1.20 Fortysomething
You could buy lingerie, a bag of popcorn and transmission fluid, all under the same roof
God, I’m getting old. I turned 35 this year, and boy do I feel it; a full eight hours sleep a night doesn’t seem to do it, an overindulgent birthday party and I’m struck down for a day or two with crippling anxiety, and the truism about exhaling getting in and out of chairs is, well, true. Politicians are younger than me, police officers are younger than me, hell, even my own therapist is younger than me. None of this fills you with confidence; I wouldn’t trust me with making the law, enforcing the law, or offering psychiatric advice. As far as I’m concerned, I’m barely out of school, still feeling like I could beg the benefit of the doubt on the basis of my youthful naivete, if needs be. And here’s the paradox, isn’t it; throughout life, we frequently feel both too old and too young at the same time.
It’s a state usually attributed to teenagers. This weekend my boyfriend and I took the dog for a long walk in the mountains that surround the city we live in. Realising, at one point, that we had taken a wrong turn, and our hike was going to be longer than planned, we stopped at a mountainside restaurant for something to eat. Sipping a beer on the terrace, we watched as families pulled up in cars for their Sunday lunch: mothers in discretely expensive coats, fathers in the Catalan middle-class uniform of button-down shirt and duvet gilets, and then their children, dragged along to maintain the family unit, to be presented to their grandparents. Watching the teenager kids I was struck by how intense it was to be a teenager; you feel so driven by your own emergent desires to be who you are, and so excited by the opportunities. Yet so many teenagers lack almost all autonomy, and find their feelings of adulthood suppressed at every turn by actual adults. We watched these teens go through this same moment and, we both agreed, it was terrible to be a teenager.
Yet I think that feeling isn’t limited to our teenage years; feeling the wrong age around our peers is something that continues throughout our life. Discomfort is part of age and aging. I remember in my late 20s feeling distinctly annoyed at 22 year olds claiming they were getting old, and now I feel the same about those in their late twenties saying the same thing I did. Perhaps I feel closer to being 22, less mature than ever, as I realise how much age changes you. In season one, episode 20, Frasier navigates the same feelings. Finding himself becoming increasingly forgetful, it’s up to Martin to let him in on the secret: he’s getting old. It’s not getting old he should worry about, but rather the slippage, when you lose a handle on who you are: the midlife crisis. Frasier looks in the mirror, and pulls at the skin slipping down around his chin.
What is a midlife crisis though? The traditional telling is a period where (usually) men are struck by a sense of their own mortality, and their fading vitality or power. They buy a car that’s too fast, or start desperate measures to reclaim, or cling on to, the visual and cultural markers of youth. It’s a cautionary tale told to younger men, where older men become tragic figures, unaware of what others think of them. Yet the term itself was only invented in the mid 1960s, and in the US. It’s not a insignificant detail that it emerged at a moment when consumer culture was offering a great affluence in terms of goods, goods which could become signifiers of identity, while society was trapped by a rigid conformity based around the heterosexual family. If the midlife crisis was a rebellion, surely it was as much a rebellion about how stifling that world had become, and how the men involved felt like its demands had restricted their potential in life.
Put simply: the midlife crisis is a part of the sexual revolution. What began in the sixties reached its peak in the nineties, when the fear and threat of the midlife crisis was not just as profound as ever, but the crisis itself was beginning to look more alluring than an age appropriate descent into mature capitalism. In the 1999 film American Beauty we begin to see a backlash against the mockery of the midlife crisis. While the film starts with the protagonist slipping into all the cliches of midlife crisis - smoking weed, lusting after younger women, and bodybuilding - it’s nonetheless clear that his diagnosis of the meaninglessness of his suburban life, the American dream, is, in fact, correct.
Frasier fears becoming this archetypal loser figure, the successful straight white male who becomes a figure of mockery and pity because, despite or because of having the world on a plate, he loses touch with social reality and can’t see himself as others see him. The problem with anxieties, however, is they are a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we meet our fears on the path we take to avoid them. Anxious about being unloved, we can make ourselves unloveable. Anxious about being trapped, we trap ourselves. Anxious about aging, we make ourselves seem older than we are. When a young shop assistant compliments Frasier, he becomes so worried that he is misinterpreting her affections, he misinterprets her. In the end, we must always take a step back and remember that anxieties that seem so present to us are invisible to others, and that our self-image is seldom the way others perceive us. I guess I’m not getting old at all - or at least, no faster than usual.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.
Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19