Children want to grow up, and they often look forward to the prospect of becoming young adults with considerable excitement. Even when they feel unhappy, the thought of growing up gives them hope. In the background of their developing minds is a pervasive sense that the future will be good and better, perhaps, unimaginably better.

This state of youthful hopefulness and optimism tends to persist throughout adolescence and one’s early 20s – if checkered by some heartaches and other rubs of life – but there often comes a point in life at which many begin to feel as though childhood’s promise was a false one. For some, this feeling intensifies and leads to a midlife crisis. Why? What exactly is it that childhood promises and that adulthood fails to deliver?

It may seem that, perhaps, the answer has to do with particular aspirations such as becoming a singer, an astronaut, or a world-class athlete. Many children dream of such things and most do not, as adults, become what they dreamed of. This can be a source of disappointment. The situation is captured pithily and well by Joe Dator in a cartoon which features two preschoolers, one playing with a toy car, and the other arranging Lego pieces. One says to the other, “What do you want to be when you give up?” Similarly, novelist George Eliot in Middlemarch says that among the large number of middle-aged people “who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.”

But failure to........

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