have and what your life can be like.

4:35Kieran Setiya:And some of it is more focused on what you're doing in the present. And often midlife at work and in one's personal life is a time of feeling like it's project after project. There's so much that has to be done just to keep your family or your business running. And that can feel very oppressive. Yeah. And we do spend so much of our life.

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5:46Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Lives at work. So it seems natural that this sort of backward-looking regrets about the past, a lot of that does center not on our relationships or sort of our social lives out in the real world, but, you know, in the office.

6:08Kieran Setiya:Yeah, certainly for me, that was the initial and main focus of things was the sense that I had spent 25 years working on a career with a fairly linear trajectory and had been incredibly fortunate to end up with a job as a philosophy professor. And this is something I ought to have been grateful for. and yet that was the point when the sort of rush of needing to get tenure and get promoted sort of calmed down when I thought what about all the other things I haven't done and now I'm not going to do my life is sort of relatively constrained there was this sort of puzzling sense that even though it was worth doing the thought of just doing it over and over again for another 20 30 40 years felt dispiriting yeah and so unlike most people you turn to philosophy for help, which makes sense given your background, but it's not something most of us would do.

7:01Most of us would go to career coaches. We might read HBR. A lot of the advice is about how to make changes at that stage, but you took a different approach and focused more on how one could manage it in place. Tell me a little bit more about what you found out in your research.

7:20Kieran Setiya:In a way, this came out of my personal experience. It was pretty clear to me that I wasn't going to make a dramatic change. I wasn't going to give up tenure and leave my job. And at the same time, I thought, well, this is a kind of ethical problem. It's a problem about how to live, how to think about the shape of a human life. It ought to be the kind of thing that a philosopher like me who works on how to live and what's a good human life would have something to say about. And so I did turn to philosophy. I was surprised in a way that on the one hand, philosophers had rarely explicitly talked about midlife.

7:52Kieran Setiya:On the other hand, I found a lot of resources in philosophy for thinking about the kinds of errors or confusions about value or about the passage of time that underlies some of the negative feelings we have around midlife. So in effect, what I was beginning to do was a kind of abstract cognitive therapy, trying to unearth philosophical mistakes that might underlie negative feelings and see if there was room for a philosophical therapy for the midlife malaise. What particular strategies did you find most therapeutic for you when you were trying to figure out how to still be happy as a philosophy professor?

8:34Kieran Setiya:A starting point that I found very simple but in a way very helpful was just to think about what philosophers call incommensurability or the incommensurability of value or the plurality of values. So in a way, there are decisions in which you take a better option and you have no regrets. If I say to you, do you want$50 or$100? You'll take$100. You will not feel conflicted about it. But that's actually a comparatively rare case. But most decisions that we make, even when we make the right decision, involve different kinds of value and so involve a kind of loss. So I might have tickets to see a concert and then get a sudden offer of tickets to the first game of the World Series.

9:14Kieran Setiya:And for me, baseball fan, I'm going to go to the World Series. But there is a kind of small scale loss there. I won't get to hear that concert. So there's a way in which regret is compatible, a certain kind of loss is compatible with even having made the right decisions. And I think a phenomenon people often experience when they reflect on their lives in mid-career is a version of that sort of writ large. It's sort of thinking, now that I've spent 25 years doing this, it's pretty clear I'm never going to be a medical doctor, which my father wanted me to be. And I look back and think, yeah, there's a real loss there.

9:48Kieran Setiya:There are all kinds of ways my life would have gone and things that would have been really valuable. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

10:26Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. bundling just another way to save with the personal price plan prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state i have missed out on and will miss out on

10:52Kieran Setiya:so the thing that i think is therapeutic here is to realize that a certain kind of regret or loss around midlife is not a symptom of anything going wrong it's a symptom of basically your ability to appreciate many different kinds of values. And that in fact, that's a good thing. It would be terrible if you were so narrow in your focus that there was really only one thing that you could see value in. But what about when you think back, and actually it was a mistake, you know, you were decided to be a corporate lawyer instead of pursuing your dream of dance. Yeah. So that is the harder case in a way for thinking about your past and coming to terms with it.

11:32The case where you think, I'm really not sure I made the

11:35Kieran Setiya:right decision, or even I'm pretty sure I didn't. I really, I just made a mistake. And it could even be a decision. It could just be something that happened to you and a misfortune that you went through that you look back on and think, at the time, I knew that was a terrible thing, and I was right. Or a situation that's been forced upon you. You know, you've lost a job or been pushed into a function that actually you don't enjoy as much as you would have another. No, exactly. So I think the starting point to sort of rethinking this philosophically is to draw a distinction between mistakes, misfortunes, failures on the one hand and regret on the other hand.

12:13Kieran Setiya:And those things can seem inseparable, but actually you can see that they come apart even just thinking about simple cases like I make a stupid investment, bad mistake, through sheer luck it turns out that I make a huge profit. So I don't regret a mistake. So conceptually at least there's sort of two phenomena here, how you should have felt then and how you should feel later. Philosopher Derek Parfitt talks about a case in which someone decides to have a child as a teenager, and they never lose their sense that it was a rash decision. But later, looking back on that decision, sort of holding their child in their arms, they might well completely reasonably think, I don't regret it.

