Midlife Mastery Journal » risk

What If I Get Sick?

Les Brown — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:21:18 +0000

This is my first day back in my home office since I left on my Vancouver trip last week. In the meantime, something unpleasant happened to me: some kind of nasty, lingering stomach virus that has left me wanting to do nothing more than just sleep. Getting sick is one of life’s most unpleasant experiences; although, from time to time it happens to us all. Once we approach midlife, however, life’s annoyances seem to take on a much more sinister air: we can’t help wondering if each downturn may not be just another harbinger of worse things to come.

Don’t you need to be concerned about such things? Doesn’t life get that much more difficult once you’ve begun that midlife transition? Aren’t you headed ‘over the hill’? Shouldn’t you be out shopping for a nursing home and a casket? The good news is that you only need to be composing your eulogy if you get particular enjoyment out of doing these things. There are, indeed, many things that you could worry about: including health care, finances, retirement options, and so on; but these are things that you should have been concerned with all along! Nothing has changed!

First, let’s consider planning at midlife. As soon as you start a new job, what should your first concern be? Think about this for a few minutes before you read on. Take your time — don’t look ahead. Are you ready for the answer? If you said, "Plan your exit strategy," you’d be correct. In this universe, the only absolute is change, and the only response to change is to plan for it. Whether any of your involvements will be your ultimate one, only God can tell. In the meantime, you would do best to look on each involvement as temporary. Wouldn’t you be reckless to take on any temporary position and not consider what was to come next?

When you embark on any reasonable plan, one of the most important elements involves a comprehensive risk assessment. A well-engineered risk assessment forms the cornerstone of any successful plan, and yet, this element is too often done superficially or even neglected entirely. Yet, a risk assessment involves the estimation of only two factors: probability and severity. That means that there are only two questions that you need to ask about any eventuality: 1) ‘How great an impact will this have on my plans?’ (the severity) and 2) ‘How likely is it that this event will actually occur in the foreseeable future?’ (the probability). But, aren’t these already the two questions you ask yourself, day in and day out? ‘What effect will rain have my plans?’ you ask yourself, ‘and how likely is it that it will rain?’

Of course, every day that we live (and the passage through the midlife transition in particular) means that the probability of some serious event’s occurrence grows. Isn’t it obvious that, every day you life is one day closer to the day you’ll die? You don’t need any actuarial tables to prove to you that the longer you avoid any problem, the higher the probability that you’ll have to face that problem. It’s simply a fact of life. On the other hand, should it be a cause for panic? Hardly. It is what it is. On the other hand, it should indeed be a cause for concern if you’ve been avoiding taking life’s risks seriously and not only planning for them, but doing something about them.

Slowing down at midlife isn’t a tragedy; it’s a predictable (and manageable) fact of life. You might even say that your decline begins around age 15 when growth stops and maturity begins. Should children be dreading hitting 16? Hardly. So why should you be dreading hitting 40, or 50, or 60? It’s very true that you won’t be the same then as you are now, but why should you expect to be? Life is all about change. Just because you’re ‘slowing down’ and some eventualities are becoming more probable than they once were doesn’t mean that your quality of life should therefore be decreasing. On the contrary, if you’ve been careful in your planning, and taken care with your lifetime risk assessments, your general quality of life should continue increasing indefinitely.

Could you lose all your savings? Yes. Could you get sick or have an accident and be incapacitated? Certainly. Could you die? Of course. But then, any one (or all) of these things could happen to you in the next ten minutes. The point is, that it’s all a matter of probability. Just because things become more probable over time doesn’t mean that they’re any more certain to occur now as compared with fifty years from now. You never know. What I can assure you is that, as you carefully and successfully navigate your own personal midlife transition, your capacity for achieving success at a level you’ve only previously imagined (a success that most likely bears little resemblance to how you first conceived it) grows exponentially.

There’s no more reason to dread midlife than there is to fear tomorrow. In fact, you’ve every reason in the world to look forward to it with anticipation. Midlife really is just the beginning.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

What Will Your Transition Cost?

