Imagine you need to carry a heavy sack of flour. When you first grab it and start carrying, it’s not that bad because you still have a lot of energy. You might not even mind the sack a whole lot at the beginning. It might even be an invigorating, challenging experience that is not unpleasant.
Gradually, though, your back begins to hurt, your energy starts to run out, you lose breath, the straps rub your back raw, and here you begin to notice the sack. A few miles later, the sack begins to make it very hard for you to walk. It’s the same sack as before but you no longer have the strength to carry it as well.
Psychological problems function like this sack of flour. They hit people especially badly when their bodies are weakened. The infamous midlife crisis, for instance, is such a time. The body is weakened by the hormonal storm it experiences and can no longer keep the problems inside. So people act out in weird ways. But the problems have been there this entire time. We often ask ourselves, “God, what’s happened to him? He’s like a different person now that the midlife crisis hit.” But he’s not a different person. He’s simply no longer managing to hide who he really is behind the socially acceptable behaviors. The poor fellow has been carrying this sack of flour for decades and can no longer pretend that it isn’t there.
This is why it’s important to start tossing things out of the sack as we age. What was easy to carry 10 years ago, might prove an impossible burden in a few years. It’s also crucial not to fixate on the current moment in time when trying to figure out what you are feeling and why. Often people wonder, “Why do I feel so shitty? My life has never been as comfortable and as secure as now, yet I’m exhausted, sad, depressed, nothing makes me happy.” The reason for the misery lies in the things one put in the sack decades ago but one is so used to the sack that it doesn’t even occur to one to look and see what’s inside.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s also the time when all your previous “fuck the consequences, I need to feel good now” coping mechanisms begin to show their long-term effects. You then need to find other ways of dealing with minor crises, and this can be difficult on its own.
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“It’s also the time when all your previous “fuck the consequences, I need to feel good now” coping mechanisms begin to show their long-term effects.”
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Ah, Clarissa, your post sounds to me as if you’re addressing the psychological problems that reach a peak at middle age, when you realize that you should be at the peak of your success, but have never felt more burdened down by factors that hinder that success, or make it impossible to enjoy it.
In my experience as a psychiatrist, people (with or without psychological treatment), generally follow one of two paths as they continue to age:
Either they become gradually more bitter and cynical as they realize that time and opportunities are running out, and that their personal fate is going to continue to get slowly but inevitably worse.
OR –
They reach a point where they realize that the issues that they once thought were so overwhelmingly important seem less significant with the passage of time, and life somehow seems better, despite the encroaching restrictions inherent with growing older.
Me?? I’m still too cynical, but also a lot more optimistic than I used to be, both about my personal life, and the world that’s going to outlive me, which the younger people on your website like Shakti and Stinger Bell will have to deal with. (And I didn’t even have to work at reaching that outcome — somehow it seems to have come naturally with the years.)
Or maybe I’m just feeling sappy because it’s NEW YEAR’S! We’ll see. 🙂
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It would be great if younger people had such a positive, optimistic overall outlook as you do. There is too much apocalyptic hand-wringing going on, and that’s unhealthy. Let’s hope people get to calm down with age.
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Your post about age and psychological problems is well-taken. If a person has depression or OCD, it’s not likely to spontaneously go away as you age. In my opinion, it’s likely to get worse as time goes by. About other mental afflictions, I do not know.
If midlife crisis is related to loss of energy and strength . . . just think about retirement. Later in life, we sometimes look inside the sack; reexamining stuff we’ve put in there and forgotten about is not always a pleasant experience. (Understatement warning.)
Dreidel, any recommendations for reaching that wonderful point where “life somehow seems better, despite the encroaching restrictions inherent with growing older?” If you could put that in a book, I’d buy it.
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@Editor (Retired)
Editor (Retired), if I thought I had a universal solution to the psychological / physical problems with ageing, I’d definitely put it in a book. (A lot of quacks have already published such books!) But the truth is, all my answers would be anecdotal, based on my own experience and those of about half of the patients I’ve observed, without any statistical data to back them up.
But I will present an answer, in this long comment:
What I have observed, PERSONALLY in my case and ANECDOTALLY with a number of other aging people, is that as the pressures of middle-age (the internal and external forces demanding that you succeed), recede after retirement, the individual feels a freedom not to have to keep trying to perform to expectations
that is quite liberating, and he/she can start enjoying life on his/her own terms.
There are a lot of caveats to this:
As I said in my post above, “[Some people] become gradually more bitter and cynical as they realize that time and opportunities are running out, and that their personal fate is going to continue to get slowly but inevitably worse [as age progresses.]” But this isn’t inevitable. Much of clinical depression is related to external events — and as the events change for the perceived better, the depression can dissipate.
OCD isn’t a death sentence, either — I have a number of perhaps unnecessary but useful rituals that I perform on any given day, starting when I get up (combing my hair, eating breakfast, watching the morning news, feeding my cat, logging onto the Internet, doing my afternoon exercises, cooking supper, etc.), and that routine serves me quite well. (I’m capable of modifying that routine without stress when external situations intervene.)
It helps that I’m in excellent health, financially set for life, feel like I’ve achieved all my pre-retirement work-related goals, and have no family to make demands on me or whose future I have to be concerned about.* So as I said, my satisfactory personal situation is purely anecdotal, as are the situations of the roughly 50% of elderly friends who have similarly accommodated to the requirements of aging.
I don’t think that ALL of these positive factors are essential to enjoying a happy old age. I know a number of old people who don’t met one or more of the criteria, and still manage to consider old age considerably more enjoyable than the rat race that preceded it.
Note that I didn’t say that old age is **wonderful — what I said was that it can be at least as enjoyable as all the hectic years which preceded it, and often far better.
As an aside, the ultimate point that I was trying to make was about politics and the idiocy of apocalyptic fantasies that have been swarming about ever since I was enough to become interested in the U.S. political situation some sixty years ago.
What I have observed is that for practical purposes, IN THE LONG RUN IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO GETS ELECTED, be it the worst Democrat in my lifetime (Obama) or the worst Republican (George w. Bush). We’re living in the most stable democracy in the world, and sooner or later, no matter how much the balance figure of Uncle Sam sways, it always rights itself.
So chill out, Editor (Retired) — despite all the hype, the world is going to turn out fine for you and your grandchildren. 🙂
(I BS around a lot on this blog — but if I didn’t sincerely believe what I’ve written above, I wouldn’t post it.)
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“Much of clinical depression is related to external events — and as the events change for the perceived better, the depression can dissipate.”
Wow, if even psychiatrists now agree with this, the world is really not hopeless. 🙂
“So chill out, Editor (Retired) — despite all the hype, the world is going to turn out fine for you and your grandchildren. :-)”
I agree.
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