{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Crushing Disappointment of Middle Age","description":"I turn 43 in a few weeks and, I must admit, I\u2019m feeling some kinda way about life. It\u2019s widely known that middle age folk experience weirdness for about ten years between the ages of 30-ish and 50-ish. Mid-life crises have long been the go-to fodder for movies, books, songs, and TV series. Stereotypes abound \u2013 women scrambling for facial injections and men for sports cars. Everyone sadly grasping for the youth they can never recover and simultaneously dreading the downhill roll toward death that will characterize the rest of our lives. Yes, the picture America paints for mid-life is quite bleak, even if it is sometimes comical. But we don\u2019t often get below the clich\u00e9s to deal with what\u2019s beneath this bleak picture, at least not as a collective people. We may do personal work, like finally beginning therapy or carving out space for a new hobby. We may even embrace physical aging and discipline ourselves to learn new things. These are all common aging practices we celebrate in our overly individualistic culture. Yet what we emphatically resist doing, as a society, is naming the elephant in the room. The word we seem afraid to speak out loud, but which also keeps us up at night, is the one thing we like to avoid recognizing together \u2013 disappointment. No one talks aloud about the crushing disappointment of mid-life. ","author_name":"Gold Digger Show: Finding God's Gold in Every Story","author_url":"https:\/\/www.amberhjones.com\/","html":"