Age is often the determining factor when judging certain modes of behaviour. Take drunkenness, for example. A twenty-year-old who drinks too much and ends up spewing his lunch all over the road is quite funny (“Youth must have its fling” etc). A thirty-year-old who does it is reprehensible (“Time to grow up, don’t you think!?”). And a forty-year-old in that situation is pathetic.
I’ve been mentally polishing that little bon mot for years, waiting for an opportunity to use it. Now I just have, thanks to my TL platform (yes, I know, I need to get out more).
In coming to terms with the onset of middle age, I am continually reminded of the words — so poignant and so damning — of the Fool to Lear: “Thou should’st not have been old till thou hadst been wise”. Leaving one’s youth behind invariably means facing up to the realities of diminishing vigour, physical decline, in perhaps most cases at least a degree of disappointment at dreams unrealised and a deteriorating “retail value” so far as one’s desirability in the job or marriage markets goes. To balance this, one has recourse to the dignity and self-respect that comes from whatever has been built up and whatever has been learned in preceding years. Take that away, and growing older becomes a daunting prospect indeed.
People react to middle age in different ways. Perhaps not the most commonly, but certainly the most talked about is how certain men resort to reckless sexual adventurism, pursuing younger women in a usually doomed bid to rekindle their youthful energies and start over. This certainly happens, but is unlikely to be typical. Ultimately most men, apart from obvious moral qualms, will be realistic enough to resist the urge to risk everything they have built up through pursuing relationships whose consequences, as common sense tells them, will most likely be heartbreak, guilt and recriminations.
My own developing mid-life crisis is taking the form of a premature yearning for retirement, despite official retirement age being still a good 20-plus years away. Natural youthful ambition is giving way to a fear of the future, the uneasy sense that with the best years apparently behind me, my value as an employee has subtly diminished leaving me vulnerable to the ultimate horror of being cashiered before my time.
There is also the prospect of mounting boredom. Whatever has been done in the previous two decades will most likely have to be done in the next two as well, made easier to carry out because of one’s experience but more difficult to actually do given the wearisome sense of “been there done that”. Someone who feels that way should look to move on, but the realities of employment prospects for middle-aged males, especially white ones, seldom makes this a wise or realistic option. How well I understand now why people become more hide-bound and conservative the older they get. It is because the future seems so threatening in light of their waning powers that they begin battening down the hatches and seeking to preserve whatever they have achieved before old age truly sets in.
This, at any rate, is what I am struggling to overcome as I approach my 43rd birthday. I can only hope that my own sense of lethargic defeatism will prove temporary and that I will acquire a “second wind” to see me through the second half of my existence as a productive society member. Perhaps others who have gone through the same kind of phase and come out the other side more or less intact will be able to reassure me in that regard.
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