Life begins at 40: the biological and cultural roots of the midlife crisis | The Royal Society

Thank you John for those kind words, it is an absolute pleasure to be here tonight, it is an honor to speak at the Royal Society, so thank you very much for inviting me. I must say that I didn't expect there to be so many people here. Thank you very much for coming too, we know particularly at the Royal Society that in terms of knowledge production we always stand on the shoulders of giants, there are always people who have gone before us, but there are people who walk alongside us who we depend on. Also, before we start, I want to thank three institutions: the first is the Wellcome Trust.

The Wellcome Trust has funded a large proportion of my research and research career from the early stages, converting me from clinician to early career researcher across several larger strategic awards program and more recently the trust has supported the creation of the Welcome Center to cultures and Health environments in many ways for me this was the fulfillment of a dream although at times the responsibilities and demands seemed more like a nightmare but it is a fantastic opportunity and I am deeply grateful for the trust in the financing and It's good that Simon Chaplin is here too, so thanks for coming.

I am also very fortunate to have worked at the University of Exeter for over 20 years. We know from the slogan that Dexter is probably the best university in the world and for me it has been fantastic, a place to grow as an academic, a place to develop and try new ideas. The senior management of the University, Steve Smith, the vice-chancellor. Janice Kay, the chancellor Nick, said that before he left and now Neil gal, the senior group that runs the University have been fantastic, they have supported and encouraged me and been prepared to take a risk or two to support one or two of my greatest ideas.

I want to thank Andrew Thorp, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, he has been a fantastic academic and friend for many years, the last institution, but I want to thank the institution that is my family, without which I did not get to where I am today. my wife Siobhan wonderfully loyal faithful tolerant of my own crises throughout our marriage our three children Kiera Rhythm and Connell the best children these together are the why and how of my

life

so thank you it may seem strange to be at the Royal Society giving a lecture on a topic like the mid-

life

crisis

this is an institution renowned for its world-leading scientific research, but I hope that what I have to say does justice to the three figures after whom this lecture is named John Wilkins, of course, a natural philosopher. scholar one of the

society

's founders John Desmond Bernal, an Irish scientist known for his work in X-ray crystallography in molecular biology, but also a highly engaged and prolific historian of science interested in the relationship between science and

society

.

Peter Medawar, really the most famous. for his work on immunological tolerance for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1960 (what is less known about Medawar's work), he was also interested in aging as an unsolved

biological

problem, as he expressed in his inaugural lecture in 1951 and one of the terms What Medawar used to describe the aging process was senescence and that concept of senescence had been popularized by an American psychologist Grandville Stanley Hall in the early 20th century and became one of the key ways in which middle age was defined and middle age during early 20th century middle age came to represent the period between adolescence and senescence and that is why many people refer to it as middle essence, so although it is a topic strange to talk about at the Royal Society, I hope it will do justice to these three figures who give their name to the conference.

Let me take you back and some of you will remember this. Let me take you back to the late 1970s, iconic BBC comedy television series, the fallen rise of Reginald Perrin. starring Leonard Rossiter and the television series was based on a novel by English comics writer David Nobs Reggie Perrin Reginald Isle Anthony Perrin our PI was 46 years old, married to his wife Elizabeth and lived in a house near Georgia in the suburbs of Surrey. They had two children. They both grew up leaving their parents living in a house that maybe wasn't quite right anymore, it wasn't a home anymore.

Reggie traveled every day of the week to Waterloo station he crossed the bridge he went to work at Sunshine Deserts as a middle manager as a bureaucrat and at the beginning of the novel Reggie is depressed he is disillusioned and distraught disillusioned disillusioned disillusioned with his life disillusioned with his wife disillusioned with his job and

begins

to behave quite randomly

begins

to send aggressive notes to his colleagues tries to have an affair with his secretary begins to become more irascible and one day, while his wife is away, he decides that he is going to collect all the memories of his childhood, the memories of his youth, and he will burn them as if he were trying to eradicate his past, eradicate his identity.

