Midlife has traditionally been described as the passage of play between the forties and fifties but given that we live longer, and that our lives are getting more complex and non-linear, some of the phenomena that are typically attributed to midlife could possibly be felt by people in their thirties and sixties. It is that phase where we are at least about five to ten years into our working life and have five to ten years of working life ahead of us. One could call it the high seas of our working life where no lighthouse is to be seen for comfort.
As a student of leadership, journeys and transitions, I have observed that all of us encounter these turbulent passages of play in our lives where multiple things come together across our professional and personal fronts and cause a knot that seems hard to unpick. How we engage with this messiness can determine our life outcomes.
In these situations, I have seen the script play out in three broad ways. In the worst-case scenario, people get into a vicious loop and implode. In the moderate case, they end up chugging along, often over-indexing on one or two domains of life till there is an event that hits them and forces them to reprioritize. In some rare cases, people seem to be proactive about engaging the multiple dimensions and end up leading a fulfilling life of happiness and meaning.
To go back to the visual of the high seas, these three scenarios are equivalent to sinking, drifting or swimming. This book strives to share some of the lessons that might be useful in swimming with intent in the high seas of life.
However, we must understand the dynamics of midlife and why it might come about before we move to discussing the potential ways in which we can turn it from a crisis to an opportunity.
When we encounter these questions, I notice that we often do not know where to start.
By the time we approach midlife, we might have collected several experiences, some real data to reflect upon. We all grew up reflecting on the question “what do you want to become when you grow up?” I have come to realise that it is a challenging question to navigate early on in life (for that matter at any point in our lives) because we don’t have a realistic understanding of what we would enjoy and what we would be skilled at. However, by the time we approach midlife, we often have enough data to work with for sensemaking. Chances are we have possibly lived in a few places, tried a few jobs and dealt with a few work cultures. In addition, we see journeys around us unfolding that provide further data for us to reflect on.
Very often, people have moved levels in terms of where they are on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Our needs slowly shift as we move up the pyramid. To understand how this plays out in people’s lives, let us work with three variables – money (surrogate for earnings/wealth), needs (what we can live with) and wants (the master list of whatever we would like to have if finances were not a constraint). This is a gross simplification of the problem but just for illustration, let us work with these three. There are three feasible permutations to these three variables (assuming wants > needs).
I come from the Indian middle class. I saw several people around me who grew up in scenario A or scenario B but as they experienced commercial success in their twenties, thirties and forties, they moved to scenario C. If you started in scenario C, then you might have experienced less of a Maslow Shift as you hit midlife. But the key point to note is that the relationship between money and our wants and needs has an implication on how we think about spending our time and how we prioritize various objectives.
People often have wealth managers. But at high levels of wealth, the real question is often, “Given I have all the money to take care of my wants, how do I spend my time (i.e. What do I do with my life?)?” Once people move to scenario C, I have noticed that the correlation between happiness and fulfilment (although they mean different things, I have clubbed them here to make a broader point) and wealth accumulation is often much weaker than their correlation with the choices you make around how you spend time. You can see the diminishing marginal utility of money playing out as you move from scenario A to B to C.
In a lot of instances, there is often a negative utility of too much money. Prof Raj Raghunathan speaks about a study that was conducted in 2011 which profiled the super-rich (people with more than USD 25 million in their bank account) and speaks about the low (or even negative) correlation between the wealth they have amassed and their happiness levels. While a lot of us may not have this kind of money, midlife is the time when we often are reexamining our relationship with money and that can lead to its own set of upheavals and challenges depending on where we are, how the people in our family think, and what the constraints and opportunities are. And this churn can cause a lot of angst.
Excerpted with permission from Play to Potential, Deepak Jayaraman, Penguin.