On the midlife crisis

I’m fairly comfortable with getting old – it’s one of those things that you get used to on account of it happening little by little every day. Like that analogy of boiling a frog in water, only it’s a really old frog and it’s been sitting in the pan for 35 years. Some frogs enjoy an average life expectancy of around 10 years, but some have been known to get to 40. Seems like a bit of waste for it just to live in a saucepan, though, even if it would be nice and warm.

Anyway – not so bothered about getting old. But the weirdest part is how I’ve come to understand the midlife crisis – the creeping realisation that despite feeling young inside (can it really be decades now since the foundational events and experiences of my youth? Why yes it can) you’re now an establishment figure, deeply uncool to youngsters and unable to comprehend the following generations.

I always swore I’d never be one of those old people flummoxed by technology, for instance, unable to work a telephone or thumping away at a computer keyboard and squinting at the screen. I’m doing alright so far, but there’s a fundamental difference in how young people experience the world that I’ll just never get. They way they use video, sneer at my full sentences and prosaic emojis, the fact they come with a baked in weariness at the world having grown up in economic and cultural stagnation.

Faced with ever increasing responsibilities – bills! a mortgage! power! – it’s easy to want to tap into your youth for one last hurrah, or try and hoover up the experiences you think the deprivations of your early years kept from you. It’s a process so tragic from the outside, but understandable from the inside. Or so I’ve heard. I actually already had the motorbike and convertible when I was younger, I don’t know what I’m going to do for my midlife crisis.