This weeks article "Midlife Myths" was
pretty interesting. I also wrote about this article for my article review
this week!
I'm glad to find out that people are actually
happier than what we think. Society, nowadays, is all about youth and staying
young. It makes you have this negative opinion about getting older. This
reminds me of the movie I saw awhile back, "This is 40", and it's
about going through a midlife crisis. This movie and other things we watch on
tv make being old look worse than what it really is.
I really think that the reason adults find
themselves in crisis is the way these issues are resolved. Most events that come
up unexpectedly in a person’s life may become a moment or a stage of crisis.
Either its divorce or the death of a family, in which critical decisions need
to be made, that will make up the rest of your life. The article states that
the reason adults start to experiences crisis in their life is due to the
amount of “juggling” they need to do between job, family, educations, and so
on.
I think that
people need to accept who they are, accept the transitions throughout life, relax a little, and let life
happen. This whole denial stage would go away, and they could enjoy their lives
more! One of my favorite quote is," life is all about how we handle the
challenges
we're
given".
As I have
also mentioned this in my article review this week. This article relates
to the text very well covering much of the material covered in Chapter
thirteen. They both cover for example how people develop cognitively over the
years. The experiences of the middle aged help them solve problems that younger
people with their “quick minds” can’t. They also both cover the empty nest
issue, Menopause and changing priorities. Although the text talks about it in
different terms the article mentions the attaining of wisdom. I really like
this part of the article and I think that this has a lot to do with becoming
more satisfied with life.
I am definitely one of those people who don’t like to get older; it just scares me how fast time goes by. I’m still too young to have a mid-life crisis but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. I have seen someone close to me go through one and it was kind of humorous. He was a dad and in his 50’s and I think that one day he just realized how fast his daughters were growing up and how quick life was passing him by. He started listening to younger kids’ music, dressing like a teenager/young adult, and bought an old muscle car. It went on for a while and then light bulb must have gone off in his head and he went back to being normal. Maybe his wife finally called him out and got him to snap out of it. I think that you’re right in the fact that people need to accept who they are and be content with the decisions they’ve made.
ReplyDeleteI think that sometimes the fear of getting older is related to the regrets we have in the past. Perhaps we didn't do everything we thought we would by the time we are 30 and now we think we have let that opportunity pass. Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that even though we might become "wiser" our health begins to fail in little ( or big) ways. We feel invincible when we are in our 20! You don't hear of 20 year old getting cancer very often or dementia or struggling with arthritis, heart attacks strokes etc. For some reason there seems to be that age marker in peoples minds that once they pass a cirtan age they start dying instead of living!
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