When I think of a stereotypical "mid-life crisis," I imagine someone of a different generation suffocating under the weight of a stable life.
When I think of a person in mid-life now, I imagine someone who doesn't even realize they're mid-life because they're wondering if stability will ever be in the cards for them.
Mid-life
Exploration
Awakening in the Middle
​​​
There’s something disorienting about realizing you’ve quietly arrived at the middle of your life, especially when you never quite knew where the first half was going.
For millennials especially, mid-life comes without the usual markers. The things that once defined adulthood like home ownership, stable careers, and retirement savings are either inaccessible or feel strangely hollow. You might have even checked off some of them and still feel uneasy. The culture that raised us promised possibility but what it delivered was debt, burnout, and the constant sense of being both behind and exhausted.
Signs mid-life is calling for your attention:
-
A subtle disorientation and disconnect from the meaning of life
-
You’ve started measuring time differently
-
You feel both too young and too old, often within the same hour. You’re not sure which identity to lean into
-
Your usual ambitions feel like someone else’s to-do list.
-
You’re haunted by “what if” thoughts, not necessarily out of regret, but curiosity about an unlived life
“Since the culture most of us have inherited offers little mythic mediation for the placement of self in a larger context, it is all the more imperative that the individual enlarge his or her vision.”
-james hollis
The Initiation of the Middle Passage
Despite it's challenges, something meaningful can happen in this era. Jungian psychologist James Hollis calls it The Middle Passage: an initiation process that begins when we accept where we've landed and still seek out a brand new path.
The early years of our lives often have us occupying adaptive patterns or provisional personalities which are determined primarily by others; parental expectations, cultural ideals, early experiences of inclusion and rejection. You've made these patterns work thus far, but your mid-life is calling out for something more.
​
The middle of life often arrives as a loss of certainty, but what if that uncertainty was your unlived life inviting you in? Whose life have you been living so far? What desires, values, or potentials have you neglected?
Mid-life may come with fears of having run out of time, but it's just another opportunity to individuate. This is the time to choose meaning and the unknown over the comfort you've grown to love. There is no past you to return to, only a present you to meet, filled with disowned desires, severed emotions, abandoned potentials, and deeper values.
"We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it."
​
-James hollis
How can therapy help?
In therapy, we can trace the themes that have carried you this far: What patterns are asking to be retired? What desires have been delayed? Sometimes the work is practical, like changing direction in career or relationships. Sometimes it’s existential, like reckoning with mortality or discovering new meaning in the mundane.
​
There’s humor in it all, too. The absurdity of realizing you might be middle-aged in a world that feels perpetually adolescent. The weird comfort of knowing no one actually knows what they’re doing. Therapy invites that honesty. It’s a space where you can question, contradict yourself, grieve what’s done, and dream again.
​
This middle phase isn’t about reinvention so much as excavation. Beneath the person you’ve been performing is someone quieter, wiser, less impressed by external definitions of success. The goal isn’t to go backward, but to move forward with more intention.
