It's here

Neoliberalism's mid-life crisis.

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This is part two of a two part series about mid-life crises. Check out It’s coming for part one. You can read both posts independently.

Mid-life crises are about more than chasing after younger women, buying sports cars, and compulsively working out to hold on to our fleeting youth. That’s a male-centered and purely consumerist approximation of what a mid-life crisis is. This hackneyed view tells us that we can consume our way out of the crisis in a manner that allows the cogs of our consumerist society to keep turning. That is, to resolve the crisis, consume more sex, luxury goods, and personal care products—and while you’re at it, let’s make a buck selling you all that crap.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I’m well aware of having gone through my own mid-life extravaganza. I don't know if I'm out of it, but it feels like the worst is behind me. It sounds as if it was an earth-shattering experience, but that’s not how it felt. It slowly crept up on me and, just as it came, it gradually fizzled away. The crisis came and went at the same pace everything else comes and goes when you reach middle age: slower. That’s why I’d describe my mid-life crisis as “congruent.”

As we saw in part one of this series, It’s coming, the crisis embeds itself into the day-to-day. It’s in the routine. In the half-sense of satisfaction that’s disturbed by a feeling of mild disappointment in a well-adjusted and materially comfortable life. That's the power of a mid-life crisis: it goes unnoticed when it reaches you, and it becomes the normal state of being. Obviously, a state of crisis can’t be perpetually sustained, and at one point it’ll impact decision-making. That's when you buy a fast car and cheat on your spouse with a younger person. You start doing things that get rid of short-term discomfort, but that, in the long run, hurt you.

A lot happens when we reach our mid-thirties and early forties. Firstly, the idea that we’ve lived through half our life and only have half to go smacks us in the face. Remember summer holidays when you were a kid? The first month was great—a little slow and sometimes even boring. But when the second month started, time flew by and the dread of the first day of school permeated every moment. The difference is that instead of trepidation about getting back to school, we’re dealing with our ultimate destiny: death.

As if the future prospect of no longer existing weren’t enough, we have to deal with the past. Half our life is behind us, with its successes but also with its failures. In our teenage years and early twenties, our whole life is ahead of us and anything’s possible. We dream of being rock stars, professional athletes, millionaire entrepreneurs, Nobel Prize winners, or world leaders. We don’t even pick one; we expect to be all of them. A lot of us were unnecessarily realistic children and had more modest goals, but even so, we didn't dream of living in failure. At mid-life, the results of our efforts start trickling in, and some of them aren't what we expected.

The prospect of a future death, coupled with unfulfilled dreams from our past, is a lot to deal with. Hence the crisis. At this point, we have a choice. We can either consume ourselves through the crisis or we can re-order our dreams and aspirations out of it. In one approach, we’re just numbing the pain. In the other, we’re addressing the root cause by shifting our philosophical approach to life: wanting better instead of wanting more. The alternative is depression and suicide. Be it a quick death or a dead life.

Most of us don't have the resources to buy expensive sports cars and consume ourselves through it. Therefore, the decade between our mid-thirties and our mid-forties is a moment of re-assessment. It’s a moment when we start to rethink how we live and change patterns—mainly by getting rid of unnecessary fears and worries, which helps us live better than before. A step in that direction is to look at the past and reassess our goals. If I didn't make it as a footballer, I can coach my kid’s little league team.

In short, the solution is to scale down.

Something else is going through a mid-life crisis. The philosophical framework today’s society is built on was born around the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s called neoliberalism, and it’s in its mid-forties. At its inception, we went on a deregulation rampage in the name of free markets and consumer choice—not individual choice. Global competition and trade would give us more options, more growth, and more innovation. More, more, more. More! And more would bring us happiness.

It looked like neoliberalism was delivering on its promise. As a child, at 10 years of age, with all its hopes and dreams alive, neoliberalism tore down the wall and destroyed communism for good. In its early twenties, it came up with the internet and existence became a global phenomenon. Suddenly, we were all connected to every corner of the planet. Humans became omnipresent. Sure, the dot-com bubble burst, but we got over that as easily as a 20-year-old gets over a hangover. We hydrated, ate some greasy food, and dove headfirst into the web 2.0—yes, that was actually a thing, and we thought it was cool.

