Brecht made some waves this week. Brecht Vandelanotte. The man who testified in the Age section about his life as a 38-year-old. He has everything sorted in the house-garden-family department. A girlfriend he has been with since high school, a stable job, two wonderful sons, a house. He loves his family to death. And yet it hurts. He is overwhelmed by doubts. Because hey, is this it? Is this the life he wanted? One of the most haunting passages in his testimony is this: “There is a word for losing someone, grief, but there is no word for having something you may not have wanted. That has nothing to do with the love I feel for my boys, I love them to death. But I struggle emotionally with that father role, because I have never really longed for it.”
I heard and read a lot about Brecht in recent days. People in their thirties and forties who discussed it; live and on Instagram: was he spoiled? Wasn’t it ungrateful to question the treasures you were surrounded with? Or had life played a trick on him? One person posted on Instagram that he should just put his fomo away. Someone suggested that he should release his inner Peter Pan. That he had fallen into the trap of conformism, according to the other. A certain Esther 1986 typed something to the point: “This is someone who has done everything according to the standard and now thinks: is this it? What next? Is this what they mean by being happy? Successful? And so forth! There are also people who do not adapt, who did not have children. Who work for themselves. People who don’t have a mortgage. People who travel a lot. People with a lot of passion for their own business. People who don’t live like ‘everyone else’. He has now become everyone, and now realizes that.”
But there is also a lot of recognition, a lot of understanding. Lots of hearts. Two words that come up often are auto and pilot. You can imagine it like this: how one thing (school, youth movement, teenage sweetheart) leads to another (studying, living together, getting married, children). How from the first step in this chain you almost automatically end up on the next one. And suddenly looks outside and sees a trampoline in the garden.
Crisis sung about
You can immediately come up with a soundtrack. ‘Is this all?’ by Doe Maar is allowed on one, because it so literally expresses what Brecht says: “Sit down, because I want to talk to you/ I am no longer as happy as I was back then/ No, don’t be afraid, I don’t want to leave you, no/ There is something and I can’t do anything about it/ We don’t lack for anything, we have everything/ A child, a house, a car and each other/ Mmm, but do you know, dear darling, what the case is, ah/ I’m looking for something more, I just don’t know where.” Or how about Once in a lifetime by Talking Heads? And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile/ And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
It is an ingredient of the classic age crisis. Call it midlife, call it quarter. The realization that life is a series of streets in which more and more doors close than open. It is what Marianne Faithful sang in The ballad of Lucy Jordan: “At the age of thirty-seven/ She realized she’d never ride/ Through Paris in a sports car/ With the warm wind in her hair. Or as writer Maya Angelou puts it: “There is no greater pain than carrying an untold story inside you.”
Within twenty years you will regret more the things you didn’t do than the things you did do. So goes a well-known aphorism, long incorrectly attributed to writer Marc Twain. But isn’t mourning for the things you do have, as Brecht puts it, basically the same as mourning for the things you don’t have? Ultimately it is a matter of choice in all directions. Because you have chosen one path, there is another path on which you are not walking life, and you can regret that or you can be happy about it because that other path was not for you. And you can have doubts and still want to explore the path. Or you can doubt and let the doubt make you unhappy.
I myself have a kind of unproven theory about 37 as a crisis age. Maybe because I was 37 myself when I shot down quite a few pillars of my life – job, relationship, house – and for a while developed a visceral aversion to anything that smelled even remotely like bonding and commitment in all those areas. And because I saw the same thing more than once among my peers.
You cannot put an age on it, says developmental psychologist Bart Soenens (UGent): “Middle adulthood is an important moment for existential reflection because time is becoming a precious commodity, but it is certainly not entirely age-related. It’s a feeling that even young adults can have when they feel stuck in their choice of study or hobbies. Often because they are good at something and are automatically pushed in a certain direction based on that.” Soenens understands people who are going through such a crisis: “I don’t think you should underestimate the forces pulling at our sleeves.”
Keep an eye on your compass
Existential regret. That’s what it comes down to. Soenens: “The feeling that you have made choices that were perhaps not well thought out enough, as a result of which you have rolled in a certain direction without much awareness.” He calls our internal compass an important element: “That is the deepest layer of ourselves as a person: our values, interests and preferences. One layer deeper than the identity with which we present ourselves to the outside world. Over the course of their lives, people sometimes lose contact with their internal compass, then encounter it and wonder whether what they are doing suits who they are.”
Soenens sees the analogy with a compass on different levels: “Just like a real boat compass, it points the direction in which the ship should go, but it also serves to see whether you have stayed on course. We know that people who are in good contact with their internal compass easily make choices that match who they are, they quickly sense whether something clicks with their inner self. But even after you have chosen a well-considered course in life, you can still drift. Then you risk waking up at a certain point with the question: how on earth did I end up here? So you have to regularly blow the dust off your compass, question yourself and see where you stand, and stay awake.” It explains why Brecht’s story is so polarizing. Those who navigate life with a good internal compass may not understand the existential regrets that can plague a person.
Okay, so what? Want to get back on track? Simple with a rowing boat perhaps, but not with a tanker that already has an entire house and household attached to it. Soenens: “There is no such thing as a recipe for success. First of all, you need to reconnect with your internal compass and look that uneasy feeling straight in the eye. Rediscover what your values and preferences are. A psychotherapist can help with this. The next question is what small or large adjustments you can make to your life structure to get closer to that internal compass. Sometimes this can be done with minor interventions. Because you shouldn’t necessarily blow up your entire life. For example, you can incorporate adventurous moments into life, follow your gut, do things that help to shake off that feeling of petty bourgeoisie.” But depending on the gap you feel, it can also be something else: looking for quiet moments again, when you are alone with yourself, learning a new language, planning a regular reading day, skydiving, and so on.
Jaguar on the doorstep
In any case, reader Matthias Van Damme did not limit himself to minor interventions. He sent us a letter to Brecht in which he revealed himself as a fellow sufferer. A long letter. So I take a few excerpts from it: “I am also 38 and feel unrest when I look at my current life. Almost without noticing it, I have built a comfortable life that I should be proud and satisfied with, but which feels emptier and emptier. I already tried to make adjustments. The most important change was my divorce, especially because it clashed with my husband when it came to the direction of our life together. We became the childless gay equivalent of the successful hetero family, a mansion in the center of Antwerp, an investment property, a Jaguar and a Mini on our doorstep and the obligatory trips to Bali, Vietnam or Mexico.” A trip to Romania put Matthias on a different track. He not only fell in love with the country, but also with Vlad. He exchanged his Mini for a kangoo that he converted into a micro camper with which he will explore the Romanian countryside. “I found comfort in this sentence ‘One must be patient with the unresolved issues in life and cherish the questions themselves’ that I read in DS Magazine. It is a statement by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It gave and gives me a new basic attitude that I try to strive for as much as possible. To put the search and not-knowing first, to become a beginner again and to unlearn doctrines that we were spoon-fed.”
Finally, back to Brecht. How did those around him react to his candid testimony? “It certainly wasn’t the case that my girlfriend opened the newspaper on Monday and saw this story. I involved her from the beginning. We talk about that very often. She also read the draft. She is very positive about it. In the broader family environment I don’t know, I may feel some awkwardness there. Fear too, fear that our family is about to break, which is really not an issue, really not. I have received many warm-hearted responses from strangers, people who very much recognized themselves in my story.” And himself? No regrets? “I still think that it is not a bad thing to mention these kinds of internal struggles like mine and make them open for discussion. That seems very human to me.”
You can read more thoughts about life in the blog From the heart
