A man reaches middle age. Half his life is behind him. The slip of vanishing days catch him in panic. Not long ago a young graduate who beamed at the promise of his future, the man finds himself staring at his mortality, which looms large on his horizon. Each decade is briefer than the previous. The future threatens to hasten his demise. Whether the remainder of his time will be counted in decades or years, the prospect of oblivion grows ever so haunting. A successful career and financial stability buys material comfort, but provides no refuge from the terror of mortality. The responsibilities of adulthood – raising children, managing a household, paying the bills – become doldrums that bleed away life’s vitality. The daily grind has chipped away the mirth of his youth; the days and weeks blur into an indistinguishable streak devoid of dimension and colour.
In the crisis of middle life, men revert to trappings of youth. Desperate for a refuge from withering age, men buy expensive cars, sail boats, motorcycles. That middle-aged men acquire fancy gadgets has become a familiar tactic for forestalling death. Consciously, the acquisition of gadgets takes on the note of consolation: my life is passing me by, but at least I have what I always wanted. For others, the rationalization takes on the arc of compensation: I have worked hard to earn my station; I deserve the finest things in life. Such conscious rationalizations justify the gadgets that fill garages and man-caves. However, beneathe the shiny collection lurks a reflex that stem from despair. The Corvette and the Harley Davidson are the cold, gleaming machines that counterpoise the pulsing heart and coursing blood of their human owner, who grows more frail by the day.
In the terror of his inevitable demise, the disintegration of his animal body, he recants to the memory of his childhood, a time when his entire life was still ahead of him, when he basked in the optimism of boyhood and held an unbridled faith in the future. The toys he enjoyed in play – miniature hot rods, trucks, trains, and airplanes – were objects of initiation. They symbolized the good things that awaited him: material goods that satiate his desires, objects of prestige that announce his status and value. For the boy, a toy collection is rehearsal for the acquisition that he will amass as a man. The collection becomes proxy for the boy’s sense of himself as an individual, a tangible representation of a nascent self-esteem. The toys gleam in the sun. The boy feels them in his hands and press them against each other. The toys are material and therefore real. The boy loves his toys and through them he makes contact with what is true and good. The toys are more definite and concrete than anything that he feels within himself. What he supposes as good is incarnate in the toys themselves. Merging his ego into his objects, the boy believes that he is what he has.
When the middle-aged man reverts to the trappings of childhood, he is attempting to access the succour of his boyhood dream. The decades have been withering, and life has brought bitter disappointments. Bruised and broken, the man acquires the gadgets that evoke the solace of childhood innocence. He is not buying a car so much as the symbolic meaning that come with the car: a promise that life is good, that he is good.
However, the pursuit of materials proves most devastating when the man succeeds in acquiring the desired item. To want the car is to court an ideal. The dream is gripping only when the man is enthralled. The promise of a good life is potent precisely because it is elusive. The fantasy expires once the car arrives in the garage. We never live our dreams, we kill them by making them come true. The exuberance of a new acquisition always fades in time. In the coming weeks and months, the shiny new car will be absorbed into the fixtures of the man’s surroundings. The excitement will diminish. The car will be subsumed into the monotony of his life, and in time, it too will become another example of life’s many disappointments. Empty and addled, the man searches again for consolation. Without defence against the ravages of time, he reverts to his familiar acquisitive impulse, the same boyhood dream to keep him in thrall. Another car, another bike. He looks to his possessions as reassurance for what he lacks in himself: the feeling of solidity in the face of impermanence. Yet the dream is only an illusion, beyond which he finds no alternative to dispel his fear of death.
Reversion to childhood fantasies instantiate a case of arrested development. One cannot resolve adult fears with childish comforts. The existential dread of one’s mortality marks one of the primary tasks of human development: a knowing acceptance in the face of death. Short of this inner work, all else is doomed to fail. Money can only buy things. That is, despite all the gadgets that it procures, money cannot dissolve the existential angst that torments the psyche. In order to navigate the crisis of mid-life, one must stand without defence in the blinding light of mortality. We must walk naked into the helplessness of our condition, and there to witness the sailing clouds and the blinking leaves in a universe that is indifferent to the individual but embracive of the whole. The world heaves and turns. Time is as expansive as all of space. An individual life is not what we supposed. We are tormented in the prison of ego that perceives its finitude as an affliction. But in the coolness of surrender, we merge with the ocean and dissolve into the sky. Ultimate surrender, which liberates consciousness from the confines of self-concern, is the antithesis of childhood obsession, in which possessiveness defined one’s primary occupation.
For someone struggling to navigate the middle passage, there are more helpful pathways to maturity. We can speak and write about our fears, and in the process give shape to terrors that otherwise lurk in the dark. Only in giving shape to the shapeless can we transform the unconscious forces that threaten us. We can explore the calling that emanates from the next stage of life. Rather than revert to childhood, we can envision the qualities that await our claim: wisdom, temperance, generosity, humility, and gratitude. We can consider possibility of service, giving to others the knowledge imparted by experience. This is another way in which our years become gifts to others. Hearkening the call of maturity, we rediscover life’s promises and can thus step forward with gusto, supported by faith in life’s goodness. Leaving behind the toys of boyhood, the man learns to trust something deeper within, discovers that they are more real than the cold metal machinery of his gadgets.
The middle passage is a harrowing time that holds both risk and possibility. When youth expires, one is given a choice to regress to childhood or step boldly into one’s eldership. The world is full of boys who are afraid to grow up. There are also many men who have heeded the call of wisdom and followed the path of maturity. The choice is always available.