Reggie decides that he can't live anymore. Thus, he decides that there are only two ways to somehow disappear or commit suicide, so he drives a van to Dorset Beach, takes off his clothes, leaves them on the beach and walks naked into the sea. He drowns He comes back up He puts on another set of clothes and leaves his old clothes on the beach so that people think he has drowned He puts on a new set of clothes He wears a week and acquires a new identity and finally becomes Martin, Well born, I don't want to tell those of you.

I mean, some of you may remember the TV series. The book is fantastic in many ways. It develops only over a week or two. I don't want to give In closing, what I want to say is that what Reggie Peron was suffering at the age of forty-something was what we would now call and in fact was then called a

midlife

crisis

. be a male problem a man between 35 and 45 years old in that borderline decade realized that his life was going nowhere a discontented and disillusioned

midlife

crisis would be derailed now that the term had been introduced for the first time approximately a decade earlier by a Canadian social scientist and psychoanalyst Elliot Jax Jax had arrived from Toronto during the Second World War he had stayed he was one of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations he was a social scientist but also a psychoanalyst he himself had been analyzed by Melanie Klein and She had practice as a psychoanalyst and what she described was more or less what Reggie Parind experienced and his dying point in his mid-life crisis.

A short article published in 1965 noted that the paradox is that of entering the prime of life, the stage of plenitude. but at the same time, the apogee and fulfillment are dated: death is beyond, so the image that Jack created was not based on this: this man usually stands at the top of a binomial curve of life and when You get to that top, all you can see is the downward curve. until death and that is the moment when anxiety was triggered a depressive crisis then he went on to explain what happened to the middle-aged men or what type of behavior they began to exhibit and what he said was that to cover up this crisis they developed a set of manic behaviors to try to convince themselves that they were still young, thus compulsive attempts to remain young, hypochondriacal preoccupation with health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity to demonstrate youth and potency, emptiness, lack of genuine enjoyment of life, these He said are familiar patterns and they are all attempts at a race against time, so the middle-aged man, the man in the borderline decade, sees death speeding towards him and tries to deny or cover it up by stating or pretending that he is younger than he is. that led to this type of behavior both in the 60s and when Reggie Perón was having his crisis in the 70s, there were two main explanations for the midlife crisis: the first was psychological, the type of analysis, an explanation that Eliot Jack proposed and that the midlife crisis was an identity crisis a depressive identity crisis very similar to the adolescent crisis the adolescent crisis thought it was a schizoid crisis the midlife crisis a depressive crisis hey ax was not the only person or certainly not the first person to Think in the stages: the critical phases of life in this way Carl Jung in the 1930s had written about his own crisis at the age of 37 and particularly Eric Erickson, an American developmental psychologist, had spoken of life particularly in terms of ages or stages of life.

He described life in terms of eight stages, each of which had its own particular conflict. The stage that correlated with the period Jax was talking about thought it centered on a conflict between creativity on the one hand and stagnation on the other and that created the crisis, so there were others who also thought largely from a psychoanalytic point of view about how we understood middle age and middle age. One of the important points to make about this kind of approach to midlife and midlife was that it was not just theoretical, this was not just a theory of how we develop eating, but it was also incorporated into practice and models.

Psychoanalytic approaches to aging became absolutely key to the work of marriage counselors, for example, those working for the National Marriage Guidance Council or couples therapists working at the Tavistock Clinic, for example, most of this was based on an understanding of individual development over the life course, through the stages up to middle age and the various crisis points that could occur, so the first explanation for the real parent crisis is who suffered from some type of illness. identity crisis around the age of forty and forty-five, but there was another set of explanations and these were

biological

. The first biological explanation really revolved around some of the work that Peter Medawar was interested in old age, natural death because of the unsolved problem of biology.