Besides the occasional hangover, neoliberalism's teenage years and early adulthood were a time of opportunities and of chasing dreams into reality. During that time we learned how to monetize the internet, and e-commerce began to fuel and feed our appetite for more. We got more cars, more houses, and more iPods. Until life caught up with us. The 2007/08 credit crisis knocked us off our high horse. It was like the last time in your late 20s when you asked for money from your parents because you blew your rent backpacking through Southeast Asia. They bailed you out, but they also told you that you weren't a kid anymore and had to be more responsible. Like everything (and everyone), neoliberalism was growing up by learning lessons the hard way.

In its 30s, after travelling the world and seeing other cultures, neoliberalism craved spirituality. Picking up yoga, like most 30-year-olds do, wasn't enough for market capitalism. Instead, as a young adult, it created the smartphone, and together with social media, developed and proselytized the cult of the self. Neoliberalism found its true spiritual being. It was the obvious choice for a society that carried, almost literally, the world in its pocket, and that had a social media landscape where we’re all celebrities in our own little bubble.

Until the unexpected, yet expectable, happened. What usually comes with age made its appearance: decay. Knocking on 40’s door, neoliberalism caught a cold in 2019, and it didn't recover as quickly as when it was younger. It was the long version, and the cough lingered for months, even years. In fact, things never really went back to how they were before. The social structure started to feel the aches and pains of age. With convalescence, neoliberalism’s mid-life crisis kicked in.

It looked at what it was and compared it with the dreams it once had. Yes, there were more phones, more “friends,” more likes, more tweets, and more viral (literally and figuratively). But there was also more inequality, more environmental degradation, more wars, more tension, more stress, more disappointment. We also realized there were somethings that neoliberalism gave us less of. Less healthcare, less education, less social cohesion, less human contact. Less community. In short, like all other mid-lifers, neoliberalism started to feel the weight of its failures.

So we went on a shopping spree. We tried to consume ourselves out of the crisis. Some consumed expensive road bikes and espresso machines, others opted for costly electric cars and luxury holidays. There were those who really splurged and bought rockets, put on cowboy costumes, and travelled to outer space; or consumed power and land—in the best of cases through expensive popularity contests called elections, and in the worst, by force. If you want to consume yourself through a mid-life crisis, that’s first class.

But like we said, consumption gets us through a mid-life crisis, not out of one. However, there could be a memetic mutation that keeps neoliberalism going. It's not its philosophical tenets or its economic doctrine that keep it alive. It survives because it has a built-in perpetuation mechanism. It automatically and systematically puts in power those who never manage to kick the consumption habit. That is, those who continue to live in a perpetual mid-life crisis, fueled by consumption, are the ones who reach the highest positions of power and maintain their grip over society.

In electoral democracies, those who want to consume more power by winning one election after another hold on to our social institutions. CEOs who want to consume more of the market share and amass billions, or trillions, control how the rest make our livelihoods. These are the winners of neoliberalism, and to the winners go the spoils of victory. But we already saw that this mechanism that keeps the system alive will also bring it to its end. Palliative consumption eases the pain and doesn’t address the root cause of our problems. The end can be a quick suicide by a nuclear WWIII, or the slow living death of environmental decay.

But it’d be depressing to end our first post of the year on this note, so here’s a thought for you. We know that the way out of the crisis is a change in the system’s philosophical mindset. That is, moving from wanting more to wanting better so we can live a more fulfilling second half of our lives. So maybe, instead of following the winners who consume their way through a perpetual mid-life crisis and take us down with them, we should start celebrating the losers. Let’s start paying attention to the underachievers who are forced to change how they live their lives to find happiness. Let’s look towards the defeated for solutions. Who would have thought that our hope to get out of this mess is our love for a good underdog story.