Midlife is no crisis; just men living their life, enjoying hard earned cash

Life is generally a scam. You spend your first few years soiling yourself, the next few playing with yourself, and the rest slowly killing yourself. You suffer through your childhood and slog through your youth, rushing to get to that vaunted thing they call adulthood because it looks really cool.

From where you’re standing as a kid, adults have all the fun. They get to wake up whenever they want, they get to go places and laugh loudly with other adults, and they get to do those secret things they don’t like to talk about, things which elicit funny noises from the bedroom. It’s like the Illuminati, and you cannot wait to join.

But then you do grow up, and even before you can start laughing loudly with other adults, even before you figure out how to do those secret things in a way that elicits funny noises, you’ve crossed over into a wilderness known as midlife, and the world could not be less interested in you.

Yeah, life is a scam. Would not recommend it, to be honest.

As a man, there is really no stage of your life when you can just be. From the moment you’re a child, everyone is drumming into your head what it means to be a man. What ‘real men’ are supposed to look like, how they are supposed to talk, and how deep their pockets should be. So you spend years pursuing that status, that totem of manhood that is always just out of reach.

You can never win, of course, but you don’t realize that until it’s too late.

When you achieve the body of a Greek god pretending to be human just to sleep with someone’s wife, you find that the goalpost has been moved; what women actually find attractive is a kind soul and generous spirit. You watch all 300 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy so you can become more sensitive, but then they tell you, no, it’s bad boys who are getting all the action. You lean into the pillars of toxic masculinity and start treating women like trash, only to learn that it was all for naught; nothing else matters except money. Do you have it? Then how can you call yourself a man?

But unless your father was a politician, or he got divorced from Bill Gates, you never really get that money. By the time you have relative stability in your life, you have taken a sizeable bite into your 30s, and society wants you to channel that money into raising children who will follow that same path, and paying bitter women who will take your business to Facebook if you’re a few months late.

Midlife crisis, as they call it, is a trick the world plays on you to keep you docile. It is a myth, and a cruel one.

The fact is, a man will probably not be financially free until later in his life. Up until then, he can only play within a very limited field. He is like a cow tethered to a peg by a three-foot rope. He cannot go for a roadtrip to Nanyuki every weekend, or get blind drunk off the good liquor every night, or purchase the car that has haunted his dreams since he was 12.

So when he does finally get that money, is it any surprise that his first instinct is to live the life he always wanted to? He has been collecting rejections from dismissive 25-year-olds all his life; now that he has money, of course he is going to make a beeline for the 22-year-olds. When else would he get that red sports car that can silence the entire Thika Road? At what point should he try out leather pants, if not when he has the money to silence any objection?

The world has indoctrinated a fake timeline on us, such that we believe there are things that must be accomplished for every single age. Mention your age to a stranger, and they will list for you the milestones you should have clocked. “Oh, you’ll be 26 in three months? Ah, those three months should give you enough time to secure baby mama number 2, enrolled in a Masters programme and moved into Lavington.”

When we delay this timeline, or achieve it in the wrong order, the name-calling starts. Look at that old man, dancing in the club with small boys. Imagine someone his age with blonde frills in his hair. Shouldn’t he be decaying on a couch somewhere, deaf in the ear his wife likes to yell into?

‘Crisis’ has such negative connotations. I recommend we refer to it as the ‘Midlife Adventure’. And that when we see someone enjoying the fruits of their pointless 20s, we step aside and let them pass.

 

— [email protected], @sir_guss