I was particularly interested in the evolutionary and biological dimensions of aging and, in that sense, the downward curve of life was not necessarily just an awareness that death was approaching, it was something else, it was an awareness that as we age we become grayer or balder in everything we develop. the extension of middle age or our muscle mass decreases our vigor our vitality deteriorates and it was that sense of deteriorating vigor that fueled the cry in some kind of waste now it is not alien to the fear of death that Jax described but it is very linked to that decline The biological vitality that people wanted there was, of course, another way and there has been another way in which midlife crises have been linked to biology and that is particularly in women in relation to life reproductive and here the argument was and most of the literature certainly in this period was on men, but there was some literature on women, in these cases it was understood that women were going through an act of crisis during postmenopause when their reproductive functions supposedly disappeared or somehow through the process of emptiness, so the midlife crisis of a woman who had tied very clearly to her reproductive capacity the term biological clock or the speaker the clock is ticking was used by the American journalist Richard Cohen in 1978, but the notion that women's transitions and crises could be governed by their biology or reduced to their biology was very common, the bats were not surprised to learn that some men blamed menopause for their own crises. middle age and their wives' menopause, so let me go back to Reginald Perrin and reflect for a moment on Reggie Parry, in the late 70s, when a crisis tried to change his life in key ways, recognizing that perhaps He hadn't achieved what he wanted and he was dissatisfied and disillusioned.

We can see that combination, we could explain that in terms of his own psychological distress he has reached a stage where an age in his life when everything seems to be going downhill and only death awaits him, we can also get the sense of his book that he is physically declining physically, he no longer feels like himself to be the man he was for us to see. It is largely an individual story of a man with psychological and biological problems. What I want to suggest for the rest of the talk is that this is not the only way we can understand the midlife crisis.

In fact, I want to take it further away from the individual and think about the social and

cultural

conditions that make the midlife crisis possible not only as a concept in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but also as a set of experiences, which happened to allow the midlife crisis to arise not in one individual case but much morebroadly in terms of socioeconomic and

cultural

conditions and I want to do it in two ways: firstly I want to think about the standardized life course that emerged in the mid-20th century and that created particular stress in middle-aged people, secondly I want to reflect on the meaning and history of the phrase life begins at 40 and, in the end, I want to argue that it is those two components that played a key role in the emergence of the midlife crisis not only is it that of Reggie's parents but also ours, so let me begin to reflect for a moment on the standardized life course.

There is no doubt, of course, that our life cycles individually and collectively are governed by our biology, but Bernice no Garson was a very prominent psychologist. in America, who wrote extensively about middle age and the transitions between life stages and noted, of course, that the calendar of life milestones was not merely biological, but it was also socially prescribed, so there was a social relationship. prescribed calendar, he said, to order major life events, a time in life when men and women are expected to marry, a time to raise children, a time to retire so the rhythm of our life stages of laughter the ages of our life the transitions of our life were socially prescribed not just biological and of course if they are socially prescribed it means that they can change our understanding and experience can change our expectations they can change our expectations about the course of life the life course the life cycle changed dramatically during the first decades of the 20th century in the 1950s and 1960s couples lived longer if they were born in the late 19th century and early 20th century in In this country we could expect to live to the ages of 14 50 60 years in the 50s 40 50s we could expect to live well into our 70s or perhaps 80s, so life expectancy had increased, giving us that longer life cycle and, in principle, also a lifespan longer. adulthood or middle age at the same time we were married earlier at age 19 in 1911 only about 24% of women were married by age 24 by the early 1950s that had risen to 52% and in fact If you look at some of the surveys of men's and women's attitudes about marriage during this period most women would say that the ideal age to get married is between 20 and 24 the ideal age for men is a little later. but not very different at the same time during the first decades of the 20th century it became more It is common to have fewer children and group them together earlier in the marriage, so let's say a couple married at the age of 20 or 21, at 24 or 25 would have had their two or three children and then would be raising those children. children were leaving home, so there was a much longer period of life after the period of having children, in a sense, in this period it was even more important for women who tended to be in the workplace less and take care of children more at the pace of men.

The rhythm of life for men was slightly different, dictated not so much by the rhythms of the family but by the rhythms of occupational patterns. In the 1950s and 1960s, men tended to work for a fixed number of years, often in the same job until retirement, in order to see the male life course somehow also socially prescribed from the moment of starting work. work until the time of retirement set by the government, by the State or by private industries. One of the consequences of this separation of the life course is the clustering of major life events very similarly across populations meant that people began to experience much more clearly defined stages and transitions in the life course, so we could begin to identify a period of middle age between 30 and 50, 40 and 60 and we could begin to identify those critical transition stages between those phases of life.

