What is middle age? The melancholy of life’s middle years

“Midlife is a point of no return, that place in a journey where the beginning is further away than the end.” So writes Patricia Cohen in her excellent examination of middle age, In Our Prime.

This line flashed into my mind when I stumbled across a terrible piece of information, released by the ONS: the median age for a man in the UK to die is 82 years old. I am 41 years old. I have passed the point of no return. If death is a black hole, I am within its event horizon. We will soon ask you to return your seat to the upright position as we begin our final descent.

Middle age is a tricky thing to pin down, not least because it’s a club at which nobody wants to be a member. Those, like me, who are standing dubiously at the velvet ropes, hoping the bouncer doesn’t let us in, think that real middle age begins at 50 or even 60, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we?

“It’s entirely constructed,” says Dr Eliza Filby, a historian of generational evolution. “It’s not biological like puberty.” I can console myself with the knowledge that until recently there was no middle age. Before the 20th century, life expectancy in developed countries was less than 50. You were young and then you died of consumption, or fell into a threshing machine. There wasn’t any need for the term “middle age” so nobody bothered to come up with one. It was only with the advent of leisure time and increased life expectancy that a recognisable definition of “midlife” began to emerge. Advertising execs soon realised that people with property and managerial jobs were the ones with all the money, and that selling them the dream of an extended youth was a lucrative business.

I’m lounging on the deck of life’s cruise liner, sipping a beer, enjoying the band. Across the ocean, I can just about make out the iceberg

Filby says the modern conception of middle age was defined even later, as recently as the 1980s. “The idea of the midlife crisis, of buying a sports car and realising you’re a sellout, is a narrative that was invented by the boomers,” she tells me. “It came about when the hippies became yuppies.” That flavour of midlife crisis is already beginning to feel antiquated. As the first generation of millennials reach middle age – I am a pioneer in this field, being what is unfortunately referred to as a ‘geriatric millennial’ – they are less likely to buy a sports car (in this economy?) than they are to quit their job and go backpacking through Nepal, or at least speak interminably at dinner parties about how they intend to. 

“It’s a very different trajectory,” says Filby. “Millennials have pushed the idea of delaying adulthood to its limits. We didn’t invent it but we really perfected this new life stage called ‘kidulthood’. We remained dependent on the bank of mum and dad, we struggled to get on the housing ladder, we wanted to travel and delay having babies. We extended what I call the ‘freedom years’ – but this means we have gone almost overnight from being kidults to being middle aged. It crept up on us. For a long time, millennials were synonymous with youth, because we’d been younger for longer than any previous generation. We’re only now realising there’s this new generation who think millennials are really sad, and really quite old.”

I feel attacked. I look young for my age (although when I suggested this to a Gen Z colleague they replied: “Really? I suppose I don’t know anyone else as old as you”). I go to the gym. I can’t be middle aged, it’s preposterous. But I can see differences between generations. Those in Gen Z drink less. They go clubbing less. They’re not as fun, essentially. “Hedonism is to be found in the middle aged rather than the young,” agrees Filby, who describes friends in their fourties who take regular sex- and drug-fuelled holidays to Butlins. She also points out that seeing these generational differences probably says more about us than it does them. “Young people have always been criticised for being lazy, entitled, not willing to work hard, right back to the days of Aristotle. When you start to think like that it’s a demonstration of your age.”

•••

This is too bleak an analogy. When I think about getting older it’s with a sense of not-entirely-unpleasant melancholy (the Germans will have a word for this, no doubt), a realisation that my number of potential futures is becoming ever-smaller, that each day a multitude of invisible doors close without me even realising. When you’re a child – at least a middle class one growing up in England, like me – your possibilities seem endless. Kids think they can be astronauts or football players. But the possibilities soon go into freefall. It quickly became apparent I would never play for Manchester United. I would never even play for Colchester United. I was bright but not a genius. University beckoned but not Oxbridge. With every passing year the slab of possibility is whittled down further and further, becoming more solid and defined but also more prosaic. Raw potential is fed into the top of the machine and reality slides out of the bottom like a string of human sausages.

In my twenties and thirties, the concept of my own mortality was entirely abstract. At 41 it’s still a distant cloud on the horizon, but a cloud nonetheless. I’m lounging on the deck of life’s transatlantic cruise liner, sipping a beer, enjoying the band. Far away, across the ocean, I can just about make out the iceberg. Nothing to worry about, yet. Its jagged edges are still hazy, I can’t imagine how horrifying it will look up close, can’t conceive of the moment when I’ll hear the rending of metal against ice. But it’s there, vast and cold and inevitable.

