How Middle Age Is A Not-So-Gentle Nudge Towards Conservatism

. . . a man confronts the farce that he is. All his worst instincts, habits of mind, predictable appetites and easily parodied past actions crystallize in that moment into a punch line that prevails above all his refinements and respectability. He is a human exaggeration. — “A Calling for Charlie Barnes,” Joshua Ferris.

To be middle aged means to live in an existential gap.

Let me explain: in middle age we are either birthing our children, burying our parents, or steadying our own feeble place on the great timeline of life. It is here where we discover self actualization might just be a noble lie. We often come to feel like the unknowing protagonists in a fictional tale of self-fulfillment. In this phase of life certainty becomes imbecilic. Confidence takes on the gloss of hubris. We are left clutching a simple conclusion: knowing what to do is wisdom, actually doing it is virtue, and the gap between the two is utter anguish. 

And yet, what I have discovered in these middling years is that there are treasures aplenty, not the least of which is a nudge towards understanding a number of conservative truths. 

Of course, in this context, I am not referring to political conservatism, as in lower taxes are better than higher taxes or originalism is preferable to judicial activism. Instead, I am referring to a general recognition that a conservative disposition towards living and life is the surest path towards authentic contentment.

So many of the obvious truths we discern as children are quickly forgotten once we lean into adulthood. We get seduced by what is chic and fashionable, consumed by our own vanity and ambitions, or become exuberant hostages of sheer midlife busyness. The cosmic signals we easily detected as children — the soulful sustenance of loving and being loved, identifying and speaking the truth, basking in the nimbus of the world’s beauty, knowing that righteousness is truly right — are still here, right in front of us every day. But we spend decades forgetting to conserve and recognize these signals for what they are.

Not to make excuses, but it is easy, after all, to stop seeing what’s in front of us as we are raising children. We stop attaching ourselves to the highest and truest totems the human journey has to offer when our immediate concern is fixing a leaky toilet or painting the garage. Our relationships become stale or we allow our annoyances with others to become ossified deep in our souls, making it difficult to repair friendships of perceived slights from the past.

For all the talk of the modern mid-life crisis, one’s mid-forties to mid-fifties are actually the perfect juncture of life to acknowledge the most fundamental conservative truth of all: the world is infinitely more complex, mysterious, and incomprehensible than we understood as young men and women.  

Indeed, the most dangerous people in the world are the well-read utopianists who claim to know exactly how the world should change — usually on a time frame of “right now”— and just who the bad guys are preventing it from happening — often unsuspecting Americans just trying to get by. These are your Twitter know-it-alls who engage in a hearty game of grievance one-upmanship, who usually don’t know the first thing about the quest for wholeness or the soulful wonderment of genuine joy. 

Maybe it’s the frustration of raising children who don’t listen. Maybe it’s a quarter century of teaching high school students who sometimes seem indifferent to the best advice and lessons their teachers have to offer. Maybe it’s the recognition that so many people in our republic are forever and perpetually hostile to half of their fellow citizens. Whatever the cause, it eventually becomes clear that we should stop basing our happiness in this life on changing other people or on what these other people think of us. 

Instead of resting our hopes for soulful nourishment and human flourishing on our ability to bend the world to our wishes and whims, middle age is the point at which we learn it is far better to merely control ourselves. It turns out, the blasé axioms we heard in our youth such as “trying our best” or “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose” are not just true, but essential if we are ever going to break free from the fool’s aspiration of “having it all.”

In the past year, I lost my father to cancer and my oldest daughter left for college. I am saddened, yes. I am world-weary indeed. But most of all, I do feel as though the crucible of this season of life humanized me, augmented my emotional bandwidth, sensitized my spiritual barometer, and now that a few months has passed since my father’s death, I can acknowledge that the suffering of middle age does indeed grow the soul. It

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