A SENSE OF DISILLUSIONMENT AND DEFEAT
This mid-life crunch in the American marketplace can be shattering for men who regard upward mobility not only as a basic goal but also as a measure of their merit. Conditioned to believe that their identity depends on what they do, this generation of men cannot help feeling that business failure means personal failure. Thus the man in his forties who is fired, or who loses his job for any reason, is likely to experience a devastating loss of self-esteem.
But men who lose their jobs arc not the only ones to suffer at this stage of life. Those who have failed to meet their own goals, or who have simply stopped moving up, must also wrestle with a sense of defeat—and despair. Feelings that bewilder them.
While working as a management consultant and career counselor, a clinical psychologist from Michigan, Dr. Benjamin Shumaker, saw so many discontented men in the thirty-five-to-forty-five age range that he coined the phrase “career menopause” to describe the phenomenon.
“At first I thought there was something wrong with these people,” he explains, “because they had all set a good track record. They were doing very, very well. And then suddenly they say, ‘I’m not happy in what I’m doing.’ But they don’t say it that way. They project the blame on the lousy company, the damn boss, or something else related to the job.
“Of course you immediately say, ‘What’s bugging this guy?’ ‘What’s wrong with him?’ That was my initial reaction. Except there were so many of them that it dawned on me that this was normal. A normal part of career development.”
The root of the problem, in his view, is that American men have been told all their lives that it is possible to be Number 1. “We’ve been led to believe Horatio Alger is it,” he says, “and we approach our career a la Horatio Alger. You get into the race and initially you move very well. You get promoted. You get recognized. And then the movement becomes
slower, and it may stop, and you begin gradually to feel that something is wrong.
“Suddenly you start asking, ‘Am I in the wrong field?’ ‘Am I doing the wrong thing?’ And in our culture that’s terrible. You’re supposed to know what you want, get an education, get started, and that’s it. You’re supposed to be set for the rest of your life.
“So why are they having trouble? Well, they’re having trouble because they’ve been led to believe they shouldn’t have these kinds of feelings.”
What happens to men in their forties who realize they are not going to be Number 1—and then feel like a failure? Stuck in the middle, doing work they deplore or have tired of, they retire on the job psychologically. Or, embittered by a sense of worthlessness, they sabotage their bosses and savage their families.
Though no figures are available, it is now common knowledge in the corporate world that many workers, those in middle management especially, feel thwarted and defeated. Blocked in their ambition to reach the top, they often fault themselves for having “peaked out” when they stop moving up.
For these men the American Dream has turned into a nightmare.
Surprisingly, however, a similar sense of disillusionment often attacks the men who do succeed in making it. When the golden ring of recognition is finally within their grasp, they too feel severely disappointed. The fact of success, they discover, cannot match the fantasy. The dream fulfilled loses its luster.
“When I turned forty I had everything I wanted,” said one prosperous businessman. “I had interesting work. I was making more money than I expected to as a kid. I had a nice family. My kids were healthy and intelligent, and I was fond of my wife. But still, I was miserable.
“I suppose in society’s terms turning forty is symbolic. You start questioning what you’ve really achieved. And sometimes I’m proud of what I’ve achieved and other times I feel it’s absolutely nothing. Actually my life changed a lot because of being successful, but not much was changing within me. I keep wondering why I’m not happier, but I haven’t found any answers.”
Though usually unanticipated, this feeling of depression that follows in the wake of success is a common reaction. Something paradoxical occurs when the executive gets his promotion, the banker his raise, the salesman his franchise, and the teacher his tenure. The battle won, each man expects to feel victorious. Instead, there is a sense of loss. Is this all there is? he wonders.
Sometimes the letdown comes from a man’s sudden perception of the sacrifices required by his ambitious ascent. What he has gained doesn’t seem worth what he gave up. Like Babbitt, who at forty-six exclaimed, “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life!” he feels cheated.
Having reached a long-desired goal, many men experience “feelings of having been had, or exploited,” explains Dr. Robert N. Butler, the director of the National Institute of Aging, who also has a psychiatric practice in Washington, D.C. “Some men reorganize and go on without much clinical noise. But then there arc those who wind up in the doctor’s office, like mine.”
