Fear of Being Boring: Experiencing the Midlife

FOBB. Looks like a typo, right? But no, it’s on purpose. FOBB is an acronym. It stands for fear of being boring. This is a concept that usually comes up with clients in their 40s who are just starting to experience that phase of life known as the midlife.

This phase of life has often been referred to as the midlife crisis, but that’s a term I don’t like to use because it implies that we’re experiencing a crisis, when I think the idea of it being a transition is more appropriate. A midlife crisis is a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person's growing age, inevitable mortality, and possible lack of accomplishments in life. I prefer to refer to it simply as "the midlife" because taking the word crisis out of any sentence makes things feel less crisis-y to me, and I think this phase of life is not a crisis at all, but rather a normal reaction to the experience of reaching the midway point of life, when the act of assessing what we’ve done and accomplished so far combined with the knowledge that we’ve crossed the halfway point through life toward death can make for an uncomfortable and unsettling experience.

FOBB is an outgrowth of this midlife phase. It reflects the developing conflict between our self-image regarding how we used to live, what we used to do, and the lifestyle we used to lead, versus the reality of our lives in the present, and the often glaring difference between them. This often involves reminiscing about our youth, when we used to do exciting things, spending time with our friends, going out at night, staying up late, taking trips, getting out of our homes and experiencing life. Then we compare that to our current situations, which often involve being in a long-term relationship that might be starting to feel less exciting than it did earlier, or perhaps being a parent, with all the associated responsibilities that come with the position, and then add in the inevitable aging of our bodies as we struggle to push ourselves off the couch and hear our bones creaking as we rise and groan.

It’s natural to feel this way. In fact, you’re supposed to feel this way. It’s part of the process. Assessing our lives up until this point, considering all the things we might have wished we did or things we failed to do, all helps us process the experience of life in a way that sets us up to enjoy the second half of it. So this FOBB, this fear of being boring, sets up a false premise that exciting = good and boring = bad. Our lives might seem boring if instead of cleaning up vomit from a pre-party before going out at 9 p.m., we’re cleaning up vomit from a children's birthday party before going to bed at 9 p.m. But I would pitch that this description of life as boring is inaccurate. Our lives have simply changed in the ways that they are supposed to. And in fact, the more time we spend being unhappy with how our lives are different than we might have imagined, the less time we can spend being happy with how our lives actually are. Imagine that here, the midpoint of our lives, is a moment in time that our future selves might look back on and say, "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time enjoying that phase of life, because here I am in my 70s and my world has really shrunk." This is something I often experience with older friends and family who look at me as a 50-year-old man and say how they wish they were my age again.

Consider this when you are experiencing FOBB. Go ahead and let yourself think wistfully about your youth, and consider how your life feels boring compared to that. But after you’ve given yourself the space to feel that, remind yourself that somewhere in the future there’s a 70-year-old version of you wishing they didn’t obsess over their 30s when they were in their 50s, and instead focused on what made them happy in the present, and how they (you) can enjoy the second half of the journey of life.