Out of Time

When I type ‘midlife crisis’ into the British Library search engine, I get 359 returns. Some are songs – ‘Midlife Crisis Blues’ by Jon Scott Cree, ‘Mid Life Crisis All The Time’ by the Cowboy Killers, ‘Mid Life Crisis’ by Faith No More. There are blogs and websites (midlifecyclist.com). There are research papers.

It’s noticeable that references to midlife crisis seem to increase exponentially as the dates become more recent. There is a handful of books and publications in the 60s, a few more in the 70s and 80s. But from the 90s onwards, midlife crisis is so widely understood that it’s used to apply to almost anything. Articles examine the MLC of the Bush administration, the World Health Organization, Indian technology firms, North West Syria. Even outer space: ‘The Ultimate Mid-Life Crisis: Active Accretion of Gas and Dust and Planet-formation Around Old Stars’. Middle age means that once-twinkly stars get weighed down by too much stuff, by family closing in on them.

As the decades progress, not only do midlife books become more numerous, they change in tone. After 2000, they are almost always funny, extended merriment concerning trousers with elasticated waistbands and grumpiness about modern music. These books are about men, and often written by someone called Mike. There’s The Full English, Pedalling Through England, Midlife Crisis and Truly Rampant Man Flu by Mike Carden, out in 2007. Uneasy Rider: Travels Through A Midlife Crisis, Mike Carter, 2008. So You’re Having a Midlife Crisis! Mike Haskins and Clive Whichelow, 2009.

In the 70s and 80s, books about the angst of the middle years took the topic seriously. These days, the idea of midlife crisis is no longer serious at all.

Jung preferred ‘transition’ to crisis, but after Jaques, midlife crisis became the most common phrase to describe the tribulations of the middle years, and the term was quickly expanded to include women.

Female writers tackled the subject. One of the most influential books was Passages, by Gail Sheehy, a journalist who was moved to write about the different stages of life when she covered Bloody Sunday and a young lad was shot dead right next to her. It triggered a sort of breakdown, a ‘whither life and what does it mean’ epiphany – a reasonable reaction, let’s face it – and she interviewed a lot of couples at different stages of their lives in order to work out a pattern for living. Much later, she wrote an updated version, a whole new book, called New Passages.

She wrote this version because in her original book, and other middle-ish books of the time, the assumptions around a woman’s life were very different from today’s. Then, marriage happened in your early twenties, kids followed soon after and you stayed at home to look after them and your husband. The midlife crisis of a woman in the 70s and 80s was assumed to happen after her children stopped needing her, and she was left to dust a lonely house for thirty to forty years.

Prime Time, by Helen Franks, which came out in 1981, looks at women between their mid-thirties and mid-fifties. In it, she describes a woman ‘no longer burdened by domesticity and childrearing’ who has the time ‘for emotional stock-taking, a re-examining of beliefs’. She tentatively suggests that such a woman might want to take on some paid work of her own. But many of her subjects are held back from entering employment by their lack of experience, their years of wife-and-mother work. And, shockingly, by their husbands, who want to keep their wives at home, making hot meals and organizing the ornaments, even though they’re out all day and the kids have left. Franks writes about a New York psychologist who held workshops for middle-aged women. Not to help them cope with their own midlife crisis but to learn how to cope with their husbands’.

Also in the 80s, Jim Conway, a US pastor, wrote several books about midlife crisis, including one on the midlife crisis of men, and another, with his wife Sally, on the female version. The books are great at pinpointing the feelings of intense inadequacy in men in their forties, the desire to jack everything in – family, work, house – and go driving across the country … But they are not so hot on their wives.

In Women In Midlife Crisis, Conway (Jim) writes this: ‘When I was going through my midlife crisis, Sally was teaching school Monday through Friday. My day off was Monday. In order to be available to be with me, Sally resigned from teaching so that we could get away more frequently for the recuperation and reflection time that I needed.’ Good old Sally, eh? Must have loved those jolly Mondays.

