Turning 40
and thinking about it with Kierkegaard
Last year I, to borrow a phrase from Benjamin Franklin, “conceived a bold and arduous project at arriving at moral perfection.” Well, maybe that’s overstating it. I set out to lose 30lbs and finish a draft of my book—a pair of goals aligning somewhat with moral and intellectual virtue. My fortieth year was a good one and a fortunate one, and I managed to accomplish both. My motivations were not at all original. Staring down forty, I wanted to look better and conclude a project which, if it did not soon end, might drag on forever. Life is moving increasingly quickly in this sort of Gestalt manner—there’s a narrative I’ve built and events snap increasingly quickly into place. I thought that with sufficient determination I could achieve my way out of the ambivalence of a fortieth birthday. At forty, the thinking went, I’m done with promise, precocity, potential: here I am, being what I was becoming all along.
But I wasn’t going to achieve my way out of feeling ambivalent, even a little bit sad, about turning forty. A good friend told me I’m being ridiculous about all of this because I’ve got “a lot to show” for my forty years. Perhaps. But it doesn’t feel this way, and while hers was a reasonable, eminently human way of evaluating a life, I can’t shake the feeling that this focus on outcomes is a real trap of middle age.
As I was finishing my book—which has a new title, by the way, Humanly Speaking: Kierkegaard’s Socratic Political Philosophy—I was spending some time with Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus. He’s my favourite pseudonym. My wife was recently riffing on what the people I like the most have in common, and landed on: “highly competent weirdos.” I think she’s right—the people I’m most drawn to tend to be personally weird but very good at something: earnest, committed, passionate. But being these things means you will not be quite normal. I’m afraid I don’t have much patience for people who are charmingly eccentric but not also really excellent at something. I want a jolt of something from the people I’m around, just as I hope to give one. Anyway, I think that’s not a terrible way to describe Climacus (if you want my complete thoughts on this matter, I’ll refer you to my book).
In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus skewers the idea that we should evaluate our lives according to “the outcomes” of our actions. “True ethical enthusiasm,” he writes, “consists in willing to the utmost of one’s capability, but also, uplifted in divine jest, in never thinking whether or not one thereby achieves something” (135). The truly ethical person wills the good without reference to the outcomes of their choices. You ought to submerge yourself in the task of living, understanding that sometimes things don’t turn out—you get a little bit fat, your book maybe doesn’t get done—but you don’t get depressed about it because you can only submerge yourself in the task of living. That’s what you can do. The mistake is thinking you can control anything apart from your own will.
As soon as the will “casts a covetous eye” on outcomes, its energy “becomes torpid” because it recognizes it is free only to control itself, and not the world outside of itself. As anyone who has undertaken any large project can attest, you cannot sit down and choose to “write a book;” rather, you must attend to one word at a time, even as you imagine the whole. The will becomes “torpid” from being told to bring about impossibilities. Maybe this is why people like posting so much: all of the problems assaulting us each day seem impossible for me to address, but I can give my opinion on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. We start to despair when we try to act with a view toward big outcomes—stopping a war, solving a crisis— when we abstract from the reality that the big changes can only come from willing when and where I can over and over and over in the time that I have.1
The problem, Climacus avers, is that the task for an ethical life is not to achieve certain outcomes by a certain birthday, but to live a full human life: “when time itself is the task, it is a defect to finish ahead of time…To be finished with life before life is finished with one is not to finish the task at all” (246). So there’s no such thing as “middle age” (a convenient conclusion!) there is only life, lived out in time, a rectilinear line, slicing across eternity.
Insofar as Kierkegaard agrees with Climacus (and Kierkegaard, it must be said, wrung a lot of out his forty-two years) we could probably say he’d be all for jettisoning this way of looking at human development altogether. And surely part of the ambivalence of “middle age” is probably from the canard of thinking, as I fell into thinking, that you are, at a certain point, complete. The Gestalt acceleration is an illusion. It’s not that you become until you are an “adult” and then slowly decline. That’s a way of thinking about life that not only devalues what it means to be a kid and an oldster, but also distorts what it means to be in your “prime.” Your life is as much yours at forty as it is at twenty. It’s all prime, baby.
Christianly speaking it’s bad and good that we focus so much on conversion. Conversion can’t be something that happens once, but a task presented to us fresh every morning. Understood in this context, God’s faithfulness might be one of the most God-like things about Him.