During the 34 years I’ve been a psychotherapist, I’ve heard many clients make the offhand remark they should probably buy a motorcycle as part of their “midlife crisis.” Not one ever followed through on this comment (and in my day job, I don’t nudge anyone in the direction of my own desires or broadcast my recreational activities). Not only did none of those folks ever become a motorcyclist, some weren’t even having a genuine midlife crisis. Still, it’s remarkable there’s a widely held notion these two things go together, and sometimes they really do. Let’s talk about why this might be.
What constitutes a midlife crisis, anyway? I bet the vast majority of people encountering that phrase immediately picture a cartoonish, paunchy, balding man in a red convertible coupe with the top down and his comb-over billowing embarrassingly in the wind. He doesn’t realize he’s a silly caricature and instead smiles smugly as though his car confers upon him the youthful sex appeal of a hunky Hollywood heartthrob. Everyone else sees right through his pathetic charade, viewing him and his delusional self-image with scorn or pity, but in his mind he’s livin’ the dream. Hellooo, ladies!
Of course, there’s a female version, too—with copious and exaggerated plastic surgery, awkwardly packaged in her daughter’s clothes, makeup and hairstyle, and sporting a leopard-print accent somewhere to make it clear she’s on the prowl. Again, there’s quite a gulf between how she imagines she looks and how others actually see her. For either gender, it’s easy to characterize the phenomenon of midlife crisis with these tragicomic stereotypes, but the realities are rarely this garishly flamboyant. Make no mistake, though, midlife crises can be all too real. The mundane examples from ordinary life typically involve a lot more tragedy and a lot less comedy. Nevertheless, the decidedly “immature” quality of these faux-adolescent images points to something legitimate. There is indeed a longing to return to an earlier era, but not simply as a way to recapture the vitality of youth—that’s something any grownup would like. The person having a real-deal midlife crisis is very often in hot pursuit of that vitality for the first time. Rather than returning to “glory days” that were a high-water mark in their past, they’re laying claim to an adolescence they never had. This is what imbues their efforts with desperation and propels them to act destructively, frequently burning down decades of investments in their marriages, careers and “respectable” lifestyles.
The burning down feels justified because all that stuff being destroyed was in some sense false, as I’ll explain later. First, let’s zoom in on how adolescence is supposed to work and what went wrong for this group of midlifers. The teenage years should be a time of gradual transitioning from the dependency of childhood to the autonomy of adulthood, with parents metering out expanded freedoms as the teen demonstrates increased responsibility. The teen naturally wants it both ways, to have the full dependency of childhood along with the full autonomy of adulthood—and who can blame them? This wish is readily understandable; it’s just not how the real world works. If family life is to prepare growing children for success out there, the lesson must be taught and learned that we all have to do something to get something. We can’t expect full support while we squander resources, disregard others, eschew responsibilities and pursue only our whimsical self-interests like a baby. (Sadly, some people do grow up expecting exactly this arrangement because the education I’m referring to went awry, but that’s a different discussion.) This tension between the teen’s wishes and the (ideally) measured, contingent expectations of the parents causes serious conflict. The teen wants out from under parental control, but to achieve this emancipation they have to prove themselves capable of self-restraint and self-reliance (on the parents’ terms) because of their dependency. In other words, they must submit to what they’re trying hard to escape. This conundrum gives “being good” a negative valence that wasn’t present during childhood, back when their self-regard was based largely on getting pats on the head for compliance. Now being good (compliant) comes with resentment and a sense of self-betrayal, while being bad (disobedient) feels strangely powerful and comes with a new kind of pride—a next-level sense of selfhood, that of being a separate, self-directed entity. As obnoxiously problematic as this process can be, it’s not only normal, it’s essential for healthy development.
Alongside this fraught conflict, there’s a shift in relatedness away from the family and toward the larger peer group, signifying an adaptive diversification of emotional dependency. We don’t actually move from dependency to independence, but instead become more interdependent, with a growing appreciation of the need to contribute to the group in order to enjoy the benefits of membership. This allows for less dependence on any single source of social supplies, but we still need other people. Among teen peers, we don’t get the automatic acceptance and support we enjoyed as a younger child at home (which should now also be paired with increasing expectations of mutuality). We’re exposed to a vast array of novel possibilities for our own emerging identity, with a newfound freedom to try these on for size, along with crosscurrents of peer pressure and seduction at odds with parental values. This exciting expansion of options further fuels a teen’s revulsion at remaining a good little boy or girl as defined by their parents. Rebelling against the old regime takes many forms, from not wanting to be seen in public with family members, to violating house rules and norms, and defying authority outside the home, possibly resulting in trouble with school and/or legal systems. It’s not necessarily dramatic, but it has to be a meaningful departure from prefabricated familial ideals.
