Intellectual Menopause

I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny than the more familiar one we know as midlife crises. It sounds much worse than merely buying a sports car and chasing younger women. And if you chase down the idea, it turns out it is worse. And sadder. And unfunnier.

Anyway I got curious, and started digging. Turns out this was rather hard to do since this rather obvious turn of phrase surprisingly has no usable footprint in either Google Trends or ngrams. Some tedious wading through the shitty Google search results turned up the earliest usage I could find in H. L. Mencken’s 1917 book A Book of Prefaces. The phrase occurs within a merciless evisceration of a semi-autobiographical novel called The “Genius” by a writer I’ve never heard of, Theodore Dreiser (emphasis mine):

“The ‘Genius,'” which interrupted the “trilogy of desire,” marks the nadir of Dreiser’s accomplishment, as “The Titan” marks its apogee. The plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity…“The Titan” is the history of a strong man. “The ‘Genius'” is the history of a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resignation,…he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. …As I say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the Dreiserian pen. But it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. It is as if Dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit.

…It is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. The book is an endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light up its killing monotony. It runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. Mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. Certain chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the fervid luminosity of “Jennie Gerhardt”; there are character sketches that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. But in the main it lumbers and jolts, wabbles and bores. A sort of ponderous imbecility gets into it. Both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced thinking of Greenwich Village. I suspect, indeed, that the vin rouge was in Dreiser’s arteries as he concocted it. He was at the intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish days that were no more.

My reaction to this passage was, for the most part, OUCH. And “attitudinizingly” is a solid word.

I asked ChatGPT, and it was wrong about the origins of the phrase, but did find me an interesting usage from 1944, in The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolley, another book and author I’ve never heard of:

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising. Those whom the public criticizes most, usually end up as full-blown mediocrities. A writer who has produced a respectable body of work and still writes on may be past his prime. He may go into a decline of intellectual menopause, producing more and more of what he does best with less and less feeling until the mechanical becomes habitual and the habit becomes invincible.

Fortunately, these don’t resonate at all. While I occasionally experience the temptation of “donkeyish solemnity,” I rarely surrender to it. I don’t feel much of a need to “attitudinize.” And mechanical refinement of technique is definitely not me. But I felt there was a germ of something real here, so unwisely, I continued drilling for my own nerve.

***

I stumbled across the most useful sense of the idea (and simultaneously hit a nerve in myself), in a 2019 article, John Ransom: The Cycle of Commitment, by Michael O’Brien, about a minor 1920s poet named John Ransom, who was apparently a founding figure in a rather sadsack 1930s literary-political movement called Southern Agrarians. This gang of a dozen odd writers produced a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays called I’ll Take My Stand, which leads off with Ransom’s contribution, an essay called Regenerate but Unrepentant. Ransom also apparently also drafted the Statement of Principles which was the basis for the discussion that led to the volume. The only name I recognize among the contributors is Robert Penn Warren, who is not an author I’ve read much of, or particularly admire.

But if intellectual menopause is a thing, John Ransom was probably the clearest case of it.

Here is O’Brien (much more compassionately than Mencken) suggesting that Ransom had run into intellectual menopause:

Life for John Ransom in 1930 was very out of joint. He was not writing poetry. He had abandoned his study of philosophy. The activity which absorbed most of his energy, teaching, seemed futile. In his early forties, he had reached a crossroads, an intellectual menopause. And, if one looks at his language in I’ll Take My Stand, it is striking how much it revolved around age. America was “adolescent,” the exponents of progressivism were “immature.” The South and Europe were “adult.” It was the same language he had developed for his aesthetic theory: poetry was the exercise of an adult mind.

