"Midlife Crisis" comes from the difficulty of conciliating mathematics with life. The term was first used by psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques in the 1960s, after noticing that several patients of a similar age showed depressive symptoms and a deep displeasure with the way their lives had unfolded. Although the figures aren't exact, there is a relative consensus that the phenomenon occurs between the ages of 40 and 60. The midlife crisis is a period of retrospective analysis in which people are overwhelmed by nostalgia, a desire for rejuvenation, and a general disenchantment with the present, which is perceived as serious, boring or meaningless. It's clear that it is essentially a shock reaction to the realization and consequent rejection of human finitude. According to a diagram I found online, some of the symptoms are the obsession with the hairline, with the purpose of life, feeling tormented by the future, or desire for sports cars.

 

            However, it's worth pointing out that the midlife crisis contains in itself a disguised positivism. If one takes the letters as strictly as the numbers, then the middle of human existence would be somewhere between the ages of 40 and 60. This is deceptive advertising, designed to convince people who are probably already two-thirds through life that they are still in time to decide how they want to live the second half. Perhaps that's why brands repeatedly try to sell them metaphors of infinity and immortality, whether it's through cars, clothes, perfumes or technology.

 

            The depiction of the Universe is one of the most common ways of illustrating the concept of infinity. For human perception, the cosmos remains largely an abstract and intangible place, where social conventions lose their value and the most familiar units of space-time measurement become insignificant. It is therefore a point of great proximity between reality and fiction. If, on the one hand, scientific theories help us the existence of other celestial bodies, the inability to experience or even observe them pushes the cosmos into the realm of fantasy. That's why we are quicker to fear the idea of our own extinction than the extinction of our planet or even of the universe. If we can't determine the existence of extra-terrestrial life in the midst of the infinitude in which we find ourselves, it's no wonder that at 50 we're content with a sports car and keeping our hairline.

 

 

Francisco Correia

February, 2024

 

 

 

To my father, who, when passing my age, didn't realize he was already halfway through his life.