Hence, the normal teenager is highly motivated to reject the constraints and identity imposed upon them by their parents in search of something they can feel is authentically their own. They may have no idea what that is, but—by definition—it can’t be something they simply swallow whole at home. So, they experiment with alternative personas, growing into and out of various peer groups as this morphing unfolds. They usually have to “learn the hard way” that following parental guidance could have kept them out of the ditch, but such first-hand evidence of what works and what doesn’t carries more weight than just taking their parents’ word for it. As adults, they may come full-circle, eventually viewing the same parents they considered terribly stupid as surprisingly wise.
Adolescents can be extremely distressing to parents, who wonder what happened to their previously nice, approval-hungry child. Now they have a mercurial monster on their hands who oscillates between infantile demands and transparently feeble pretenses of adult authority, all while actively rejecting the parents’ values for no better reason than the fact they are their parents’ values. This has much in common with the “NO!” perpetually asserted by toddlers during the “terrible twos.” In both cases, emergent selfhood is first established in opposition to someone else—“me” is initially defined by contrasting itself with “not me.” Only later does a more coherent sense of direction form.
If the teenager is to have an identity and set of values they consider authentically their own, they must wipe the slate clean first. They may well return to many of the values espoused by their parents after this tumult subsides, but then—and only then—can they feel like those values are their own. They’ve proven they can reject their parents’ positions, so returning to them later is a choice—a function of their autonomy instead of their submission. It may seem like they went to a lot of needless trouble (and put their parents through hell), just to arrive back where they started, but it was absolutely necessary in order to end up with a life of their own, rather than feeling like they’re merely an extension of their parents’ will and preferences. Note that parents who avoid conflict with their teens by imposing little structure for them to rebel against distort this process and can end up with amorphous, directionless young adults unable to launch. It’s best for everyone if they’re a full-fledged teenager during adolescence, rather than later in life (or never at all).
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With “normal” adolescence laid out in these terms, you can guess what went wrong for people who later experience a classic midlife crisis. Many never made the break with parental authority that would allow them to feel in charge of their own lives. There can be different reasons for this, but rebellion felt too dangerous and they remained “good children,” taking refuge in uninterrupted parental approval. They may have performed very well in school and sports, received much praise for their precocious “maturity” (while their troublesome counterparts were the ones actually lurching through maturation), launched successful careers and set up house with an apparently model family. No matter what rewards accompany this progression, they’re likely to grow restless in it because it doesn’t feel authentically theirs. After some number of years, the mischief begins. Extramarital affairs, eruptions at work, and other peculiar new behaviors reveal a brewing rebellion against the structures that were once reassuring but now feel intolerably claustrophobic. The step they skipped as a teenager is finally in play, albeit with much, much higher stakes. Unfortunately, they may be compelled to cast off everything they’ve built in order to create something new that feels like it’s truly their own, rather than conventions that have come to seem arbitrary, contrived and imposed upon them from the outside.
Motorcyclists are a small minority with a counterculture image among the general population. Whether deserved or not, that image makes having a motorcycle an emblem of rebellion against the larger mainstream’s status quo. While there’s a sense of freedom any rider enjoys in the saddle, the midlife crisis motorcyclist is after something beyond that. It’s the existential liberation from a lifetime of being a good little boy or girl, even if they also happen to be a heart surgeon or a bank president. They need to feel “bad” in the eyes of polite society, to break with the restrictive norms that seem antithetical to genuine self-expression. Motorcycles transport their identity from the familiar boring world to an exhilarating place where they can be someone freshly alive and different, a daring antidote to their earlier reticence and conformity.
Just as a teenager may try on a number of anti-establishment identities in quick succession, the midlife crisis motorcyclist may not stay within the riding fold for long. They’re not in it for the same joys that sustain lifetime members. They need motorcycling as a temporary vehicle (pun intended) to carry them out of their extended childhood and into a more authentic adulthood. And like many a rebellious teenager, they may wind up settling back into a life very similar to the one they fled or blew up—but, if so, this time they’re making that choice on the basis of their own needs and priorities, not those of their parents or other formative subculture. They could grow fond of motorcycling for other reasons during their sojourn as a rider and keep their bike, but it might also be discarded promptly after serving its developmental purpose. Obviously, motorcycles aren’t the only means to this end. Affair partners, career diversions, geographic relocations, and many other symbols or catalysts of a hoped-for transformation can operate the same way and likewise be abandoned afterward.
I mentioned none of my clients who thought of buying a motorcycle as part of their midlife crisis (whether partial or full-blown) ever did so. Ironically, given my personal love of motorcycling, that may have been a result of psychotherapy, which can temper people’s wilder impulses and channel that energy toward constructive initiatives more likely to address their actual problems. In the world outside my office, however, I’ve witnessed people using motorcycles as I just described. In some cases, I was baffled by their readiness to leave riding behind after several years of seemingly blissful involvement. How could they just walk away from something they found so fun? Now I realize riding probably served a circumscribed function for them. I miss their company, but I’m glad they enjoyed motorcycling for a while, and that it helped them complete a step they’d skipped.