Now what I want to highlight about this is that there is a series of consequences that arose from this modern, standardized and homogenized life course and that were directly linked to the emergence of the midlife crisis. The first impact was the growth of anxiety or age awareness, if there were standard milestones in the life course that we could measure ourselves against, we would become much more aware or anxious about whether we were succeeding or failing at those milestones, for which we would have a much greater sense of where we should be at certain times. points in our lives and, of course, that expectation that we would leave home, get married, have children, get a job, retire, our expectations increased, but at the same time, if we don't meet those expectations, if we don't meet those milestones, we will continue On that calendar we could be dissatisfied with our achievements and this led to the notion that the phrase keeping up with the neighbors began in a comic strip in the United States around 1913, but became in those first decades of the century XX until the 30s and 40s in a key way of us comparing ourselves with others a driver in some way of envy and jealousy a driver of emulation a driver to increase our consumption to keep up with the pace of the trip the Joneses were much more aware of our place in the world and particularly of where we were failing while We were becoming more aware that we were also subject in this period to two very different tensions.

This is the generation of the fifties and sixties. The Reggie parent generation of the 1970s, who could perhaps describe themselves as the first Sandwich Generation if we think about patterns of marriage and children. raising and aging if you imagine we have that couple ideally getting married in their twenties having their children in their twenties when they are 40 45 years old of Reggie's parents their children will go through the troubled years of adolescence their parents will age into retirement They need more attention and in this period middle-aged people, between 30 and 50 years old, 40 and 60 years old, are caught between the problems of their adolescent children and the problems of their parents, so they reach the midlife crisis. age exactly when your children are going through it. a crisis of adolescence midlife was also challenged for many people by financial pressures at the time and again this was a characteristic of the changing life cycle in 1891 that we could expect to inherit at the age of about 37 now I have to say that this This is not true for everyone, although the longer history of the midlife crisis suggests that the crisis has been democratized in many ways, but if one was lucky enough to inherit at the turn of the century XIX, you could expect to inherit at the age of 37 in the 1940s, you wouldn't expect to inherit until you were 56, that meant you inherited.

It's always good to receive money, don't get me wrong, but if you inherited, you inherited after you had children, after your children had grown up. and after they left home at times when maybe you didn't need them as much as you did when you were middle-aged and raising your kids, that created a whole host of financial pressures on couples trying to raise your kids. The last point I want to make in terms of the pressures of midlife and it applies, you know, the empty nest is as it was first introduced, the empty nest around 1913 was largely applied to women in a way. quite derogatory that their only function in society was to have children and once those children were gone they were worthless, but in a way it describes a very key feature of the long life cycle: in the 1950s, since Women and men married earlier and had children earlier, a woman could live 52 more years after the birth of her last child and many years after menopause, one of the things that arose in people's minds was the question: is this all there is?

Do I really want to live like this with this person for the next 40 or 50 years and several years? Psychologists of this period noted that the long course of life, continuing with the pressures of middle age into middle age, meant that many people when they reached the age of 40 45 began what Robert Lee and Marjorie Kassabian mentioned in The Kappa Don Spouse. Not if you can see weathering the marital crisis during midlife is the subtitle of the book which they pointed out that the multiples emphasizes during midlife that feeling of recognizing that you were not achieving what you should have according to the standardized schedule of life.

The course of life meant that people began to reevaluate their lives to compare achievements against goals, satisfactions versus values, the kind of evaluation of their life that Reggie Perón did, and they began to realize, of course, that had not succeeded, they were disappointed. and as a result it came to a head and Margaret Mead, who I have cited here as an anthropologist, in a very interesting book, Male and Female, published in 1949, pointed out that in a world in which people can reorient their entire lives to 40 or 50 years old, that's a world in which lifelong marriage becomes much more difficult.