Pauline Bart made a study of 533 American women aged between 40 and 55, who were in psychiatric hospitals for depression but had no history of mental illness. Her conclusion was that the women were depressed because they ‘had lost the companionship of their children, they had fewer people to shop or cook or clean for, they had been brought up to fulfil themselves through their homes and families, they had no qualifications, had gained no work experience for many years, had no confidence, low self-esteem and nothing to look forward to’. It was 1971. At that time, the greatest users of anti-anxiety drugs were women aged between 45 and 54.

I read William Bridges’ Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes. In it, a man says: ‘I feel as though my whole life was built on a frozen lake. We all go on with our activities. We work on the house and play golf and entertain and have our fights. I put in long hours at work and think I’m doing well. Then every once in a while I think, This is ice I’m standing on, and it’s melting – or Was that a crack I heard just then? I try to forget, but I keep thinking, Damn, that ice looks thin!’

I read The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, by James Hollis. He writes, ‘Anyone in midlife has witnessed the collapsing of projections, of hopes and expectations, and has experienced the limitations of talent, intelligence and, often, of courage itself.’

I look up funny quotes. ‘Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall’: Joseph Campbell. ‘The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it’: Doris Day.

I think about how to write this book. I think: Wouldn’t it be great if the book itself had a midlife crisis? If it collapsed in the middle, started doubting itself and the way it had gone about its life so far?

Why are there so many funny midlife books these days? Has midlife crisis become so ingrained as a cultural joke that it’s hard not to mention it without us laughing? It’s like saying ‘farty poo bum’ to a five-year-old, or showing a picture of a dial-phone to a teenager. Ho ho, I know this one. The very concept is hilarious.

I say to people, ‘I’m writing a book on midlife crisis,’ to see if they laugh. They do. Some of them say, ‘Hey, interview me!’ Some say, ‘Interview him!’ and point to their friend or husband. But all of them laugh. Then they define themselves against it. They haven’t bought a sports car (they’ve bought a fixed-wheel bike). They’re not leaving their wife for the twenty-something secretary (she’s in PR and she’s 31). They’re not stuck in the same job they’ve always had (they’ve started teaching younger people how to do that job). They’re still in love with their partner (they just don’t have sex). Ha ha ha.

After a while, I realize they’re trying to hide their embarrassment. We are easily shamed in the UK and middle age is so cringe-making that we have to deflect it with a joke. Not only because to admit that you care about it is to admit a reprehensible weakness of character – can’t you go marching gladly into your middle years without making such a fuss? – but also because we will not accept that we have anything to do with the crisis part, that uncool state of being.

And so we all define ourselves against it. I say ‘midlife crisis’ to people and they point at others. Or they pick out the easy parts: the buying of gadgetry, their kids becoming obsessed with their old vinyl. They deny that the truths of middle age, the darker implications, might actually apply.

I wonder, though, if the jokes are getting in the way. They help us skim over the sadness, they mask our bewilderment, and the other option – despair – is hardly appealing. But the MLC jokes remind me of other funnies, the ancient ones, the take-my-mother-in-law gags, the anti-gay or racist one-liners. Comedy shows us where our fears lie.

I have a meeting with a TV commissioning editor. He laughs and says, ‘I don’t believe midlife crisis exists!’ He is wearing an earring, has split up with his wife and is dating someone fifteen years younger. I should have asked him if he had a new bike.

‘Have you had a midlife crisis?’ I ask S, who is a bit older than me. He was married before, and has two older children, who are adults themselves now, married, settled down.

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I had my crisis when I was 21. When D was born. Dad said to me at the time,’ (I know this story), ‘“Ah, the toothpaste’s out of the tube now, son.” You can’t push a baby back inside. You bring a child into the world and your life stops being about you.’

Yes, but that’s part of it, I think. The terror, and the tedium, and the sheer delight of your children. And you, knowing they will go.

I keep reading. It turns out that there are a lot of people – distinguished academics, psychotherapists – who insist that midlife crisis is not a thing. After all, unrealized goals, lack of self-determination and physical changes are not problems exclusive to forty-somethings: you can run up against them at any stage in your life. The academics point out that middle age is tricky, busy, overwhelming, but that doesn’t mean there’s a crisis. Nothing to see here. It’s just middle age.

Also, a crisis tends to be triggered by an event: a parent dying; losing your job; a long-term relationship breaking up; having a child, or the children leaving home. Any one of these upsets can trigger a sudden shift in thinking, a shaking of the foundations of your life. Which is what happened to S, in his early twenties.

