On becoming 45

A friend texts to ask if I want to grab a coffee to catch up. I read the message, put the phone down, and pick it up again a minute later to say yes.

The thirty-two-year-old version of me would have answered inside ten seconds. “I don’t have time for it. There’s so much work to do.” That was the line, more or less, for the whole of my thirties. The work was the answer to every question, including the ones the work was not being asked.

I do not answer like that any more. The yes is not heroic. It is not a reordered-priorities moment. It is just that the question, do I have time for a coffee with someone I care about, has stopped being a question I need to consult a calendar to answer. The calendar will move. The friendship will not, if I keep treating it like the variable.

I sit with the texture of that for a second before I answer, and the sitting with it is most of what has changed.

the script I was handed

I turned forty-five on Wednesday. When I was in my early twenties I was certain that forty was a kind of cliff edge. The good things, the interesting things, the things worth doing, all happened before then. After forty was admin. I had a half-articulated belief that if I had not become someone by forty, I would not become anyone. I worked from that belief for the better part of two decades. The hunger was real and most of it was useful, but the belief underneath the hunger was not something I had thought my way into. It was a script I had been handed.

Eric Berne, the psychiatrist who founded transactional analysis, has the cleanest definition of the thing I am describing.

A script is a life plan based on a decision made in childhood, reinforced by parents, justified by subsequent events, and culminating in a chosen alternative.

That is from Berne’s What Do You Say After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny, published posthumously in 1972. The book is uneven and the wider apparatus of transactional analysis is dated in places, but that one sentence is the most useful thing anyone ever wrote about why we do the things we do without quite knowing why.

The script is not a metaphor. It is a working plan. It tells you what success looks like, what failure looks like, who counts as a real person, what you have to achieve to be allowed to relax. Most of mine was written before I could read. The achieve-before-forty deadline was not an opinion I had formed. It was a decision someone else had made on my behalf, reinforced enough times that by the time I was twenty-two it felt indistinguishable from the world.

The first move is noticing. That is most of the work. Once you can see the script as a script, you have a choice you did not have before, even if the choice is to keep running it. I spent two decades running mine without seeing it. The seeing started later than it should have, and I am writing this now in part because I want to put the noticing on the record while it is still fresh enough to describe.

what covid let me hear

I turned forty in late Covid, in 2021. The cliff edge I had been running from for two decades arrived in the strange middle of the pandemic, vaccines rolling out, Delta on the way, the novelty long worn off and the fatigue fully settled in. There was nothing to optimise for. There was no conference to speak at, no flight to catch, no room to walk into in the right shoes. The forcing function of busyness, which had been doing the work of stopping me thinking about anything underneath the busyness for twenty years, was gone.

What sits under busyness when you take busyness away is whatever you have been using busyness to drown out. For me it was the question I had been refusing to ask since my twenties. Was the script the right one? I do not mean was the work worth doing. The work was worth doing. The question was whether the life that had been built around the work was a life I had chosen or a life I had inherited.

I am suspicious of the universal pandemic essay, where everyone discovers sourdough and reorders their priorities. Most people went back to their normal as soon as the world reopened, including me, more or less. The shift was not dramatic. What changed was that the question had been asked, and once it has been asked it is very difficult to unhear. Covid did not change me. Covid gave me a quiet long enough to hear something I had been refusing to hear for twenty years. The change took another three years and is still in progress.

the armour I was wearing

For most of my working life I described myself by what I did. Founder. CEO. The badge did identity work for me, as I wrote about in the previous post, but the badge was only the outermost layer. Underneath the badge was the work, and underneath the work was the cloak the work itself was doing, and the cloak was the thing I am writing about now.

The cloak was shielding me from four things, more or less.

It was shielding me from the question of who I was when nothing was being asked of me. The achievement reflex is convenient because it answers the identity question without you having to face it. You are the person doing the thing. As long as the thing is being done, the question does not come up. Take the thing away and the question floods in. I had spent enough years avoiding the question that I no longer trusted I had an answer.

