Mamet talks about the fecundity of the "midlife crisis"

David Mamet, from "3 Uses of the Knife" --

Tolstoy wrote that if you don't undergo this reexamination, this revision, in your thirties, the rest of your life will be intellectually sterile. We correctly identify the advent of this phenomenon as a "midlife crisis" and strive to live through it so that we can return to our previously less troubled situation -- believing that this state stands between us and any possibility of happiness or success.

To the contrary, however, this state is the beginning of a great opportunity. Tolstoy suggested that it was the opportunity to change the myth by which one lives; to rethink everything; to ask, "What is the nature of the world?"


[with minor changes to clarify, at least from the way my mind reads this.]