But S is becoming an anomaly. These days, more children are born to women of 35 and over than to women under 25. And most of these crisis-triggering events occur around middle age, that busy time.

And, like I say, we make jokes about midlife crisis. This is the greatest evidence for its existence. Jokes are how the British acknowledge anything fundamental. If it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be laughing about it.

Somewhere inside, I seem to believe that middle age should be the pinnacle of life, the moment when all your previous efforts add up to something meaningful and you find yourself at the top of the mountain. I mention this to a friend, psychotherapist Philippa Perry, and she says: ‘That’s only a metaphor. Why not change it?’

For a while I try to imagine life as a long climb to the ultimate summit. But then I start noticing all the studies that indicate a different shape. Every time I find a piece of empirical research, it insists that, when it comes to our lives, happiness is U-shaped. Across several nations (Australia, Germany, the UK, others) the saddest time is in middle age. We’re full of joy when very young and very old, but struggle badly with the time in the centre. We go through our forties at our lowest psychological ebb. Some of the studies pinpoint 47 as our unhappiest age; some say 44. But it’s always in our forties.

Other research has found that great apes – chimpanzees and orangutans – have a similar life pattern. At the end of 2012, a global team (from Edinburgh, Arizona and Kyoto) studied 508 orangutans and chimpanzees and discovered that they suffer from middle-aged angst. As the apes live to around 55, they have their crisis in their late twenties.

Andrew J. Oswald, an economics professor from the University of Warwick, writes: ‘It seems the curve of happiness should no longer be considered a social and economic phenomenon, the preserve of economists, sociologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists or mysticists. Instead, intriguingly, the U shape appears to be so deep within us that it may need a natural sciences explanation.’ Not a crisis, then, a life condition.

More research. Pile it on. Let the book have its breakdown, with me. Let it look at itself and unpick what it sees. Give us the bad stats.

The average age at divorce is 45 for men, 42 for women. In 1970, most divorces happened to people aged between 25 and 29. In 2012, the number of divorces was highest among men and women aged 40 to 45; 65 per cent of divorces are instigated by women; 42 per cent of marriages will end in divorce, after, on average, 11 years.

Adults aged 45-plus are three times as likely as those under 45 to drink every day. Between 1991 and 2008, alcohol-related deaths in the 35–54 age group doubled in number. The percentage of 45–55-year-olds who take cocaine has doubled in a decade. Nearly a quarter of all drink and drug hospital admissions are of people in their forties.

Among marathon-runners, a study shows, 49-year-old men are at the greatest risk of suffering a heart attack; 93 per cent of such attacks occurred in men whose average age was 49. Other studies demonstrate that what is named as ‘pure exercise dependence’ is found most often in men in their forties and fifties.

Almost half of the long-term unemployed (47.2 per cent) are over 50.

There are two age spikes in male suicides in the UK: when men are in their early twenties and early forties. There has been quite a lot of notice taken of those in the younger group, but less support is offered to potentially suicidal middle-aged men. Because, you know, they’re middle-aged men. They’re the powerful ones, surely.

The bad stats. The dip to sadness.

We all want to be happy. But middle age, the time of money problems, of work responsibilities and looming insecurities, of boredom and frustration and a lack of self-realization, of caring for those younger and older than ourselves, of diminishing fitness, energy and relevance: that doesn’t always seem like such a happy place.

6. Jealous

I bring up the question of middle age with almost everyone I meet. People tell me odd, illuminating stories that help.

One man I talk to says he had a ‘massive’ crisis a few years ago, when he was in his early forties. It was a nervous breakdown, really, triggered by him splitting up from a long-term girlfriend, but it manifested itself in extreme, searing envy. Of people he didn’t know; of people he knew well. He had to give up seeing several of his oldest friends for a time because, in his eyes, they had everything and he had nothing and he couldn’t hang out with them any more because it was making him so unhappy.

What is unusual about his story was that he was a millionaire. But his cash didn’t help his crisis. This man wanted what his friends had – what I have: a partner and kids. Money made no difference to his situation.

