Mid-Life Crisis

After watching last Friday’s video a few times I thought about how ironic it is that a man should be made to feel infantile, or “less than responsible” for indulging in his own wants. For certain a surprise sports car purchase may be an extreme example, but sometimes over-exaggeration is necessary to illustrate a larger point. That larger point is the nature of defacto personal and social control women exercise over men. It’s part of the feminine Matrix to think that ‘responsibility’ should be uniquely framed in what best serves the feminine. We literally don’t know any other way to interpret it most of the time.

When a man begins to ‘go rogue’ the feminine imperative has many pre-established social conventions to mediate this. Obviously designating ‘responsibility’ to serve the feminine frame is the social control, but there are other powerful conventions that the imperative uses. One of these is the Myth of the Mid-Life Crisis.

A lot of hokey comedies have been produced covering mid-life crises. Usually the main characters are cast as overweight schlubs trying to recapture their by-gone days. In real life men are ridiculed, usually around age 40, for losing their mojo and acting ‘irresponsibly’ or ‘erratically’ in some silly gesture of reclaiming his independence. However, this masculine shaming hides a more desperate latent purpose for the feminine.

The SMV Crossover

The most stereotypical mid-life crisis occurs for a man around age 40. It’s important to remember that a man’s SMV really begins to peak between 38-42. It’s at this point that men have the best chance to truly unplug from the Matrix; and it is also at this point that the Threat of a man becoming self-aware of his now fully developed SMV has it’s greatest urgency for women to repress him from realizing it. Even life-long blue pill men generally come to an understanding that their wive’s SMV has dropped and their own SMV is greater. For the first time in his relationship history, he faces the Cardinal Rule of Relationships from his own perspective – women need him more than he needs women.

The feminine imperative has come to expect this awakening. In decades past, before there was a formalized Game, before there was the connectivity we have today, the feminine imperative relied upon social controls that limited a man’s becoming aware of his SMV. Through pop-culture and mass media men were taught to expect this ‘crisis’, even enlisting men to promote the idea. However, the imperative cast the ‘crisis’ as irresponsible and juvenile. It relied upon the time-tested shaming of masculinity in the hopes men would self-regulate when the time came that his SMV outclassed that of the women in his life. So we got hokey movies, and ridicule of men wanting to trade-up their wives for ‘trophy wives’.

Mid-Life Awareness

Probably the most common story I experienced when I did peer counseling back in Nevada was the disillusioned married guy. Most of these guys were professionals, mid to late 30’s and all their stories were the same; “I feel like I’ve done everything anyone ever expected of me for the past 10-15 years and I get no appreciation for it.” These guys “did the right thing” and either their wive’s were unresponsive to them or they still viewed these men as a “fixer upper” project that they were constantly working on.

This experience is what helped me to better understand the myth of the Mid-Life Crisis. Men, in most western culture’s do in fact experience a mid-life crisis, but this isn’t due to the trivialized and oft ridiculed by pop culture reasoning. Women, and feminization, would have us believe that men experiencing a mid-life crisis need to buy a sports car or divorce their wives in favor of a ‘trophy wife’ due to some repressed need to recapture their lost youth. This of course fits into the feminized myth that men are egoisitic, simple creatures and masculinity is infantile in nature, but this only serves to reassure women that they “still got it” at 40.

The truth about men’s mid-life crises isn’t about recapturing youth, it’s about finally understanding the trappings they’ve been sold into through their 20’s and 30’s and coming to terms with that often horrible truth. Some men do in fact buy the sports car, get the new hottie wife or act in some fashion that appears reckless and irresponsible. This isn’t due to infantilism, but rather new understanding of their own position as men. They’ve “lived responsibly” for so long and for so little appreciation that when that true realization is made they feel the need to move. They’ve become respected, put in the hours, the sacrifice, the censoring of their own views. They realize now that they’ve sold off true passions in favor of maintaining what others have told him was his responsibility – whether it was his choice or not. And all for what? A fat wife? A shrew? Maybe even a fantastic marriage and a wonderful family life, but also a nagging doubt about not seeing enough of the world by 40 because of it.

I worry about men who don’t come to this crisis, these are the men who are truly lost. These are the guys who remain life long AFCs, happy in their ignorance.