It was shielding me from the slower work of relationships. Friendships, family, the people you love, are the part of life that does not respond to optimisation. There is no KPI on a marriage. There is no quarterly review on whether you have shown up for the people who depend on you. The work I knew how to do had legible feedback loops. The work I did not know how to do did not. So I did more of the work I knew how to do, and the relationships paid for it.

It was shielding me from the parts of myself that needed parenting. There were younger versions of me, with their own fears and hungers and unmet needs, that I had never gone back for. The achievement reflex was, among other things, a strategy for staying ahead of those parts so that I never had to sit with them.

It was shielding me from the doubt that the script was wrong. If I kept running the script hard enough, fast enough, well enough, I would not have to find out. The doubt would be drowned out by the noise of the running.

That is what I mean by one-dimensional. Not that I was one thing. I was good at one move, and the move was load-bearing for an identity I had not built any other floor under. Take the move away and there was nothing else to stand on. So I never took the move away.

The work of the last three years has been adding more floors.

good and bad, both

The driver underneath the armour, the achievement reflex, the script, was perfectionism. I would not have used the word at the time. Now I would. The pattern, stripped to its bones, was this. If I was not perfectly good, I was bad. There was no third option. There was no middle. There was only the relentless effort to stay on the right side of a line I had drawn for myself when I was very young, and the panic on the days when the line moved.

That is splitting, in the clinical sense, and it is the cognitive habit that powered everything I have written about so far. The achievement script needs it. The armour needs it. You cannot run a one-move identity unless you have first convinced yourself that the alternative to the move is annihilation. Perfectionism is the engine. The rest is the chassis.

Jung, who I had read in my twenties and skimmed without taking in, has the cleanest frame for what was happening.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

Carl Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works Vol. 9, Part II, §14, 1951.

The disowned parts do not stop existing because you refuse to look at them. They run the show from underneath. The ambition, the impatience, the contempt for slowness, the sharpness with the people closest to me, the parts of me I was certain were not me. They were me. They were the parts I had banished to keep the good-person story intact. Banishing them did not get rid of them. It just meant I did not get a vote on what they did next.

The shift is not from bad to good. It is from a split self to a whole one. Jung’s later argument in the same volume is that the person who chases perfection has to accept the opposite of his intentions, because the self he is trying to perfect was never going to be only one half of itself. Wholeness is the target. Perfection was the wrong target the whole time. The pursuit of being perfectly good was the thing keeping me from being fully a person.

The data on this is bleak in a way I find clarifying. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill’s 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin found that socially-prescribed perfectionism, the version that runs on imagined external standards, rose by roughly a third in college students between 1989 and 2016. The generation behind me is running the same engine I was, harder, on more visible terms, with social media doing the work of broadcasting the standard. The 2023 Kothari et al. meta-analysis is the other piece of the picture. Perfectionism is a transdiagnostic risk factor for depression and anxiety, which is the polite scientific way of saying it makes you ill across the board. I was not unusual. I was a member of a large and growing cohort.

The connection to what comes next is closer than it looks. Schwartz’s IFS exiles, the parts the system locks away because they carry pain the rest of the system cannot tolerate, map almost one to one onto Jung’s shadow. Different vocabularies. Same material. The work in both frames is integration rather than elimination. You do not get rid of the shadow. You stop pretending it is not yours.

What I would say, plainly, is this. I am both good and bad. The bad parts are mine. The good parts are mine. The work was not getting rid of one half. The work was sitting with the fact that both halves were me and neither was going anywhere.

curiosity, compassion, and the work I am doing now

When I try to describe what has actually changed, two words come up first. Curiosity and compassion. Both of them sound like greeting card words, which is a problem I will come back to. For now, the practice underneath the words.