Ransom was 42 in 1930, when he took the lead in this unironic manifesto-production exercise. I was 42 in 2016 when I wrote my own ironic anti-manifesto manifesto of sorts, Immortality Begins at 40. How did Ransom come to this juncture? Apparently, he had dried up as a poet and knew it:

The history of The Fugitive and Ransom’s involvement in it has been well told elsewhere. One need only note that Ransom wrote his best poetry in the early 1920s by mastering an ironic style to supersede the sentimentality of his first volume of verse, Poems About God. What is less often observed is that Ransom wrote virtually his only poetry in those years. After 1926, he was to strive for a new kind of creative activity but was to write little more verse. Of the 168 poems in the Ransom canon, just seven were written or published after the issuing of Two Gentlemen in Bonds in early 1927. Perhaps it was in the nature of Ransom’s poetry, even at its best, to be short-lived. It was about texture, the ironic stance adopted in the poem: poetry written about poetry, and not the subjects external to the style of the verse. It needed “objective” events only as incidence. As such, the style perfected and polished, it rapidly became redundant. He himself felt this, and was to strive for an escape route from the conundrum.

I don’t have particularly cultivated poetic tastes, but I did not like the couple of Ransom poems I sampled. But I’ll take expert opinion at face value (he was nominated for the Nobel in 1974). Apparently he was part of a significant 1920s school of poetry called the Fugitives (again, Penn Warren is the only name I recognize), and edited their magazine at Vanderbilt. But this is interesting — he turned to manifesto-ing and (as we’ll see) ill-advised menopausal half-assed political-philosophical activism — after the bulk of the work he’s appreciated for was done.

What about the content of this menopausal project? In his otherwise solid essay, O’Brien is too sympathetic in his assessment, which is almost apologia for Ransom.

Regenerate but Unrepentant is, in modern terms, a hot mess. Shoddy history, amateurish philosophy, lazy and unobservant sociology, uncritical pastoralism, knee-jerk anti-industrialism, and utterly wishful understanding of the post-Civil War South and the legacy of slavery… all combined into a rather ridiculous just-so theory that would be worthy of a modern YouTube crackpot. Even by 1930s standards it is bad. But it is executed with exceptionally elegant prose, and with several isolated gems of sentences and germs of insight struggling to break through (as Mencken notes of Drieser’s Genius). I recommend reading it (you can check out the I Take My Stand book from the Internet Archive). Hot mess this may be, but it’s not lazy, shitposty bullshit of the modern sort. He clearly cared deeply enough to put work into this thing, and what’s more, cared enough to vigorously suppress the kinds of doubts and skepticism you’d expect someone as clearly intelligent as him to have. And he clearly applied the one skill he did have — poetic precision applied to prose — to polish and refine this turd (there’s no other word for it) to a high gloss. That’s what makes the whole essay so sad. He had the energy to care, but lacked the taste (outside of poetry) to find something better to care about. And as it turns out, he didn’t really. It was some sort of menopausal fugue.

Let’s take a step back here: Here we have a successful and admired poet down to stylistic fracking and a mannered late-style formalism founding a loser literary-philosophical ideology within a region that was itself a loser in all possible ways. “Southern Agrarianism” as envisioned by Ransom in his essay is a trainwreck of an idea, and the elegance of the prose merely serves to highlight just how bad the underlying thinking is. I suspect it was probably seen as bad in 1930 itself, and probably didn’t need to go on to fail (as it did) to be consigned to the trash can of the history of ideas.

Why on earth would you do this? Is this the sign of intellectual menopause? Reacting to the drying up of creative inspiration in a core area (poetry in this case) by launching oneself on an ill-advised and clumsy meta project one is ill-suited and unprepared for (a workable political philosophy), and one that is mostly a doomed losing battle to begin with (finding a redemptive politics for the post-Civil War South — the whole volume has a sort of defeated air to it).

As O’Brien notes, a clue can be found in his attitude towards poetry itself, a kind of wabi-sabi tragic fatalism:

The act of writing poetry required thought: “The obligation to be aesthetic is the obligation to open your eyes very wide.” Poetry was simply another way of thinking, and thought went on in many different ways. For poetry was a function of life and, before one’s poetry could be “major,” one’s life must become “adult.” “The vision, as a matter of fact,” Ransom suggested, “doesn’t amount to much unless it handles values.. terms which count in practical and ethical life by daily repetition. The exquisite pain and joy of art depends on exhibiting and then surrendering these values.” And the basic end of art was tragedy or nostalgia, “the destruction of dear and familiar values.” Genuine poetic stature could not be extracted simply from the external world, for “its index is the amount of turnover produced in our gray stuff. The size of the values depends on how much we use them, govern our practical lives by them; our schemes and desires and passions which have dominated us and will do it again.”