A typical example, he says, is the man who “worked his heart out” to become a Representative to Congress. He made all the right compromises, like marrying the right woman in the area where he lives, and he took all the right steps in his legal career and touched bases with all the right organizations. But when he finally gets elected and comes to Washington, he discovers he doesn’t have as much power and influence as he expected.
“He comes into my office with a raving depression,” says Butler. “He feels as though this is not really the woman he loves—and that everything he’s been doing is really a hollow zilch.”
A similar sense of letdown is often felt by men who harbor no regrets for the sacrifices they made to build a career. They too experience distress when they arrive at the place where they have long been heading.
“A lot of men have lived until they were forty with the myth that if they work hard and move up the ladder, they will find at the end of it some satisfaction,” says Dr. Ian Alger, a Manhattan psychiatrist. “But a great deal of disillusionment comes when they reach a kind of stabilized position. They feel as if they have to settle down to die at that stage—or else try to make some big change in their lives and start looking again for their dream.”
An accomplished thirty-nine-year-old physicist describes this feeling of frustration vividly:
I’m at the stage where I’m taking stock of myself, my professional life, my family life—everything. It started, I guess, about a year ago when I had reached a certain plateau where I was established.
And that’s when I started to say, “Well, this bugs me, or that bugs me,” or “This isn’t good enough, or that isn’t.” Maybe it was one of those long rides on the turnpike . . . you know, starting to ask, “What the hell am I doing here? Why am I in this car? Why am I bucking this traffic jam? Why am I going home to Patty?”—all that kind of thing. You know, “Why do I teach? Why do I write papers? Why am I in this field?”
I ask myself, why should this guy who has the world by the tail, who is an associate professor in a department with an established reputation feel so dissatisfied? I wish I knew why, but you are always seeking and searching for something better.
I think it has a lot to do with the realization of the limits of your profession. In other words, you have defined what your goals are, what your position is, and what the importance of your job is in terms of the overall Universe. Eventually, I’ll be a full professor here, and I know what a full professor at this University is all about.
I’ve been to many international conferences, and given papers I’ve written. I know the feeling of people coming up and saying to me, “Joe, that was terrific, that was great.” I know the feeling of getting reprint requests. I know the feeling of getting gallons of papers published. I know what it’s all about. / know where the walls to the room are.
You say to yourself, “Jesus Christ, I don’t want to live in these walls all the time.” When you start to look around and see the limits, the walls of the room, any intellectual, any dynamic, any responsive guy would say, “This is great”—”Now what else is there?”
Like an undergraduate I thought, “Gee it would be so great if I could be a professor somewhere in some college.” Why? Because I was in awe of professors. I thought, “Boy, he’s really made it.” They represented the end of a long, academic, intellectual trek. There they were, with all those students lapping up their every word. I admired them, I worshipped them. They represented something just phenomenal.
And then suddenly when you become it you say to yourself, . . . “So what!” It loses its meaning, because you know yourself it isn’t so great. I mean if I were stupid and had an IQ of about 60 I could think, well, this is a magnificent achievement. But anyone who is reasonably bright, and has a reasonable sense of his field, can do what I’ve done.
There are guys who would give their left ball to be where I am. I really don’t know why I feel this way—it’s part of the machinery of my head, I guess. If I became President of the United States, I’d wonder why I wasn’t President of the World!
It’s like the concept of the house. The guy who gets the house, and all of a sudden he says, “Jesus Christ. What am I doing here? I’m going to be living here for the rest of my life! I’m like dead already.”
As this physicist makes clear, the disappointment experienced by the man who gets what he wants is not too different from the disappointment felt by the man who doesn’t. At mid-life the man on top, like the man who realizes he is stuck in the middle, must also confront the fact that he has stopped moving up.
In our society lack of continuing progress feels like failure—especially to men in their middle years who have become accustomed to constant climbing as a major source of gratification. Trained to get somewhere, they feel defeated when they finally arrive.
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