Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
PD Smith

Midlife by Kieran Setiya review – a philosophical guide to the crisis

On life’s journey …
On life’s journey … Photograph: Bernd Vogel/Getty Images

Philip Larkin dated the origin of sexual intercourse to 1963. Philosophy lecturer Kieran Setiya says the midlife crisis began two years later, when it was named in a psychoanalytic study. Of course, the experience had existed long before that. As Dante said, aged 35: “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself / In a dark wood, the right road lost.” Indeed, research by primatologists suggests even great apes experience a phase of unhappiness in middle age.

For Setiya, the midlife crisis began at the same age as Dante’s: “I felt a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness and fear,” he says. In this “personal and introspective” book, Setiya turns to philosophy to explore anxieties about mortality and the loss of youth, finding answers in John Stuart Mill – “those only are happy … who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness” – and Buddhism, which teaches him to live “in the halo of the present”.

This is a wonderfully rich and illuminating examination of the turmoil of midlife.

• Midlife by Kieran Setiya is published by Princeton. To order a copy for £10.31 (RRP £11.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.