At the TED Talks in April 2023, Chip Conley gave a short talk on “An alternative to the “midlife crisis”“, three minutes encouraging us to look differently at our life stages in the modern world, one where longevity is such that life now can have multiple stages, including a prolonged midlife stage full of possibility and opportunity.
When Chip was getting the Modern Elder Academy started, I went out to Baja twice (in April 2018 and February 2019) had had wonderful experiences among “middle-escents”. At one of those visits, I came up with a koan, written about in the blog post “the less I am present, the more I can be present“, linked to the Buddhist practice of seeking to “dissolve the self”.
As I listened to Chip’s recent TED talk, then, one phrase leapt out at me, highlighted in bold below.
Just as a caterpillar eats incessantly just before it’s about to spin its chrysalis, so do we, as young adults, madly consume and produce. And then, the caterpillar decides to take its midlife break in its chrysalis, which is dark and gooey and solitary, but it’s also where the transformation happens. On the other side of that, there’s a chrysalis that cracks open, and this beautiful winged creature emerges that delights us all: the butterfly.
So to recap, the caterpillar consumes, the chrysalis transforms and the butterfly pollinates. What if we rethought midlife, such that it’s not a crisis, it’s a chrysalis. The midlife chrysalis. What if we thought of midlife as the dawning of a new age? An age where much of what we accumulated dissolves? Just as we’re ready to transform, spread our wings and pollinate our wisdom to the world in our 50s and beyond.
Midlife can be an age where “much of what we accumulated dissolves”, where we can release our ego, our old identity (job title, parent of school-age children etc), and instead simply “be”?
I find this practice of “the less I am present, the more I can be present” freeing and enabling. I introduce myself simply as Tom, my business cards (though little used these days!) simply say “Hi, I’m Tom”. When asked “What do you do?”, I tend to skirt any tangible answer, not only because it is difficult to define “what I do”, but also as I prefer to remove such definitions.
By allowing much of what I have accumulated to dissolve, I find myself more open to listening, to curiosity, to more and different learning.
If you, too, are at the privileged stage of life where you have the choice to let much of what you have accumulated to dissolve, I encourage you to actively begin dissolving!