I enjoy this story (the man is no longer in pain), not because it reveals that what everyone wants is to be loved but because I’m down to my last couple of hundred. It affirms what I pretend are my choices: to be married, to have kids, not to have thousands of pounds hanging around in my bank account. Ha! I think. I knew money didn’t bring you happiness! All my favourite books and films told me this. Religion too: Jesus turning over the rich men’s tables in the temple. They all insisted that being not-rich equates with being good. So the reason I haven’t earned millions is because I’m a morally superior person. It has nothing to do with me not having the requisite talent to earn a huge amount, or not caring enough to barter down prices, or not being able to keep hold of money when I have it instead of spending it in the wrong places.

Of course, if I didn’t care about money, I wouldn’t be thinking like this.

Money is part of life, and it should be thought about, as should jealousy. The story is about the man being jealous of his friends’ lives, and also about me being jealous of his.

A story about money.

In my late thirties, I was offered a chunk of cash by a publisher to write a book about Madonna, in honour of her turning 50. Very, very occasionally, S will remind me of this, our non-existent ‘Madonna patio money’. If I’d been able to work out how to write the book, we would be living in a house with a patio, possibly a small area of grass, maybe even – I know, I know – decking.

But I couldn’t bring myself to write 120,000 words about a famous person without some form of cooperation from that person, and Madonna was never going to give me any. I got in touch with a few people she’d worked with, set up some interviews, but when I approached her official representatives, the answer was no. So how would I write the book? Would I need to go through her bins? Did she even have bins? I’d have to follow her around as she got on with her impenetrable life, as she zipped across the world on prearranged schedules I would never be party to. I’d talk to security guards and fans and people who went to the same school as she did forty years ago, to anyone but the inner circle, and what would be the point? I would hate myself and it wouldn’t be the book the publishers wanted.

P was only a baby and I didn’t want to go away for weeks on end, and I didn’t want to write about someone who didn’t want me to write about them.

I gave back the advance. The book didn’t happen. Life went on.

My attitude to money has changed. In my teens and twenties, money was a means to an end. I would work hard for a bit, earn enough to do what I wanted, and then I would stop working to go and do it. Mostly, this involved going away. You don’t need much cash to do that.

Once I had the flight or the ferry ticket, once I jumped on the bus, everything else was fine. If I didn’t have anywhere to stay, I met people who knew a place to crash, or I slept in doorways, or stations (legs inside sleeping bag, money in socks, head on bag, arm crooked through the strap), or on abandoned pallets, or a beach, or I used a tent or crept into abandoned storage containers. I’ve crashed out in the railway station at Milan (after 2 a.m., the police moved us outside the station, to sleep on the pavement in the doorway). Under a bench in a public park in Zürich. On a rock on Lampedusa (all the beaches were sand-less, covered with jagged volcanic outcrops). All fine, because I had somewhere to stretch out and I was usually with a friend.

When I went away then, a lot of time was spent on the basics: where we were going to sleep, what we would eat, how we would get to the next place. No matter who I was with, we would somehow spend all the money we had in the first three days, then survive for weeks. Not having money made us resourceful: we would scour markets as they shut, pick up wonky vegetables, snaffle stale bread. We’d talk our way into nightclubs and then nick drinks, eat free tapas and nibbles put out on bars. We would find hash, smoke some of it and swap the rest for food. We would jump trains on scuffed-up, rewritten tickets. We would accept evenings out from men we knew probably wanted to sleep with us, just to get fed, and then we would run away. We would get by on charm and noisiness. We were young.

At the moment, I have to stop myself getting agitated about where we live. I blame TV property shows, stimulating a long-dormant home-improvement gene. Also: envy. My middle-aged emptiness, my inside absence, has become epitomized by another absence, the lack of a small patch of concrete in which we could shove some mouldy pot plants and P could practise his football skills. The Madonna patio. We can’t afford to buy a house with a garden in the area where we live because we live in London, and since the bank and I bought our flat in 1999, house prices have soared like someone’s spinning numbers on a roulette wheel. We would have to borrow twice as much as I borrowed for the flat in the first place, and the bank won’t give us that, because we’re freelance and we don’t earn enough money per year. Also, we’re too old. Add twenty-five years to my age and you’re way past retirement.

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