…”It seemed to Tate [a writer of a positive review of Ransom’s last volume of poetry] that both rationalism and noblesse oblige, so important in the old Southern order, were basic elements in the Ransom style. With this, Ransom was pleased and thanked his younger friend. He confessed, however, that he did not write consciously as a Southerner or a non-Southerner. In the next breath, he went on to discuss his own creative problems as a poet: “It is perhaps for that reason that I am not willing as yet to confess that I shall not write any more poetry, or that when I do it will be a redundancy along the old lines.” He admitted that he wanted to write more, for “that way lies health and sanity; but I have a notion that it will become more and more radical and fundamental and less and less local.”

This is an important clue and a rather sophisticated if masochistic position: The point of the Southern Agrarian manifesto for Ransom was apparently to live out some sort of poetic tragedy of doomed values? This is interesting. It is not simply reactionary resistance or sophomoric romanticism. It appears Ransom was attracted to the project of a hopeless political redemption project for the South because it was doomed at a fundamental values level. A kind of new artistic medium to level-up to, after his preferred style of poetry. There is 4-dimensional personal psyche mangling involved in doing something like this. But now that I’ve seen this prototypical example, I can’t unsee it. I see it everywhere among my middle-aged friends. There is a perverse sort of going-down-with-the-values-ship poetic menopausal suicide instinct at work here. The healthy instinct, I think, is to question dying values and looking for new, more vital and workable ones. Not to solemnly live them out till they exhaust themselves.

The Southern Agrarian story did not end well or even dramatically, with any sort of poetic grace. It seems to have died with a whimper without ever causing a bang. After an insipid decade, “Southern Agrarianism” failed entirely, despite the fame of its leadership. And somewhat more reasonable philosophies won out in the attempt to construct a new politics for the South. Ransom moved out of the South, quietly repudiated the ideas of his misadventure, and went on to a third act helping found a school of “New Criticism,” as the founding editor of the Kenyon Review in Ohio (which I’ve at least heard of if not ever read). To his credit, he abandoned this ill-advised menopausal political philosophy adventurism before it destroyed him. But it’s not clear he learned much from it. The episode seems to have basically defeated him.

The rest of O’Brien’s paper is well worth reading too. I kinda like Ransom’s post-Hegelian-Husserlian “third moment” phenomenological theory described therein, and the theory of poetics he apparently derived from it. It’s underdeveloped but imaginative and interesting. I suppose his New Criticism was a sort of post-menopausal redemptive arc but it feels like a consolation prize for a poet who lost his way.

There is something of a Greek tragedy element to Ransom’s story. It feels like he was doomed from the start for some reason. On paper he had a successful life, with three major chapters to it (Fugitive poetry, Southern Agrarianism, New Criticism), capped off with a Nobel nomination, and a kind of premium-mediocre success as a man of letters. Yet, the inner arc of this story is one of a self-inflicted failure within a larger unfolding failure in the zeitgeist.

I think Ransom suffered a particularly debilitating intellectual menopause through his forties, and never recovered, mainly because of a sheer lack of courage. His thinking reveals a kind of weak pastoral romanticism and an avoidance of difficult and uncomfortable thoughts. A fetishization of a comforting naturalism and self-serving moral instincts. There is an element of the Cyril Connolley definition of intellectual menopause — absent-mindedly sleepwalking into the mechanical endgame of a paradigm that is clearly beginning to exhaust itself and not seeing the perils. And everything Mencken says about Drieser I think applies doubly to Ransom.

But I think his failure was not entirely an individual failure. More on that in a bit.

***

It is easy to see the many ways I’m not anything like John Ransom. I’m not a precise verbal stylist, let alone one with a poetic level of control rising to Nobel-prize candidacy levels. Even reading his hot mess of an essay, it’s clear he was a better writer than I’ll ever be (or, to be fair, care to be).

But while I may write or otherwise produce my own kinds of hot messes, I don’t think I am capable of the Ransom variety of menopausal hot mess. My natural instincts are against paradigm-exhausting endgames. I cannot commit suicidally to lost causes out of an attraction to the poetry of tragedy.