12:57Kieran Setiya:And I think when you start to think through the ways in which your life course has been determined by things that at the time were mistakes or misfortunes. Many of the kinds of attachments you form later, the people you meet, who you marry, whether you have kids, whether you have these kids or would have had some other kids, those kinds of attachments are highly contingent on your past. And looking back and thinking, well, I wouldn't have met my husband or I wouldn't have my daughter if I hadn't made that mistake or if I hadn't lost my job and had to seek this other career is the beginning of a way of reframing one's history and providing a narrative that makes it reasonable, I think, to feel differently about things that at the time you recoiled from.

13:40Yeah, and I think a point you make in the article in the book is this idea that it's so easy to dream of an alternate reality that ended up perfectly with no mistakes because there's no granularity to that life. The line you use, it's the specifics that count against the grand cartoon of lives unlived. you know, the relationships you have with colleagues at work, the people that you've mentored, the work you've actually produced and put out. None of that would have happened without you making the decision you did.

14:14Kieran Setiya:Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think it's very easy to slip into a kind of abstraction where you just compare how good this life is and think, well, I could have had a better life. When you compare it in terms of better and worse, it can seem like it would be irrational not to just want the better life. There's a kind of counterweight to that in our attachment to the specifics of our lives. And so I think one strategy for evincing that, that you were pointing to, is to think about all the way, all the particular things you've done at work, the particular connections you've made, the people you know, the interactions you value, and to think about all of those details vanishing.

14:50This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments, it's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom-scrolling? Smart move.

15:27Another smart move? getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with the personal price plan prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state replaced by something that in principle

15:49Kieran Setiya:might be better but it is completely unknown and to which you have no emotional connection So the thing that really resonated for me was this idea of ennui in the present, you know, sort of I've done everything I needed to do to get to where I am. And now I'm just going to keep doing that thing over and over again. And I don't frankly want to blow my life up and do something completely different. But how do I get excited about the work again? Talk to me a little bit about the advice that you would give me. I've already read the book, so I've already done it. But what advice would you give anyone who's in that position?

16:27Kieran Setiya:So there's a couple of things I think are really helpful in trying to think through this experience, which I think is both emotionally and intellectually puzzling. And for me as a philosopher, part of the puzzle was it's compatible. This feeling of ennui is compatible with thinking that what you're doing is worth doing. It's not that it seems completely pointless. And there's a kind of question, well, how can you be doing things that seem worthwhile and yet think something is missing? And there's two ways that can happen. So one of the ways in which I think it commonly happens around midlife turns on this distinction I draw between ameliorative and existential values.

17:01Kieran Setiya:So ameliorative value is the value of amelioration. So taking something bad and making it better or not bad, sort of neutralizing a problem, colleagues having an argument at work or there's a glitch in a rollout of a product or... Editing a terrible draft. Exactly, yes. And you have to... There's this problem you'd rather not be dealing with. and then you fix it. And that's worth doing. But in a way, if too much of your life is occupied with amelioration, sort of neutralizing problems, the best you're doing is sort of making things neutral. You don't have a kind of vision of what's positively good or positive value in your life.

17:39Kieran Setiya:So the idea of existential value is the idea of value that's not ameliorative, things that are worth doing, but not because they solve a problem you'd rather not be dealing with, but are positively worth doing. And I think one kind of strategy around mid-career is to look at your life and try and classify how much of what you're doing is merely ameliorative and how much space there is in your life, both at home with your family and at work for activities with existential value. I mean, are there sort of blue sky projects you've been putting off for years that would have existential value? Maybe now is the time to think about them.

18:14Kieran Setiya:Around midlife, so much of our time is in demand. So much of what we do that's worthwhile consists of things that we have to do in order to solve problems with our kids, with our parents, and at work, and that that isn't enough to make up a satisfying life. Yeah. I mean, it really is a mindset shift, right? In terms of how you think about work, you know, thinking about different ways that your work is valuable. You know, is my editing a bad draft ameliorative because I'm just fixing this problem or does it have existential value because when it's readable, someone can improve their work life because of it?

19:00Kieran Setiya:Yeah, that's true. So sometimes you'll find that what you're doing has value of both kinds and that you were just too focused on the ameliorative and not enough of your time was spent focusing on the existential value. I think that contrast shows up even more in the sort of second distinction that I think is useful here, which is the distinction between two kinds of activity that I personally found most useful in trying to think about what was going wrong with my own relationship to work and philosophy and teaching. This is a distinction between what I call telic and a telic activities. So the terminology comes from the Greek word telos, meaning end or goal.

19:36Kieran Setiya:And the idea is that telic activities are ones that are directed at a sort of specific completable goal, like finishing a draft of an article. There's something kind of structurally... This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier. so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

20:14Shop now at palmolive.com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

21:08Kieran Setiya:shape, what you're doing is finishing them. So you're taking something meaningful and what you're basically doing is engaging with it in a way that's going to expel it from your life. And then the moment you do, you just sort of think, eh. Right, right. Then it's like, that's done. Now I'm on to the next project. Right. And so I think it's really important to recognize that not all activities are like that. Not all activities have this telic structure. So as well, take a simple example, as well as walking home, there's just walking without any particular destination. Or as well as getting the kids to bed, there's the ongoing activity of parenting.

21:45Kieran Setiya:Or instead of writing this report, there's the ongoing project of building the company. And those ongoing projects, those what I call a TELIC, sort of non-goal directed projects, I think don't generate the same kind of self-defeat that you see in projects, TELIC activities. because they're not exhaustible in the same way. It's not that they're going to be finished at any point or archived in the past. And you're not sort of deferring their realization. If you want to be building the company or you want to be going for a walk and that's what you're doing, well, you have what you want right now.