I'm not having a midlife crisis, I'm having a midlife opportunity

The World Naked Bike Ride, London, June 2010. Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

David Brooks, reporting fearlessly ("The Middle Age Surge") from Generation X, has some great news for you all: the Baby Boomers lied to you. You know that moment in your fifties where your marriage breaks up and you move into a townhouse apartment and begin exploring the possibility of joining a religious cult and try to transition out of the political hack journalism you've been doing for twenty-odd years into some more adventurous line like being a public purveyor of Philosophy for Life?

Turns out it's not a crisis at all! That's one of those awful things they used to have back in the 20th century, but nowadays it's just an occasion for spiritual growth.

This according to the new book by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Life Reimagined: The Science, Art and Opportunity of Midlife (Random House, 2016), apparently aspiring to a post-midlife career as the Gail Sheehy of smarmy Christianity.

Old totebaggers will remember "Bradley Hagerty" (as Brooks cautiously calls her, uncertain which is her surname and apparently unaware that you can look it up or get an assistant to do it for you) as the former NPR religion correspondent who brought Broderian balance into reporting on faith, intelligent design and young-earth creationism, and religious tax exemptions. Looking back at the oeuvre for some kind of hilarious example, I have to say it doesn't look nearly as bad as I remembered it; she wasn't an advocate of religious idiocy, merely a recorder of their beliefs who didn't see it as her task to judge them, a good anthropologist like Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft among the Azande, treating her subjects with calm respect:

[Ken Ham of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY] rejects the idea that science has a lock on empirical evidence.

"All scientists have presuppositions that they start with that determine how they interpret evidence," he says, adding that scientists were not around to see dinosaurs walk the Earth anymore than creationists can claim to have been present to observe Adam and Eve.

He remains hopeful that the museum will attract skeptics as well as believers.

Hagerty reports, we decide.

And she showed her own acceptance of science in the Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead, 2009), known in paperback as Fingerprints of God: What Science is Learning about the Brain and Spiritual Experience (Penguin, 2010), laying out her own presuppositions pretty clearly:

Is spiritual experience real? Or is it a delusion? When we pray, what happens? Can science explain God? In Fingerprints of God, National Public Radio religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty attempts to answer these and other vexing questions about the science of spiritual experience. Along the way she tells the story of her own intriguing spiritual evolution, delves into the discoveries science is making about how faith affects our brains and explores what near-death experiences reveal about the afterlife.

(Spiritual experience may be a delusion, but God's existence doesn't need to be questioned, only explained; near-death experience doesn't suggest features of the afterlife, but reveals them.)

Hagerty's current book is—judging from the Kindle preview—the absorbing story of how she wrote her current book, as a healthful alternative to a midlife crisis that arose with an apparently unexplained medical emergency. She went on book leave from the NPR gig, taught a college writing class, took up competitive bicycling, buried her elderly parents, went on a long RV trip with her husband and dog, and did some background research indicating that the theory of the midlife crisis immortalized in Gail Sheehy's Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1977) is not backed by sound research findings, or indeed any research findings since some time in the sixties, which doesn't surprise me, it was always a stupid theory. Proving that

There are concrete steps we can take to make midlife the best time of life. Bring novelty into your marriage, tweak your career to seek meaning rather than mere success, find a new passion, build your friendships -- essentially, engage those things that matter with intention and verve.

Isn't that special! Some things matter with intention and verve, others matter in a kind of random, bumbling way. Just kidding, I know what she really meant.

Anyway, this obviously speaks directly to Brooksy's heart without any need to appeal to his brain. It's what he's been telling himself, with increasing desperation, and allowing us to hear on alternate moral Tuesdays, for the past couple of years. Though I'm pretty sure it hasn't worked for him yet.

For the purposes of today's column, all he has to do is spin it out to 800 words, by any means necessary, including:

• a quotation from vol. 3 part 4 (1951) of Karl Barth's 9,000-page summa Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, of which I could find only a GoogleBooks snippet, with two sentences in front of the three he used ("The maturity of his psychophysical existence ought to be his chance for maturity of obedience. The insight that now is the time can impress itself on him. The sowing is behind; now is the time to reap. The run has been taken; now is the time to leap. Preparation has been made; now is the time for the venture of the work itself") and I can't begin to imagine where he lifted it from, but I bet his source didn't go into the "maturity of obedience" part.
• a reference to Abraham Lincoln, who decided very sensibly not to have a midlife crisis but preserve the Union and end slavery instead ("Lincoln, for example, found in midlife that everything so far had prepared him to preserve the Union and end slavery. The rest of us don’t have causes that grand...")
• nine clauses with "you" as subject (including "you might begin to see", "you might begin to see", "you might see", and "you might have enough clarity now" in paragraph 12) and eleven with "they".

In conclusion, I think the best approach for David Brooks if he wants to avoid one of those crushing midlife crises is not to write another book. He's tried it already. The competitive bicycling idea, on the other hand, might just be the way to go. Thank you, and God bless America.