A new friend in her early 40’s ask me to define midlife for her yesterday. I think she expected me to set a certain age range for her. It was only then that I realized that “midlife” has nothing to do with your age, and everything to do with your level of consciousness.
When your life experiences bring you to the point where you begin to seriously ask yourself:
“What did I come here to do, and am I on the right path to eventually do these things?”
you’re well on your way to a midlife transition.
Any number of crises may occur to make you suddenly and completely realize how unhappy you are with where you’re at right now. The more common ones are divorce, or the need to consider divorce, job loss, career change, empty nest, sudden, unexpected injury or illness, near death experiences, any change which is difficult to deal with, and therefore wakes you up to the realization that this is not the life you had pictured for yourself. This path is not leading to any of your original goals.
Some of us take longer than others to reach this conclusion. I suppose that’s why it’s called “midlife.” None of us know when our lives are officially half way over, so it is a nebulous term, but it has come to have much meaning to me as an experience. That is why I have so much difficulty accepting the way the mainstream media demeans and trivializes this higher level of consciousness many of us are experiencing in our 40’s and 50’s.
I must keep in mind that most of the writers and editors in charge of these media outlets are probably younger than us, and therefore don’t have a clue about the life experiences of those in midlife transitions. If they did they most certainly would do a better job of presenting more important and useful materials for us to read.
My guess is that they just extrapolate from the meaningless and down right stupid “news” in the regular media directed at 20-somethings, and assume none of us are intelligent or expanding our horizons so by age 45 or 50 we just want to hear about the lives of older celebrities.
Ah, no, celebrities and hairstyles don’t meet my needs. How about covering the health issues we face daily like dealing with menopause and andropause? How about the emotional issues unique to the midlife age group? How about issues surrounding health insurance and saving for retirement? Most of us are also dealing with frailty and/or loss of our parents, but I could not sell that story to anyone. (The Boomer Chronicle has a good blog about care giving at: http://www.thegeminiweb.com/babyboomer/?p=1825)
The first step would be for those that don’t know the experience of midlife to listen to those of us who do. Fat chance that will ever happen!
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I think the real reason is that the media is now catering to the lowest common denominator.
We are not supposed to use our brains for thinking but instead are being entertained with useless fluff.
Bear((( )))
That’s funny! I was going to put that in my piece about the “lowest common denominator” except that I’m afraid the media has it all wrong. We really aren’t as stupid as they think!!! Maybe they’re the stupid ones.
Naked & Queen,
The lowest common denominator came to my mind yesterday when a friend sent a recap of the civil & criminal records of our Congressional Representitives!
The media has had an unprecidented opportunty to raise the consciousness of our society and instead has gone the way of mass marketing and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
I’m a midwestern conservative that will defend Bill Moyers’ access to television until the day I die! If it wasn’t for Bill and the Discovery Channel my TV would have been tossed from the second floor window long ago!
Is this our legacy to our cildren?
Is this the best we could do?
I can do better!
I will do better!
Brad
I’m 69 years old. How puzzling it is to me that midlife problems are at least as bad for Boomers as they were for me. Worse, maybe, because of the money crunch. As long as you can keep your boat afloat, things get better, Honest.