Once I see roughly how a kind of writing works, and I execute a few interesting pieces myself, I get bored and move on to something else. I have a deep hostility to manifestos, and a deep suspicion of any talk of “values,” whether driven by sophomore idealism or the sort of tragic suicidal commitment that seems to have been Ransom’s way. If I am intellectually menopausal, it isn’t this variety.

Yet… I can’t help feeling that I see a glimpse of something in this mirror that I can identify with. One could make a case that in some minor way, I have traversed a similar trajectory. At 42, in 2016, the age at which Ransom wrote his awful manifesto, my extended decade-long productive streak had slowed to a crawl. After Premium Mediocre in 2017, I stopped aiming for ambitious sorts of synthesis, and all my biggest hits are from 2007-17. The small group of writers besides me who passed through ribbonfarm 2007-17 could be considered an ersatz modern version of the kind of mid-century “literary movement” of which the Southern Agrarians (as well as the Fugitives who came before) were examples. Maybe “refactoring” is a stylistically coherent kind of writing I practiced in that decade alongside a few others. I did run a “Refactor Camp” for 8 years (2012-19), though thankfully we never produced a manifesto or “Principles” of any sort. But I was certainly a bit player in a couple of self-consciously political-philosophical “movements” like “postrationalism,” albeit reluctantly, that did weakly grasp at menopausal manifestos.

Perhaps most importantly, like Ransom in his menopausal decade, and unlike many self-consciously writerly writers, I don’t see writing (let alone a particular kind of writing) as an end in itself, but as a means to figuring out and living life itself. It is notable that Ransom, after failing in his menopausal project, also failed to make any sort of return to poetry, as he himself predicted in 1930.

Yes, there is some uncomfortable rhyming going on here.

I’ve certainly slowed down in some key ways since 2017. Though I continue to write “prolifically” in a narrow sense, on Substack, the stuff that I post there does have some of the mechanical/habitual aspect that Connolley identifies as the mark of intellectual menopause. Certainly, in terms of raw skill with words and ideas, I am “past my prime,” and at a comfortably mediocre plateau, but that does not truly bother me since I’m not really attached to either. I don’t care to level up in this particular game, or frack my style.

But perhaps the closest bit of rhyming I see is in Ransom’s dim realization of the psychological importance of continuing to write ‘for “that way lies health and sanity;” but his mistake was in thinking his only options were continuing to refine an exhausted style of poetry and doomed political philosophy projects. I think I’ve made better choices.

Intellectual menopause, perhaps, is primarily a lack of imagination combined with an unwillingness to look foolish and young again. But it is also a phenomenon larger than a specific individual. Let’s explore that aspect.

***

In my dumpster diving around the term, I also found a couple of interesting uses of the term in scholarly contexts. Here is a bit from a 1944 speech by the president of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, Fuller Albright, titled Some of the Do’s and Do Nots of Clinical Investigation.

It is perhaps a presumptive symptom of an oncoming intellectual menopause,-indeed, one might say it is evidence of a Young Turk becoming an Old Turk,-when one endeavours to lay down certain precepts for success in a field. It is probably fortunate that no one follows such precepts anyway, that each prefers to learn his own way, though this be the hard way. Be all this as it may, as I look around at those of our colleagues who have attained success in the field of clinical investigation and analyze what methods they have used, I see certain recommendations or “Do’s” which may be worth jotting down; furthermore, as I look further, especially into my own past, I see certain “Do-not’s” which may be equally worthwhile jotting down as practices to be avoided. I won’t attempt to define “success.” I do not necessarily mean academic recognition; I do not necessarily mean self-satisfaction; I just mean success.

Though the context is different from the literary one we’ve been talking about so far, the pattern looks similar. This is the “attitudinizing” Mencken talks about, except directed outwards at younger minds rather than reflexively towards past-self-authorship. And instead of an artistic-political manifesto, the menopausal scholarly mind seeks expression through some sort of “advice to my younger self” variety of commencement-addressing.