The practice is mostly Internal Family Systems. IFS is a model of the mind that Richard Schwartz developed in the eighties, working with clients whose presentations did not fit the standard frame. Schwartz’s claim is that the mind is not one thing. It is a system of parts, each carrying its own history, its own fears, its own protective strategies. There are no bad parts. There are parts carrying burdens. Every part, even the harshest internal critic, even the most disabling anxiety, is trying to protect you in the way it learned how. The work is not to silence the parts. The work is to meet them, listen to them, understand what they have been carrying, and let them put it down.

Schwartz’s No Bad Parts is the most accessible version of the model. The clinical evidence base is still emerging rather than settled; the strongest single piece is the 2013 Shadick et al. trial in the Journal of Rheumatology, where IFS produced significant improvements in rheumatoid arthritis patients, and where self-compassion scores on Kristin Neff’s scale rose significantly at one-year follow-up. That is a single trial. I would not stake the model on it. I am staking nothing on it. I am describing what happens to be working, in the room, for me.

In IFS there is a concept called Self, which is what is left when the parts are not running the show. Schwartz lists eight qualities of a Self-led state, all happening to start with C. Calm, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness. The IFS Institute calls them the 8 Cs. When I say curiosity and compassion are the two things that unlocked the last three years, I am, without having known it at the time, naming two of the eight markers Schwartz uses to describe what it feels like when the parts are not running the show.

Curiosity in this sense is not the LinkedIn-bio version of curiosity. It is the willingness to ask why a part of you is reacting the way it is, before you try to make the reaction stop. The anger, the avoidance, the procrastination, the resentment, the workaholism. Each of those is a part trying to do a job. Curiosity is the move you make instead of suppression. Why is this part of me reacting this way? What is it trying to protect me from? When did it first learn that the protection was needed? Those are not therapy questions. They are the questions you can learn to ask in your own kitchen.

Compassion is the second move. It is what is available once you have understood. There is a precise version of it that is worth holding to, from Kristin Neff’s 2003 paper that founded the modern self-compassion literature. Neff’s three components are self-kindness in place of self-judgement, common humanity in place of isolation, and mindfulness in place of over-identification. Most people are missing all three. I was missing all three. The first one is the obvious one. The second one is the surprising one. You start to notice that whatever you are struggling with is not unique to you, and the noticing takes the edge off in a way that solitary self-flagellation never does.

When I say curiosity and compassion unlocked the last three years, this is what I mean. They are not abstract virtues. They are the two practical moves I had been refusing to make on myself for forty years, because the script I was running did not have either of them in it. The script had two moves. Achieve, and judge.

I am self-parenting the parts of me that the achievement reflex had been ignoring. That is the unglamorous, accurate sentence. The work is slow. There is no certificate at the end of it. There is no badge.

what the data says about 45

I owe the reader the counter-argument, because the post is about to start sounding too tidy, and the literature on midlife is not tidy at all.

Elliott Jaques coined the phrase “midlife crisis” in 1965 in a paper about creative artists and their relationship to mortality. Jaques’s paper is more interesting than the cliché it spawned. The cliché is the sports car, the affair, the suddenly-younger wardrobe. Jaques was writing about something quieter and more honest, a confrontation with finitude that, when it goes well, produces deeper and more mature work in the second half of a life.

Susanne Schmidt, in Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché, reconstructs how the modern popular concept was framed by Gail Sheehy’s 1976 Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life as a positive reassessment for both sexes, and was then re-coded over the next decade by male psychiatrists into the sports-car caricature in mainstream American media. The version of midlife crisis most people carry in their heads is a media artefact, not a finding. The original frame was closer to what I am calling renaissance.

The economic happiness literature is harder to wave away. David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald’s body of work on the U-shaped happiness curve, most cleanly stated in their 2008 paper and revisited many times since, shows that life satisfaction across many countries follows a U, with a trough that, in the canonical fitting, sits almost exactly at age 47. I am writing this on the descending edge of that curve, or the ascending edge, depending on which side of the trough you think I am sitting on. The trough is real. People who tell you midlife is uniformly wonderful are selling something.

