When I had my first mid-life crisis at age 17, I really didn’t know how to handle it. I went from sociable and friendly to morose and uncommunicative overnight, and stayed that way for a year. Now, 24 years later, I am getting really good at navigating them. I predicted 11 of my last 5 mid-life crises.
The key is to freak out early and freak out often (FEFO) in an agile way, and work towards a lifestyle that (ideally) feels like one continuously integrated and deployed mid-life crisis.
A crisis is too good a thing to waste. Not only should you have as many as you have time for, you should succumb to each as quickly and completely as possible, and then bounce back as quickly as you can so you can have another one. Resistance is not just futile, it is counter-productive.
This aesthetically appropriate and functionally necessary response to a crisis is a crash. If you don’t crash, it wasn’t a crisis. A healthy, crisis-ridden life is one that evolves rapidly, one crash at a time. So it stands to reason that navigating such a healthy life well involves crashing early and crashing often