Margaret Mead's solution and the solution of some science fiction writers was that we should introduce the possibility of multiple serial marriages, she suggested, but many writers at the time suggested possibly three, one for youthful passion. for parenthood and one for companionship in old age, that there were very different demands throughout that long life course at different stages of your life, there was no reason why it shouldn't be the same person who fulfilled them sequentially, but there was no reason why it shouldn't is what Margaret Mead said. Margaret Mead also appeared on many BBC television programs about marriage and divorce in this period.

Now one of the consequences. One of the reasons this was important socially and culturally was because people were worried in this period. divorce levels and linked the midlife crisis of marriage to a marriage crisis, claiming that it was partly the behavior of midlife men that threatened marriages and led to family breakdown, separation and divorce, and this was considered problematic for social stability in the post-war era before World War II less than 7,000 couples divorced there was a big push after World War II in the late 1940s to 1950s largely linked measure to the difficulties that soldiers had in readjusting to civilian life.

In life, the fact that during the separation both husbands and wives, for example, had had affairs, these challenges led to a high level of collapse after the Second World War. World War there was a small plateau and then it emerged until the late 60s, 70s and 80s, now it does not mean that the midlife crisis, the challenges that people faced in middle age were the only reasons for a One of the reasons for the large increase after 1970 was a change in divorce law, the divorce reform law that was introduced in 1969 was removed. marital crime and replaced it with the notion of irreparable breakdown, which makes it much easier for some people to get divorced, but debates about the midlife crisis in this period and I still think link it very closely with concerns about stability of marriage that was considered by many to be essential to social stability, let me pause for a moment and think again about Reggie, yes, distraught, yes, going through a period of psychological distress, yes, biologically fading, but also, in some ways, a victim of very surprising demographic changes throughout the 20th century or a long time ago.

The different expectations about life milestones, the expectations about when people would get married, have children, get a job, retire, etc., created a series of pressures on Reggie Peron, his wife and their children that, in some aspects, showed that for him what I expected was too much. What we have outlined is what Reggie Perón was escaping from the stick that pushed him to behave this way: the social pressures created by the long standardized life course, but what did he hope to achieve with it if that was what he wanted to escape from? ? Did he expect to go?

What were the benefits of changing his life in this way? I want to reflect on that, not just the drive to get out of the mess I felt he was in, but the drive toward a better life that I want to explore. that just by thinking about the phrase life begins at 40 and where it came from and how it influenced the expectations and aspirations of not only Reggie Peron but also many of us, the phrase life begins at 40 was used for the first time . From what we know in 1917 from Mrs. Theodore Parsons Matilda Parsons, who was the widow of an army officer, but who had already had her career and alsoshe taught especially young women and girls and young women and older women how to stay in shape scientific bodybuilding is what she was referring to and she partly maintained it. in good physical shape to keep your mind in shape and I loved this phrase.

She was interviewed in 1917 for the newspaper. It was four days after the United States entered World War I and in the interview she said a set of ideas very similar to those that Eliot Jack introduced. Later, in the sixties, it is a paradox of life, he said that we do not start living until we start dying, death begins at 30, that is, the deterioration of muscle cells that occurs in most of old age is premature and attention to diet and exercise would allow men and women to live much longer than today the best part of a woman's life begins at age 40 that was her phrase now there is a context particular for what the lady.

Parsons was saying, and again this is part of his argument, unless we understand the social and cultural context, we don't fully recognize the meaning of that kind of term Theodore Parson, Mrs. Parsons directed her comments at what she called the fat woman of 40 years; it was aimed at middle aged women who she felt had gotten carried away and the reason this was important to Mrs Parsons was because of the war effort the men were away fighting and the women were needed to raise their children to do the work of economically supporting communities while their men were away, so it became crucial to her that women maintain their physical and mental fitness as they aged. notion it's really interesting that as the notion that life begins at 40 became popular, the first part of that sentence the best part of a woman's life begins at 40 got lost in some kind of translation, it became In simply Life Begins at 40 and was popularized in various ways during the 1920s and 1930s, the most common form or the most popular book was Walter Pickens' book titled Life Begins at 40.

