Notes

Crisis of middle age?

Psychotherapists use to speak about the psychological crisis many men have to live through in the age of 35-45. Numerous explanations are being suggested, such as the loss of parental support and the failure to find a social substitute, or the feeling of too much completion or being too far from the completion of the life plans of the youth, or the development of the behavioral scripts inherited from the parents or grand-parents, or the changes in the sexual ability, or ... All such explanations are individual-centered, and the only solution one can suggest having adopted this approach is to advice a kind of self-reconstruction, changing one's attitudes and the ways of viewing the world, rather than changing the world itself.

However, there can be no psychological phenomenon without an objective cause, and the roots of any mental crisis should be sought for in the person's social environment. If a man approaching the middle age feels his unnecessariness and the absence of the future, this should not be treated as his fantasies and bad mood, but rather as an indication to the imperfection of the present society, which does not give people real ways to continue normal life after certain age. The easiest way to uncover the roots of the middle-age crisis is to look through the job suggestion columns in Russian newspapers: nearly all of them contain the words "aged below 35", or sometimes "below 40", and there are rare cases of "below 45" or "below 50". For women, the limit is even lower, and many companies prefer nice-looking girls below 25. Moreover, nearly all companies demand that the applicants have experience of working in an adjacent field. That is, if you have reached the age of 40, you practically cannot find a new job in any field at all, if your present job becomes unavailable for some reasons, or if you feel that you could do better in a different position. That is, the society does not need people above 40, and this is reflected in their minds in the form of the middle age crisis.

Definitely, if one had real possibility to start a new life at any time, with free education and no need to worry about supporting the family and the house, there would be nothing tragic in achieving the next threshold in one's activity. One could easily choose a different road, or just wait a little, to think it all over and decide what to do next. Middle age crisis is a result of stress and frustration: one can never stop struggling for life, and there are always barriers that cannot be lifted since the society is organized that way.

The same holds for the well-developed countries like France, England or the USA. However, since the wild capitalism of the past has been long since moderated by various forms of non-economic regulation in these countries, the age limitations cannot be imposed as blatantly as in Russia, and the employers had to invent numerous methods of hidden discrimination. Indeed, one can always indicate better performance as the reason for every particular preference, and this may be quite true in many cases, since the younger applicants are often educated in more compliance with the current demands, and they are more aggressive, and they have less problems with their family and health. There are lots of reasons to prefer a younger worker, and some countries even have to develop special governmental regulations to make hiring the elder workers more profitable for the employers, in analogy to the privileges for hiring injured persons. However, all such methods are not compatible with the economic basis of the capitalist society, and they are the first candidates to perish in economic troubles.