Menopausal tendencies can infect entire fields, and influence the young too. Here is an eminent (I assume) historian, William Appleman Williams, talking about the phenomenon in history in 1984, in a talk titled The Intellectual Menopause and Changing One’s Major

The title may suggest one of two things: either I am being flippant on the eve of retirement, or I am indulging myself with selected memories about a mid-life crisis. I must disappoint you. I did choose the title with a dollop of impish pleasure. It was fun. But I propose to talk about two very serious and interrelated matters. I will offer one primary proposition and then explore two of its implications. The axiom is that our historical training has become too narrow, programmed to pursue one subject and hence places us at risk of becoming satiated and bored with our expertise. I have an uneasy sense that we are becoming not all that much different than the engineers and the others we love to hate. Along with them we appear more and more like an angel contemplating a missile or a hangnail on the point of a pin. Over the last decade, for example, I have studied a sizable number of dossiers prepared by historians applying for jobs at Oregon State and several other colleges and universities around the country. I was first surprised and then increasingly disturbed by the limited range of their basic historical training, and by how many of their credits were accumulated under the rubric of “thesis.” During those same years I also served as an outside reader on various Ph.D. theses and for several publishers. My conclusions were similar – various, rather obvious connections, interrelationships, and even related evidence were simply ignored. There were none of those classic footnotes that can become the text itself.

This perhaps sheds some more light on the Ransom case. Practicing Fugitive poetry in the 1920s, declaring the Old South’s literary tradition dead and trying to invent a new one on its corpse — perhaps what Ransom exhausted in his 30s was not a personal poetic style, but a broader communal style that was itself part of a culture exhausting itself, and attempting a last, desperate reinvention. I don’t think I want to read Fugitive poetry even as a historical exercise, beyond the bits I sampled. It seems not just like weaksauce apologia/reclamation for reconstruction-era Southern society, but poetically a dead premise. A sort of corpse-like thing combining the worst of reactionary regionalism and a kind of zombie modernism. Maybe I’m wrong and poetry connoisseurs can correct me.

But systemic exhaustion of a larger group seems to be a thing with all political movements. In Rick Perelman’s Reaganland (2019, a follow-up to his earlier classic Nixonland), we find this use of the phrase:

…February 13 [1979] issue of Esquire. “This unknown intellectual,” [Irving Kristol] it read, “is the godfather of the most powerful new political force in America-NEOCONSERVATISM.” Inside, the package of articles, charts, and lists began with an epigraph from Karl Marx-“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” —and continued on for twenty lavishly illustrated pages. One essay described neoconservatives as “The Reasonable Right”—a radical reasonableness, however, because neoconservatives were the first conservative cadre in generations that fit comfortably within America’s true corridors of power, the places where the nation’s cultural common sense was formed: the university seminar room, the Manhattan dinner party, the nonprofit foundation boardroom. Liberalism was “going through an intellectual menopause“: a hoary, snobby, Ivy League aristocracy. Defending unfashionable values like family, tradition, religion, and unfettered capitalism was rebellion. And anything but crazy: Irving Kristol even “looks like a man of reason; arrogance is missing from his makeup.”

This is a 1979 description of the rise of what was initially called neoconservatism, but is now understood as Reaganism/neoliberalism, with the the former term being applied to the Bush-Jr-era war hawks. The “liberalism” characterized as undergoing intellectual menopause was presumably of the progressive Great Society variety, which is enjoying something of a resurgence today (or perhaps a dead-cat bounce 45 years later).

Let’s conclude this survey with the use of the term in John Gall’s Systemantics which originally set me on this trail. Gall’s example is a biologist who went managerial in his menopausal years:

Trillium’s Department Head, Baneberry, has for some years now failed to initiate new and interesting hypotheses about the behavior of the Slime Molds, his chosen area of specialization. Paralleling this decline of scientific productivity, he has exhibited increasing interest in improving the “efficiency” of his Department. (The medically oriented reader will recognize in these symptoms the insidious onset of intellectual menopause.) Baneberry has actually gone to the extreme of checking out of the library some recent publications on management science.

As you might expect if you know about Systemantics, Gall takes the idea of menopause beyond even a collective state of paradigm exhaustion that infects cohorts of individuals and incorporates the phenomenon in his model of complex systems. In the Gall theory, “menopause” is a characteristic of failing, or at least phase-transitioning, complex systems, with individual manifestations. It finds expressions in activities of a bureaucratic character. This is possibly worse than manifesto-derping or commencement-speechifying. Those are merely ineffectual. Bureaucratic enthusiasms also waste a lot of other people’s time.

