The Crisis at Twenty

"The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down." — John Stuart Mill, Autobiography Late on a Sunday night, you cross off the last line of a list you wrote years ago: the degree, the job, the flat, the money. You wait for pride, or relief, or anything. Nothing comes. Feeling nothing after getting what you wanted is not permanent. One man left a careful record of how the feeling came back. In the autumn of 1826, twenty year old John Stuart Mill, a clerk at the East India Company in London, asked himself whether he would be happy if all his goals came true. The answer was no. This episode follows what he wrote about the winter that followed, and what slowly brought him back. Along the way: Mill's plan for his life and the question that broke it; Coleridge's lines on "a grief without a pang"; why he told no one; his own diagnosis, that the habit of analysis wears away the feelings; a French memoir that moved him to tears; Wordsworth's poems; his rule about asking yourself whether you are happy; the friend who called Wordsworth "flowers and butterflies"; and three small things to do this week. If this feels familiar and has not lifted in about two weeks, or if you ever think of hurting yourself, please talk to a doctor or counsellor, or contact a local crisis line or emergency services wherever you are (findahelpline.com lists them by country). Tell one person today. ▶ Next episode:    • Enjoy Your Own Company   ▶ Every episode:    • Unspoken Rules of Work and Life   00:00 Everything on the List 02:54 An Object in Life 06:32 A Dull State of Nerves 09:43 The Question 12:54 A Grief Without a Pang 16:05 No One to Tell 18:53 The Habit of Analysis 22:28 A Small Ray of Light 25:14 Ordinary Incidents 28:55 The Autumn of 1828 32:26 Ask Yourself 35:45 Flowers and Butterflies 39:29 Everything on the List, Again 42:55 The Books Behind This Story 📚 Sources John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), chapter 5, "A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward" (Project Gutenberg #10378) Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires d'un père (1804); English translation, Memoirs of Marmontel (1808), vol. 1: https://archive.org/details/india.his... William Wordsworth, Poems (1815, two volumes), vol. 1: https://archive.org/details/poemsbywi... · vol. 2: https://archive.org/details/poemsbywi... Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode" and "Work Without Hope," as Mill quoted them 🔬 Research mentioned Iris B. Mauss, Maya Tamir, Craig L. Anderson and Nicole S. Savino, "Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness," Emotion, 11(4), 807–815, 2011. doi:10.1037/a0022010 (the episode describes Study 2 only: after a happy film, college-age women who had read an article praising happiness felt worse than those who read an almost identical article, and disappointment in their own feelings was linked to that drop. A small study, so hold it loosely.) 🖼 Images Photos from Pexels: Tom Materne, KoolShooters, cottonbro studio, shy, Shane Aldendorff, Samson Katt, Rodion Kutsaiev, Gizem toprak, RDNE Stock project. Anonymous, A View of the East-India House, Leadenhall Street, London (Yale Center for British Art, CC0). Washington Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (public domain). Augustin de Saint-Aubin after Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Portrait of Jean-François Marmontel (The Met, CC0). John Arthur Roebuck (National Portrait Gallery, public domain). Thumbnail: photo by Tom Materne (Pexels). #quarterlifecrisis #lifeadvice #mentalhealth