Never waste your midlife crisis - Austin Kleon

I turned 40 last month and spent three weeks reading Don Quixote, so the mid-life crisis has been on my brain.

“Never waste your midlife crisis.”

That’s advice I heard while listening to a podcast interview with John Higgs, author of William Blake vs. The World. (One of my favorite reads of 2022.)

Higgs was saying that the artists he admires are people like David Lynch, “People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.”

He continues:

There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.

“It’s always on an edge of never working out properly,” he admits, but it’s working so far, and it all started when he turned 40 and made the decision to go for it:

You should never waste your midlife crisis. You can do great things with a midlife crisis. If you just waste it on like a car, it’s just a lack of imagination. Mine was the decision to write books and attempt to make a living there.

Loved this. Never waste your midlife crisis.

(I’m currently listening to his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche while playing Zelda. He points out that James Bond was basically Ian Fleming’s mid-life crisis.)

Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: aging, don quixote, James bond, John higgs, mid-life crisis, midlife crisis