The midlife crisis spread: why are the affluent so depressed?

‘You are here’, as those signs in windswept carparks unhelpfully point out. Yup. No mistaking it, you will tend to think glumly as you look at them. I had the same feeling when I looked at a new report from no less an institution than America’s National Bureau of Economic Research. The report is called The Midlife Crisis. It tells us that in the western world, one’s forties and early fifties are associated with problems with sleep, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, disabling headaches and dependence on alcohol, alongside a decline in basic measures of life satisfaction. Well, fancy.

I don’t know about clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, I should say. Not so melodramatic, me. But I can tell you that I wander through the kitchen every day and turn upside-down the bowls and pans my wife has left on the draining board right-side-up, so the water runs out of them rather than pooling in the bottom. And every day when I do this I wonder, just for an instant, if there is some happier alternative universe in which my wife is familiar with the concept of gravity. While she, noticing me doing this through the doorway, wonders, just for an instant, if there is some happier alternative universe in which her husband is familiar with the concept of tea-towels.

There we both are: a 48-year-old and a 45-year-old who once thought that we were in a rock song finding ourselves, instead, in a Fred Basset cartoon. It’s not all that much, in the scheme of things, to complain about: a slight shift in genre, is all. But then, even the more lurid crises that this report details are not, in the scheme of things, all that much to complain about. As the authors note, the paradox is that these feelings of despond coincide with the period in most people’s lives when they are at the peak of their earning power, enjoying generally good health, and are living in the safest and freest countries in the world. The authors call this ‘paradoxical and troubling’.

These people, by whom I mean us, are not living in warzones or scraping an existence by bartering body parts with cannibals. They own iPhones and large televisions and motor cars with heated seats and passenger-side airbags. They are warm, tolerably well-fed, usually in stable relationships, perhaps even blessed with children. They are only having these crises because – unlike their toothless and fistulated ancestors, geriatric by 35 and pegging out at 40 – they have had the comparative good fortune to arrive at midlife in order to have them in the first place. And yet they are all miserable as sin.

The back half of your forties is a cursed age. It’s not so much that (as the cliché goes) the policemen look younger – it’s more that you’re gloomily aware that you haven’t done anything that they’d even consider arresting you for. Your world is beige. The field of possibilities ahead of you narrows; the disappointments and failures behind you silt up the ledger. And – as the report finds – ‘work stress’ is at its peak. Affluence undreamed of in your twenties comes with outgoings and commitments likewise undreamed of. The hamster-wheel goes faster. You wake up at 3 a.m. worrying about inflation rates. And for what? So that when, just as you finally pay off the mortgage – if you’re lucky enough to have one – you can then sell your house to pay for your care as you totter dribbling towards the grave.

You start to lose friends. They drift out of your life because you spend too much time complaining about your wife’s suboptimal use of the draining-board, or they drift out of their own as midlife diseases and unpredictable accidents set about the work of thinning your cohort. The people who are going to die early start, noticeably, getting on with it. The older people you like – now you’ve reached that stage when it’s not weird to be proper friends with people a generation or two older than you – start getting on with it too. You become more aware of your own extinction hurtling down the years towards you.

You yourself lose energy and enthusiasm. Someone suggests a party, or an exciting new creative venture, and your thoughts turn to a nice boring evening watching Netflix or crawling into bed with a good book. But bed’s uncomfortable because of that thing with your neck, and you’ve seen all of Netflix, and you’ve read all the books you have any reason to believe are good. The prevalent feeling that pornographic images stir in you is nostalgia. You’re bored to tears by all and any conversation – and you discover the one who is boring you to tears is you. Your high score on Candy Crush shifts, while you aren’t paying attention, from a point of pride to a point of shame.

There’s no point saying: count your blessings. The thing with blessings is that we tend to put them in the bank and forget about them. The baseline effect exacts a terrible toll on all of us. Whatever level of comfort, whatever level of affluence, whatever level of gratified ambition we have reached, there is always something more just over the horizon to taunt us. Even Elon Musk, not content with being the richest man in the world, spends his crisis-ridden midlife wondering if there's any chance of being the richest man on Mars. I've barely been able to look at the papers this week, personally, out of the tormenting suspicion that the queue to inspect my own coffin, when the time comes, won’t require all that many police officers and Portaloos to keep it in order.

Yet the problem, I'm very slightly cheered to think, may be biological rather than existential. Other primates – those who neither fret about interest rates nor have the first idea what a draining-board is for – suffer too. Middle-aged chimpanzees, apparently, become listless and depressed. Middle-aged orang-utans likewise. I picture a marmoset, halfway between his carefree youth doing gymnastics in a monkey-puzzle tree and going to his rest in the tummy of a vulture, contemplating his thinning fur and the sad paunch around his waist and heaving a squeaky little sigh. Mon semblable. Mon frere. At least, in our discontent, we are not alone.