And of course, this part does sting a bit, given my own transition 15 years ago (at age 35) from technical work to management consulting, a double-whammy of a retreat from the productive frontier: Upwards and sideways. Still, strangely, that doesn’t bother me much. I’m happy with my mediocre return to technical tinkering in my middle age.

***

Okay, so where does that leave us? Here is a compact summary version of the idea, based on all the usages I’ve found:

Intellectual menopause is an individual disease that men of particular temperaments and a particular age range (40-50) are particularly vulnerable to. It is especially liable to be triggered if they’re part of a paradigm that’s beginning to exhaust itself when they begin their careers, and is likely to infect entire cohorts. It is likely to manifest through behaviors like a focus on abstract values, manifestos, bestowing advice upon younger people, “attitudinizing” one’s own past, or retreating from frontline creative endeavors to supervisory and managerial ones. It is is a symptom of a phase in the lifecycle of complex social systems.

It is interesting that all mentions of intellectual menopause were in things written by men and about men. Perhaps women, because they go through a literal and much more dramatic biological menopause, have some sort of natural immunity against this rather pathetic intellectual version. Certainly all the women I know in the appropriate age range seem to have a vastly healthier sort of response to the issues we’ve been discussing. And little patience for the sort of weak-minded response the male patients of the condition seem to exhibit. Women have their own mid-life problems of course, but intellectual menopause seems to be a relatively uncommon one from my anecdotal observations. They seem to have smoother intellectual trajectories.

Or perhaps it is just the case that the period of popularity of the mental model (1917-1975 it seems) was a period when there simply weren’t that many women engaging in the sorts of activities in which intellectual menopause might manifest. But empirically and probably conceptually, it feels like there is something male about this condition.

Perhaps there is some linkage to the biological decline in men (the so-called man-o-pause of declining hormones etc. which is real if not a sharp phase boundary as in women).

Okay, let’s face it. I might have a mild case of intellectual menopause going. On the plus side, I think I do have some talent for getting the hell out of exhausted paradigms before they actually exhaust themselves. I do not like allying with loser ideologies and lost causes. And exhausted creative domains exhaust me. There is a reason I didn’t beat the Gervais Principle horse to death by making a shtick out of analyzing TV shows.

I also have strong natural immune defenses against the temptations of manifesto-ing and commencement-speechifying. And I have no wish to spend my future decades polishing the output of my 30s and early 40s as Ransom apparently yearned to do. I’ll probably polish and publish a bit to make money if I need it, but the activity itself holds no intrinsic attraction for me. Nor do I feel much of a need to narrativize, sanitize, and aestheticize my trajectory in some sort of sorry-ass personal validation pill. I’d like to attempt a memoir at some point, but hopefully I’ll do something more interesting with the genre and my past than “attitudinize.”

And I have definitely not started a misguided political-literary movement like Southern Agrarianism in an ill-advised lurch of menopausal anxiety. I managed to survive my 40s without doing that, though the temptations and opportunities were present.

But it cannot be denied I retreated to management. And the empirical data of my writing fits the pattern. The high-vitality stuff is already a decade in the past. The newer stuff on Substack has something of a workmanlike mechanical quality to it. I’ve obviously and visibly been searching for a new vitalist stream to tap into here on the blog.

I think I’ve dodged the worst variety though, and my intuitive responses — trying to learn a fundamentally new craft for me (fiction writing) and engineering tinkering with robotics and such — are the right seeds of a positive creative response. I am neither flogging a dead creative horse nor embarking on quixotic statesmanship adventures.

***

Analyzing my own case leads me to what is I think a useful model of the general case. To take apart a potential case of intellectual menopause, you have to work through the following stack of questions:

1. Is the person a man in his 40s? Likelihood goes up if so. I think this is primarily a male condition and we have to appropriate the feminine language to talk about it, and perhaps drawn on feminine strategies to deal with.
2. Is the person of a somewhat nostalgic, conservative temperament, drawn to formalism and aesthetics, including in moral reasoning? If so, likelihood goes up again.
3. Is the person part of an intellectual current beginning to exhaust itself and running into paradigm exhaustion, with a lot of cohort members also exhibiting symptoms? Likelihood really start to go up.
4. Is the intellectual current itself coursing through a larger sociopolitical milieu that’s dying in some way, taking large swathes of its associated intellectual elite culture with it? Is a whole “way of life” dying? You’re going to see a veritable epidemic of intellectual menopause, even in the relatively young.