Les Brown — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:13:46 +0000

On paper, it seems obvious that people should plan for a major shift in perspective that should occur just about the time they settle in to their relationships, their careers and their sense of personal achievement and well=being. That’s all very fine to speculate about before the fact. Yet, a huge problem arises around the question of midlife because a) you don’t know what you don’t know and b) the criteria that you use to evaluate your life before midlife are made obsolete by it. Midlife involves not only a paradigm shift, but a values shift, as well, and that’s what makes planning for it such a difficult assignment. Consider this: what good does it do you to calculate carefully the cost of driving your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) when you suddenly decide you want to sell it and ride a bicycle to work every day?

Right now, you’re planning and directing your future based on your specific life vision: in most cases, it’s something that’s been with you a very long time. That vision has been meticulously constructed over the course of your lifetime (up until now) and it provides you with an invaluable context in which you can live your life. From your vision, you derive a sense of purpose and direction, as well as your sense of what matters to you and what doesn’t. The ‘crisis’ of midlife comes upon you when, for a variety of reasons, that vision no longer speaks to you. You find yourself in the situation where all those things that used to matter most to you now don’t matter at all and things that you never even considered now appear as the most important things in your life.

When you, as an adult planning for the midlife transition, begin to take stock of what it’s going to take to get you through it successfully, you need to take into consideration the fact that your priorities will change — and change drastically. Under ordinary conditions, the next step after creating your basic plan of action would be to do a risk assessment (formal or informal). This involves, first of all, taking an inventory of things that could happen along the way that could deflect you from your goal. The assessment involves deciding just two things for each eventuality: 1) how likely each event might be, and 2) how seriously each event might negatively impact reaching your desired ends.

A problem of crisis proportions arises when your goals and values change. Suddenly, everything that was orchestrated to see those goals through to completion loses its meaning and purpose. Everything loses its importance, and everything (or almost everything) that had once seemed out of the question winds up back on the table again. Once your life has lost its core meaning and direction, what sense will anything else have? How do you perform a risk assessment to determine the importance of any aspect of the future direction of your life when your entire value system is in flux? Up until this point, you’ve assumed that you knew what was important to you and what not, but now all that is up for grabs. You can assume no longer.

Performing a valid risk assessment at middle age puts many men into a serious conundrum: many, for the first time in their lives, have to reevaluate the basic assumptions of life, from "What do I really want?" to "What is really right (or wrong) for me?" Whereas women had their cultural models handed to them in from the post World War II era popular culture (magazines, films, books, TV, etc.), and they’ve had over 60 years to critique and accept or reject them, men’s cultural models haven’t evolved nearly so drastically. Instead of the cultural revolution that women have fomented, men have been left to a more or less reactive role: trying to find how their cultural model ‘fits’ into a changing world. This has worked most often to their detriment.

Rather than critique their core views and values, men have too often either turned a blind eye to them, or put up some fairly severe emotional barriers to change. When masculinity is too rigidly defined as ‘Joe six pack’ or the ‘Blue Collar Comics’ ("Git ‘er done!"), then even exploring the deeper goals and values of life falls under a cultural taboo. And men pay a high price for this. When core values shift (as they must at midlife), and self-reevaluation is either culturally unsupported or even a taboo, the probability of suffering a true midlife crisis (and the disorientation that accompanies it) rises nearly to certainty. When your goals and values are gone, how do you plan? How do you calculate the risks of any potential course of action? Obviously, you can’t.

If you want to know in advance what your midlife transition is going to cost you, you’re going to have to be very clear about where you want to go and how you want to get there. It’s going to take focus, and it’s going to take embracing a bit of masculine counter-culture: being prepared to do some deep and hard self-examination. What are your core values? What are your motives? What’s really important to you? Until you’re ready to take the time and energy to engage yourself fully in this quest for personal meaning, the cost to you of an eventual midlife crisis may be too high to bear: it could cost you everything you hold near and dear and leave you with precious little apart from an empty or broken heart (yes, men have them, too). It’s a price you really don’t ever want to have to pay.