The 2025 Blanchflower, Bryson and Xu paper in PLOS ONE updates the picture, and the update is grim in a different direction. The U has collapsed in recent years, but not because midlife got better. It collapsed because young people got dramatically unhappier. The post-2015 cohort of twenty-somethings is reporting wellbeing levels that look like the midlife trough used to look. Midlife is not the worst part of life any more. Twenties are. I have no triumphalist read on that. It is just true.

And there is the survivorship problem I have to name directly. I am writing this from a comfortable seat. I have my health. I have work I find meaningful. I have a roof and a family and the means to choose what my Tuesday feels like. The version of 45 I am describing is not the version that arrives if you have been made redundant, if your marriage has just ended, if you are caring for a parent who no longer recognises you, if the savings did not survive the last decade. Renaissance is not the universal experience of this age. The version I am describing is one I have the conditions to live. It would be dishonest to pretend the conditions were not part of it.

The post is what I have seen, on my side of the curve, with the conditions I have. That is the only honest frame for it.

the clichés you have to live to prove

There is an idea I keep coming back to about clichés. The lines that get repeated until they go hollow are not hollow because the lines are wrong. They are hollow because at the age you first hear them, you have not yet done the living that would prove them. They are theorems without proofs. You can read the statement. You cannot work the proof until you have run enough years through your own hands to see why the statement holds.

At forty-five, the lines do not sound new. They sound proven. “The days are long but the years are short.” “What got you here will not get you there.” “You can have it all but not all at once.” “Most of what you worry about will not happen, and the things that do happen are not the ones you worried about.” I have read all of these. So have you. The first time you read them, you nod, and the nod is courteous. The hundredth time, at the right age, the nod is involuntary, because the proof has finally landed.

I think this is what wisdom is, more or less. Not the production of new lines. The verification of old ones. The reason older people repeat clichés is not that they have stopped thinking. It is that the clichés have started checking out, line by line, against a life they have actually lived. They are handing over statements they now know to be true, hoping the listener will hold on to the words long enough to run the proof themselves.

I would not have been able to write this post at thirty-two. The sentences would have been the same. The proofs would not.

still becoming

There is a Christian writer called Richard Rohr who wrote a book in 2011 called Falling Upward. The argument, summarised on his own site, is that the first half of life is spent building the container, and the second half is spent discovering the contents. The line I keep coming back to is his description of what the second half feels like, at its best.

a bright sadness and a sober happiness

That is the closest two-phrase version of the texture I am trying to describe. There is sadness in noticing how much of the first half you spent running a script you did not write. There is brightness in finding out that the noticing is itself the way out. There is happiness in the slower life. There is sobriety in knowing that the slower life is not the universal version, and that the conditions that make it possible could be taken back at any moment.

I am aware that “renaissance” is itself a script. I have replaced “the achieve-before-forty plan” with “the rounded-human-being-in-the-second-half plan” and there is a real risk that I am running the new one with the same intensity I ran the old one with. The honest thing to say is that I have not escaped scripts. I have noticed one and chosen another, and the new one wears more lightly than the old one, but it is still a script. The work continues.

This is why the title says becoming and not arrived. Arrived is the lie the achievement reflex always tells. You will be there when you have done the next thing. There is a quiet version of the same lie that says you will be there once you have done the inner work. I do not believe either. The work is the work. There is no finish line on either side. The forty-five-year-old writing this is not the version that will be writing in five years, and the version writing in five years will be reading this one back, embarrassed in places, and that will be fine. That is what becoming looks like.

I had a lot of angst about turning forty. I am excited about turning forty-five. Not excited in the keynote sense. Excited in the sense that the becoming is the work, the becoming is going somewhere, and the person I am becoming is closer to the one I was meant to be than any version that came before. That is not the same as having arrived. The whole post has been an argument against arrived. The excitement is for the next ten years of the becoming, not for the milestone.

I will not pretend to know what fifty-five looks like. I have a hunch I will be reading the same lines again, and the containers will be a little fuller, and the nod will be involuntary again, and that will be the work.

I text my friend back. Yes, let’s get that coffee.