Pitkin was an American journalist who worked at Columbia University and had the notion that life begins at 40 to write. a self-help book and it can be seen on the cover of the book through the inspiring and useful advice in this book that thousands of men and women afraid of middle age have lost their anxieties and found new ways to make life richer , happier and more worth living. the propaganda of the book to try to sell it and the idea that both Pickens' book and that phrase life begins at 40 were used in other areas life begins at 40 was a 1935 film starring Will Rogers that was based on the book and there were some parodies and also some satires of this great movie from the late 1930s called Life Begins at 8:30, so the idea that life could begin instead of ending at the median age became a key part of self-help literature and advice. to middle-aged couples during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, so what did Pitkin do?

Advising people to find these new ways to be happy, in fact, was quite bland and mundane. He noted that happiness comes more easily after 40, firstly realizing that many years lie between 40 and 70, now that you know, that might seem pretty banal and I think it probably is, but it is a twist to the worries of middle age. Reggie's parents look back and say, I haven't accomplished anything. I have nothing left to hope for what Pitkin is. What I'm saying is that yes, even at 40 you're going to have 20, 30, 40 years of your life still to make the most of it and, according to Pitkin, the way you made the most of it was by seeking personal fulfillment through The material. improve leisure and what he called the art of living, much less work, more leisure, more play, this process of self-realization would make those last 30 or 40 years worth it, no longer the downward curve, nor the acceleration towards death, but, in fact, a satisfactory half-life.

Aging and old age and this notion was widely adopted in two particular ways: one is that it was taken as a strategy for personal renewal. This is one way we could refresh and renew ourselves when we were getting tired and faded in middle age. I realized that there were things to look forward to and that it was possible to reshape Ramola's life in more positive ways, but the key part of this and again thinking about this in social and cultural historical terms, the key part of this is this story that What Pitkin said was not just about individuals discovering themselves, but it was also a lesson, a message for populations certainly in the United States and Britain during a period of economic depression during a period of increasingly recession. concerned about the specter of a second world war during a period of doom and pessimism that if we revitalized ourselves there was hope for optimism and Pickins' argument was that if people as they aged, the middle-aged and the elderly , worked less and had more free time, there would be more job opportunities for younger people, which would boost the economy.

Likewise, if middle-aged and older people spent their money buying things for fun, buying leisure, for example, and pleasures that would also boost the economy, then part of the appeal of Pickins's work was that it struck a chord with people like Reggie Peron who were struggling. with its own problems, but it also meant something to a Western world struggling with the effects of the economic recession because it promised a way out of them and, in a sense, a choice in writing in the 1930s, the 1930s were a period strangely paradoxical, a period of morbidity. pessimism in some ways due to the recession and fear of another global war, but it was also a period of incredible optimism;

It was the period in which the American dream was conceived and the American dream first appeared in the work of James Truslow. Adams in 1931, the year before Pitkin was published, Life Begins at 40 and he is in the epilogue of this fantastic overview of America's epic and in that epilogue he attempts to sketch the future away from some of the pessimism of the interwar period. To say that life globally and individually does not have to lead to death and destruction, it can go in the opposite direction and for Adams the American dream was not simply a dream of cars and high salaries, so it is not just a material dream. but a Dream of a social order in which every man and woman can attain the highest stature of which they are innately capable and be recognized by others for who they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position, so this was Adams' dream. and it was a dream in a sense that resonated very clearly with what Pitkin was saying: we didn't have to be depressed in middle age and the mid-20th century, or we could look forward with some hope that this would happen.

Adams argued that we needed to develop a new scale and base of values ​​for Adams hoping to achieve the American dream which meant collectivity trust love working together to make a better world so here was this period of economic recession Pitkin saying yes, life can begin at 40 Adams saying in fact, there is an American dream that we should work toward somehow, of course, what happened was quite the opposite. Those hopes and those dreams were shattered, they were shattered by World War II, they were shattered by the catastrophe of global conflict, and they were shattered. In many ways because of what happened later in terms of the Cold War, that sense of optimism that could create security or the sense of security that could create optimism faded during World War II and then what was left of the Pickin mantra and the Adams' dream was simply a material dream A lot of values ​​the scale the base of values ​​that dream of a democratic and egalitarian social order Equal opportunities occupationally and educationally shattered by experiences in the second world what was left was the dream of automobiles and People with high salaries were left feeling like they couldn't achieve those other grandiose aspirations that Pitkin and Adams had set for themselves; instead, what they tended to do was pursue happiness and be in a hurry.

