The 'mid' life crisis: Zero, infinity and nothing in-between

A modern pejorative about being just fine is the perfect crystallization of our times.

A midlife crisis is fairly easy to define and identify.

You reach a certain point in middle adulthood, take stock of what you have accomplished, gasp at how suddenly time seems to be shrinking, and perhaps flail in some desperate attempt to be cool, relevant, desirable or meaningful.

I’ve dabbled in this realm as a 47-year-old working through some things.

But that is not what we are talking about here. This is about a crisis of all ages, particularly younger.

I can think of no better way to define this calamity than to build it around a piece of modern slang.

The term "mid" has become a popular way for people to express their unenthusiastic feelings or opinions about something in a casual, shorthand way. It is typically used humorously or sarcastically to express disappointment or underwhelm. For example, if someone says "That movie was mid", they are saying that the movie was just okay and didn't exceed their expectations. Similarly, if someone says "My day was mid", they are saying that their day was neither good nor bad, just average.

Like much of the language adopted and built by younger generations, perhaps “mid” just isn’t meant for me. Maybe you have to have been born much later than 1976 to justify the sense of malaise the word evokes.

But perhaps it’s more complicated.

Maybe: If the zeitgeist of our time is such that the average day is treated with disdain, that decent art is disposable, that a life which under all other circumstances would be classified as “good” is instead mocked with this pejorative, there is both a problem with our world itself and with how many choose to experience it.

We are in the midst of a “mid” life crisis.

Being average is not some sort of aspirational goal, but the concept of “mid” conveys to me a certain binary viewpoint that is neither healthy nor realistic.

It’s a “zero or infinity” mindset, whereby the goal is to have the absolute best of anything — job, house, curated social media experience, whatever. To have uncalculated wealth, infinite possibility, limitless experiences.

And if you fall short of that aspiration — landing instead with a comfortable, good life — you have failed. You are not the greatest, your life isn’t special, so what’s the point?

You are mid.

It would be better to have nothing at all, to start over at zero and try to climb that infinite mountain again.

Or: Why even try in the first place if the absolute best is not possible. If the end result of what you can conceive of is destined to be above-average at best, don’t even begin.

There is a paradox of potential at play here — a concept that I was first introduced to many years ago in “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” by former Yale professor William Deresiewicz.

I’ve returned to this passage many times since in trying to understand how we are living.

A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called ‘The Paradox of Potential.’ Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

Interestingly, the book at large argues that elite higher education institutions are preparing students for the wrong things — namely bland upper-middle class careers that leave them devoid of much satisfaction beyond the material trappings of a comfortable life.

Maybe what we have experienced in the decade since the book was published, then, is something of a backlash against that sort of life.

But the tension in that decision-making — the worry that whatever you pick might be wrong, might not be the best thing ever, leading to no decision at all — is stronger than ever now because the results are being judged.

It is part of the backbone of what makes “mid” such an insult, however casual. You made a decision to wear that? To watch that? To eat that? It’s so mid.

I would argue too, though, that this is not entirely (or even primarily) the fault of those who denigrate the “mid”.

Social media and the general incomprehensible volume and pace of information leads to inevitable and constant comparisons to lives being lived better than ours, often by self-made new generation influencers.

We are compelled toward extremes in order to stand out — not a new concept, but probably neither healthy nor sustainable at an accelerated pace. We also see what we could have, and we see people just like us getting it.

This isn’t anything anyone specifically asked for. A suggestion that people should just turn away and unplug from it is unrealistic wishful thinking.

That’s the online environment. Step into the “real world” and there’s this:

Income inequality, a trend multiple generations — including, obviously, Gen Z — have witnessed over the last 50 years, has diminished the middle class while expanding the lower and upper classes. Upward social and economic mobility has likewise been diminished.

Someone growing up today in a lower economic class might look now at the possibility of achieving a middle-class life as just as realistic (or unrealistic, if you prefer) as joining the rich elite. If you treat the two opportunities as equal, why would you aspire to be “mid”?

Why commit to anything, or attempt to make incremental progress, when something truly amazing might come along?

The trouble is that, at least mathematically speaking, there is always going to be a “mid”.

And labeling something or someone as “mid” is highly subjective in the first place — perhaps nothing more than an example of illusory superiority, akin to 80% of people thinking they are above-average drivers.

When a subculture is built around the idea that OK is not OK — and nobody wants to live in that space nor believe that they do — we have a problem.

Maybe even a crisis.

I wonder from time to time what this will look like several years from now as my kids are reaching young adulthood.

When I think of it, I can’t help but recall my oldest daughter, now 9, being asked a couple years ago what she wants to be when she grows up.

“A teacher,” she said. “Or a YouTuber.”

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash