The midlife crisis as a middle‐class malaise

Drawing on scholarship and online testimonies, this article construes the midlife crisis as a quintessentially middle‐class malaise: a symptom of the middle‐class principle of investment. It afflicts people who have spent most of their lives investing in resources that promise security and prosperity while forcing them to constantly reinvest. In affording them a glimpse of the futility of these investments, the midlife crisis might even be considered an anti‐capitalist malaise. Yet, operating within structures over which individuals have little control, the responses that the midlife crisis elicits affirm the same capitalist dynamics that brought it about. The analysis reveals how individual responses to this crisis − quiescence, redirected investment and divestment − ultimately reinforce rather than challenge capitalist structures.