Edmund Burglar marriage, middle age and middle age, particularly in relation to men. He has a beautiful book published in 1948 that says that divorce won't help if someone is interested and his argument, in fact, in that book and in this book is that before a couple goes to the divorce lawyer they should go see a psychiatrist. , which is about the challenges within themselves and their so what he's saying is that during the '40s and '50s the collapse of the American Dream in many ways and can be traced through postwar American literature and, In particular, the collapse of the dream left people struggling and they translated those struggles or those aspirations into a dream of material abundance in consumption seduced by the pleasure of consuming material goods but also by the pleasure of the anticipation of consuming our people, This was the emergence, if you will, of a form of narcissistic self-actualization that drove some of the behavior that you see in Reggie Peron, a thief, four thieves, they were looking for happiness quickly and he has this beautiful passage that describes very, very clearly. the thought processes he attributes to people like Reggie Perry in this mentality stressed by life circumstances. who had failed feeling that even though they were looking down on death everyone was telling them that life begins at fourteen things should be getting better by that time they were anxious and retreated more depressed than they would have otherwise been and this is the mentality if you like Reggie Peron I want happiness love approval admiration sex youth all this is denied me in this stale marriage with a sickly old woman complaining nagging wife let's get rid of its beginning Life again with another woman I will surely provide it for you For my first wife and my children, I'm sure sorry, the first marriage didn't work out, but self-defense comes first, I just have to save myself, so what's left of those aspirations in the middle of middle age emphasizes the argument that life. should be getting better, not worse, that optimism that we could achieve the American dreams faded, what was left was a sense of selfish, narcissistic belief that we would do something to make ourselves happy and this thief suggested that was why people like Reggie Peron had crises pushed from their marriages expelled from their relationships disappointed in their lives but seduced by a dream that was no longer attainable except through the selfish pursuit of pleasure let me reflect then to finish on where we have been Reggie Peron in certain way he spoke during a generation that was an everyman, if you will, and his wife and children, victims every day of the kind of pressures that people and families suffered in the 50s, 60s and 70s, we can certainly understand his behavior , that random, impulsive and destructive behavior as a product of the psychological desperation that I have had.

I've peaked I've peaked but it doesn't mean anything anymore because all I'm waiting for is the downward curve of life and death like that sense of identity crisis that David captures very, very clearly, but you can also see. In other literary and cinematic forms, as well as in the fifties, sixties and seventies, everything we can read in biological terms we can say that mating is getting older, you are losing your virility, you are losing your hair, you are losing muscle mass and energy and that leads him to a Crisis of Despair also related to death, but not entirely the same.

We can see this in individual terms. This is a man who behaves strangely. However, what I want to suggest is that we cannot understand Reggie unless we magnify our lens unless we zoom out. to see the social and cultural conditions in which Reggie Peron lived and in which we continue to live in some way, then perhaps there are two conclusions that I want to draw. The first is that we are aging, Reggie, we not only age because of our minds and bodies, but we also age because of history, because of the cultural values, the attitudes, the beliefs, the norms, the practices that we have inherited from the past, some ways in which that Reggie Perry in the late '70s was derailed by what had happened in the '50s. and the 60s, both in terms of the life cycle and in terms of the seduction of materialism, the second point is that in that context, when we say that history and culture age us, within that context, theMidlife crisis is no longer the biological crisis. the natural phenomenon the inevitable phenomenon of aging is immediately a social and cultural phenomenon the midlife crisis that Reggie suffered and that we may continue to suffer is a set of experiences generated by historical changes shaped by cultural contexts and social economic conditions and also determined for the political contingencies, thank you