Our lives, Setiya argues, are founded on incommensurable values, which cannot be evaluated using a simple felicific calculus. He became filled with “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”. There was “something hollow in the prospect of doing more of it, in the projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death”. And yet, six years ago, at the age of 35, he began to think of the life that he had worked so hard to build and to see it as a series of diminishing returns. A professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a happy family life, he recognises his good fortune. Kieran Setiya is nothing like Bill Stoner. At 42, with a failed marriage and failed career, he “could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember”. Our role model is Stoner, the freshman-composition drone at the University of Missouri and eponymous hero of John Williams’ classic novel. But we now know that we are auditioning for another role: the academic ghost we will one day be, haunting the corridors and rattling our chains. We midlife academics carry on doing the same job as best we can. You are “moving forward” all right – in one direction. Meanwhile you welcome new colleagues, attend retirement dos and go to funerals. After you have been through enough of these iterations, the organisational amnesia – in which every year becomes year zero and we are always “moving forward” – starts to feel quite surreal. Its audits and assessment exercises consume much time and worry and then vanish like snow, to be replaced by something worse. The managerialism of the modern university is project-driven. You are a year older but are surrounded by young people who are not. Each year, amid the sweet, melancholy, annual death that is autumn, the cycle begins again. Life is linear university life is cyclical. For an academic, midlife has an odd feel.

Midlife setiya