I like this frame, and now that I have it, I see intellectual menopause everywhere I look, draining vitality in discourses, leading to predictably stale, stagnant and lazy patterns of theorizing and argumentation. I see many localized epidemics killing genuine curiosity, energy and vigor in investigative efforts. I see angry derpfests circling obvious drains in insufferable cozyweb corners. I see a sheer lack of fun — and its substitution by a kind of resentful and dolorous glee that can only find sustenance in schadenfreude — and a yearning for the sort of anemic pastoralism that John Ransom admired in Europe, projected onto the American post-Civil-War South, and ill-advisedly internalized into his life.

Look around. Some of our most prominent contemporary thought leaders, if they can be called that, whose tired and tedious rants dominate discourses, are clearly going through intellectual menopause. Certainly a great many leaders in the technology sector have succumbed in the last decade. And much of the literary world succumbed in the previous decade, in the immediate wake of the internet boom. The political commentariat has been going through an extended menopause for two decades now.

This is not entirely tragic. It is perhaps fine and inevitable for moderately successful men in their 40s and 50s to go through this. If I end up part of those statistics, there is no great loss. I had my fertile years at least.

What I find tragic is that I see signs of intellectual menopause even in very young people. People in their 20s and 30s, if they are showing up in public discourses at all, seem to be born into a mode of soulless and mechanistic endgame grinding, and even celebrate it as “engagement farming.” That, or worse, they descend into maudlin Values™ driven angsty political projects, usually within dead-end political subcultures that look doomed from the get-go.

Or most often (and this is maybe a good thing), they don’t show up at all. A good many people seem to be arriving into adulthood already menopausal at 21, retreated (regressed?) into cozy, fearful, fatalist shells of incurious ennui. To some degree, the “quiet quitting” and “laying flat” tendencies globally are a rational response to societies that don’t work for young people, but in another sense, there is a lack of imagination here. There are better options, even under the grim conditions of today. The world is in bad shape, but not such bad shape that 21-year-olds have to foreclose on the possibility of a fertile youth before they even get going. The world can afford to let people have their 20s and 30s. There are enough 40+ types around to do all the menopausal flailing necessary.

You might even call what’s going on a pandemic. An early-onset intellectual menopause pandemic. Without even a period of intellectual fertility between intellectual adolescence and normal-onset menopause.

Is there a vaccine for it? I think there is. It consists, for the most part, in simply shrugging off any sense of felt responsibility for the larger fate of the world until you’re old enough that it appears as a temptation in the twillight of youthful creativity. If the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, let the angry, ranting boomers and billionaires fret in futility about it, and let failing 40+ types do the pointless manifesto-derping.

But whatever your age, you’re probably better off simply trying to find a personal source of living energy first. Put on your own mask before assisting others. Whether you’re 21 or 42. Shit, I’m commencement-speechifying. Okay I’ll stop.

As for my personal prospects past 50, I am perhaps unreasonably chipper about them. After the initial stab of anxiety in response to seeing the term intellectual menopause, I realized I kinda didn’t care whether or not I have a case of it. If I do, and whatever I am doing is a response to it, or an expression of it, I’m at least having fun with it. It may or may not succeed, but I don’t think I’ll regret trying the things I’m trying. And I don’t feel like I’m on a doomed John-Ransom type trajectory.

As for the past — and intellectual menopause seems to be a preoccupation with one’s past to a significant degree — I don’t feel any particular urgent need to “top” my younger self. When I see the occasional tweet wondering where I disappeared, or talking about me like I’m dead and irrelevant, it curiously doesn’t bother me. In a way, it feels like I have better things to do than attempt to half-assed fulfill the apparent promise of my earlier life.

But we’ll see. I’m still in the risk zone for a few months. I suspect the risk declines sharply after 50. We’ll see where I go then.