According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, many successful young people feel old. The pressures of life weigh heavily upon them as their chaotic lifestyles take their toll.
Middle Age in their Thirties?
“‘Young people are feeling older and feeling pressure a lot sooner in their lives,’ says Tirrell De Gannes, a licensed clinical psychologist at the Thriving Center of Psychology. The center surveyed millennials and found that 1 in 10 experienced a midlife crisis around the age of 34.”
That conclusion is shocking, considering that many young people seek to live lives that tend to extend their adolescence beyond college graduation and into midlife. Child-bearing, midlife’s most meaningful task, is often delayed or skipped. The life goal for many appears to be to retire early at age fifty-five (or less) and then live until the age of ninety.
The midlife crisis often occurs when these extended adolescents wake up to the fact that something is missing in their lives and they do not know how to deal with life’s vicissitudes.
Eternal and Natural Law: The Foundation of Morals and Law
The Common Patterns of Life
Throughout Western history, a person’s life span was generally regulated by nature and the following of God’s Law. Life had its cycle of childhood, puberty, family life and eventual decline. Each phase in this cycle brought trials, successes and crosses proportional to the task at hand. Those who professed the Catholic Faith were blessed with supernatural and sacramental aid to help them along the way.
With the modern age, things changed. The pattern remained the same, but the stages grew longer, and three new ones—adolescence, middle age and retirement—entered the picture. As medicine improved, life got longer.
Adolescence and retirement became times of leisure and experimentation. In midlife, things became much more oriented toward gratification. Above all, the practice of the Faith declined and materialistic goals gained traction.
Choosing to Ignore Nature
This life cycle dissolved with the massive sexual revolution of the sixties. The primary reason is that humanity sought to replace God’s law with a regime of unimagined whims and immorality.
Indeed, new sexual norms like sex before marriage, contraception and abortion conspired against the forming of families. Feminism, deferred adulthood, eternal adolescence and euthanasia interrupt and destroy the well-regulated Christian life cycles. All these things replace God’s law and plan for each person with revolutionary human choices.
These practices are enshrined in society as unalienable rights. No one, the leftist dogma holds, has the right to tell anyone else how to live. The result is grown-up children who do not know how to live.
Is it any wonder that some young people now feel so old?
Learn All About the Prophecies of Our Lady of Good Success About Our Times
Unnatural Lives Generate Stress
However, as the WSJ article points out, the people who make such choices experience stress that their ancestors did not feel. A twenty-seven-year-old man admitted, “mentally and emotionally, I feel like I am 43.” A twenty-four-year-old woman worries about preparing for retirement.
Many of those who still live in their parents’ homes never took on adult responsibilities. When these individuals have to face life’s trials, they feel the stress of time and experience lost. Their midlife crisis comes from their skipping the valuable lessons of midlife.
Under the pretext of making choices or planning their own lives, each tries to reverse or alter God’s pattern for human existence. The human cycle is all messed up, and people cannot cope.
God is not a Dictator
However, life is not a straitjacket when certain acts must be accomplished at specific points. There is room for an enormous amount of freedom when individuals live in accordance with human nature. God gives each person free will and a unique set of gifts, goals and personality traits to reach sanctity and one’s full potential. True freedom and happiness consist of working with nature, not against it.
The third chapter of Ecclesiastes expresses a great and undeniable truth. The chapter begins, “All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.” A holy and happy life is best lived in accordance with those seasons.
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