There are roughly 30,000 days in a lifespan of 82 years, which gives me 15,000 remaining, with a prevailing wind. But not all days are created equal. The perception of time speeds up as you get older. My parents describe feeling shell shocked at the realisation they’re somehow in their seventies. Five minutes ago they were young but time trickled away while they weren’t looking, escaping silently through a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Ask a teenager what they’re doing and they’ll tell you “nothing”. And why not? As Roger Waters puts it in the Pink Floyd song Time: 

You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

But what did he know? He wasn’t even 30 when he wrote that. Still, you find the same sentiment again and again, every time the Venn diagram of pop culture and middle age overlaps. Life’s middle years are defined by a sense of loss, of realising too late that youth has moved out and changed the locks. It’s everywhere, from the sublime Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker

To the ridiculous Sunscreen by Baz Luhrman:

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; Oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you

In the Oscar-winning film Sideways, Paul Giamatti’s character – who is somehow five years younger than I am now – drinks his way to the realisation that he will never be a great novelist. In Before Midnight Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy long for the simplicity and passion of their youth. In Call Me By Your Name a father tells his son: “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Before you know it, your heart’s worn out, and as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it.”

Life’s middle years are defined by a sense of loss, of realising too late that youth has moved out and changed the locks

We can only do as Dylan Thomas urged and refuse to go gentle into that good night. Youth may have immediacy but there’s an urgency to the middle years, a realisation that your most precious commodity is in dwindling supply. The less time you have, the more valuable it becomes. Simple economics. You begin to measure your life in things you won’t do, rather than things you will. Every decision takes on a heightened significance. A decade ago I bought a copy of Ulysses, which remains stubbornly unread. Will I ever start it? Probably not. What else will I never do? Have I visited Moscow for the last time? Will I see Man United win the league again?

I’m writing this from a position of privilege. I have my health. I do not live in a warzone. I have the kind of job that allows me to pen sprawling essays on middle age. I am also a man, which, as with so many things in life, makes middle age relatively straightforward. There is no sudden and uncomfortable biological shift, no perimenopause and menopause, no grieving an irreversible change from one state of being to another, no hard cut-off date for the possibility of having children. “It’s a milestone for women,” says Filby. “It hits differently.” For men, middle age is a gradual decline that begins around your 18th birthday. It’s incremental, measured in the thinning of hair and expanding of waistlines, what Walt Whitman described as “the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea”.

The process is further complicated by the age in which we live. Our digital existence allows the possibility of a parallel life, one that’s curated and manicured and filtered. I have friends who are barely recognisable from their Facebook profiles. We attempt to hold back the sands of time through cosmetic surgery and Botox and fillers, creating a generation of strangely ageless faces, locked in a sad parody of youth. We spend more time than ever in the gym, delaying the inevitable. “We’re a generation that grew up with fitness culture and that’s a way of counteracting middle age,” says Filby. “People live on fuel and pump iron to stave off physical age. There’s that very Californian idea of having a ‘biological age’, basically asking the question: ‘Can I stop time?’”

Algorithms dictate when Bryan Johnston should wake (early), sleep (early) and consume supplements (often). He says he achieves the nighttime erections of a teenage boy

Some go further. Billionaires including Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are interested in ‘biohacking’, attempting to increase their natural lifespan through technology and chemistry. Others believe they can end ageing altogether. Tech bro Bryan Johnston, 46, is an extreme example, claiming to have slowed his ageing process by 31 years, experimenting with blood-plasma transfusions from his teenage son, gene therapy and bone marrow transplants. Algorithms dictate when he should wake (early), sleep (early) and consume supplements (often). He says he achieves the nighttime erections of a teenage boy.

When I interviewed life-extension evangelist Dr Aubrey de Grey years ago, he asked me not to use the term “live forever” but rather “forever young” – the goal is to capture youth, not extend old age. It’s about stretching the healthy years across the canvas of eternity, to realise a dream that’s existed since humanity dragged itself gasping from the sea. 

“It’s trying to control time,” says Filby. “We live in a hyper individualistic age where we think our lives are really important, that our purpose and our jobs and our contribution really matters. So we’re scared of getting old and we can’t deal with death.”

I am not holding out for eternal youth. I will be satisfied if I get to live out my remaining 15,000 days. I have come to terms with the fact I will never read Ulysses – it’s too long! There aren’t enough full stops! – but I do plan to rage, rage against the dying of the light, to hit that iceberg at full speed and disappear into the inky darkness having lived.