Why 47 really is the worst age of all, SAM LEITH reveals

Why 47 really is the worst age of all: SAM LEITH reveals in this poignant confession how the conclusion of a recent global study is all too true…

Well, there’s a finding to turn your breakfast egg to ashes in your mouth, I thought, as I opened my newspaper yesterday.

Scientists at the American National Bureau of Economic Research claim to have established that, in the developed world, human misery peaks at the age of 47. To be precise, 47.2.

Writing as someone who has recently celebrated — if that’s the word — his 46th birthday, that puts me right in the thick of it: like some benighted mountaineer, huddled below the peak, low on oxygen and morale alike, and the frost nipping at my toes.

Scientists at the American National Bureau of Economic Research claim to have established that, in the developed world, human misery peaks at the age of 47. To be precise, 47.2

Full disclosure: I have not, as far as I can tell, gone through an actual, by-the-book midlife crisis.

I have not embarked upon a Viagra-fuelled affair with an oversexed 20-something (chance would be a fine thing).

I have not left my clothes neatly folded on the beach in some half-shuttered seaside town and hopped it to South America to embark on a new life.

I have not chucked in my job and decided to ‘find myself’ in a South Indian ashram. I have not bought myself an electric guitar, or a powerful motorcycle, or started calling myself Butch or Fletch or Ace.

I haven’t even started wearing a leather jacket.

But ah, the life-weariness is strong in me. I know all too well why middle-aged men are tempted into such absurdities; and women into different but quite comparable follies of their own.

Your mid-40s are the point at which you find yourself saying: ‘Is this it?’ And at which you hear the doleful answer from the universe: ‘I’m afraid it is.’

Your mid-40s are when you know, beyond even the slimmest of long shots, that you will never sing Born To Run in front of 100,000 screaming fans at Wembley Stadium.

It’s the point at which the Booker or Nobel Prizes, the Victoria Cross, the keys to No 10 Downing Street, the screenwriting career, the six-figure salary, the global admiration and esteem, the secure sense of having made a contribution to the world which will both credit and outlive you — all of those things start to slip out of view.

It’s not that people your age and older don’t manage all those things. Bruce Springsteen is 70, after all. But the overwhelming majority of them don’t; and the ones that do tend to have put the hours in long before this point.

In other words, you have left it all a bit late — most likely because you were watching old episodes of Inspector Morse or playing Candy Crush on your smartphone. And now you are where you are, with dwindling reserves of time to accomplish your dreams and dwindling reserves of energy to fulfil them.

It’s not that people your age and older don’t manage all those things. Bruce Springsteen (pictured) is 70, after all

You didn’t paddle hard enough when you had the chance, and now your legs are tired and the waters are moving faster and the temptation to give up is overwhelming.

You are defeated. You have measured out your life in coffee spoons, as T.S. Eliot put it, and you are what Ben Elton used to call ‘a farty’. You’re an ordinary person, just like all those dreary characters you used to think were the supporting cast in your drama. And you are deeply unfree. Like Gulliver on the beach in Lilliput, you are tied to earth by a thousand tiny ropes.

There’s all the stuff you own. Where did it come from? Why is it cluttering up your life? The other day I discovered — as someone who does not use an iron from one year to the next — that I own three of the bloody things.

If I had the energy, I’d take two or more of them to the dump. But, instead, they join the redundant pasta-maker, the never-used juicer, the jigsaws with missing pieces and the incomplete under-tens chemistry sets in the spare-room gadget graveyard. You spend your time worrying about the mortgage, or the composting collection.

Because you have young children, you tidy the kitchen four times a day and it never seems to get actually tidy. You become dismayed by your own toenails. You clean your glasses over and over again because you can’t quite admit that the blurriness is caused by your eyes rather than a smudge of grease on the lens.

You bicker with your spouse about paint colours and the hanging of pictures in the loo. And you love your children but they absolutely drive you up the wall.

Nobody does what you ask them when you ask them, and everyone wants something from you, all the time. A glass of water. Help with homework. Toast sliced diagonally rather than on the square.

Even the cat — which has peed on the sofa for the third time this week and is overdue a visit to the vet from which no traveller returns — is miaowing for another dish of food half an hour after you gave her the last one.

Then there’s that glorious moment when you’ve done all your chores and are settling on to the one sofa the cat hasn’t peed on — only for the washing machine to go ‘Peep! Peep! Peep!’ to tell you to get up and start hanging up the laundry.

Plus, obviously, there’s sex. You don’t have as much of it as you once did. You’re not as good at it as you once were. And far fewer people — including your spouse — find the prospect of having it with you especially appealing.

Where once the sight of an attractive person sparked lust or excitement in you, now it sparks a twinge of nostalgia.

And, ah, vanity: the paunch, the receding hairline, the dimming eyes. Men and women alike are, for the most part, biologically programmed to think that this sort of stuff is important.

Our self-esteem is bolstered by the glad eye of another — and as we sink into sexual invisibility, happily coupled up though we may be, that’s a hard thing to get used to.

And there’s death. Here you are, closer to the end than you are to the beginning. What used to be an abstract notion has started to feel a bit more real.

Your parents — whose immortality used to be a comforting given — may already be gone; or they’ll have started looking a bit frail. Perhaps you’re already comparing twinges and minor ailments with your father.

You’re turning into your parents and they are turning into old people and you can see all too clearly where this particular plotline leads.

But here’s where the rubber meets the proverbial road. In terms of the renowned Kubler-Ross stages of grief, your 40s are when you go through anger, denial, bargaining and depression — all of which are followed by acceptance.

You ask ‘Is this it?’, you get an answer in the affirmative, and you set about learning to love it for what it is rather than resenting it for what it isn’t.

You recognise, as your sense of perspective broadens and grows, that nothing matters very much and very little matters at all.

That what will both credit and outlive you is, if you have them, those same children you find so overwhelming now.

That the esteem of your friends is a steady flame where the glad eye of that hot 20-something is a brief sparkle. And that Nobel Prize wouldn’t have meant a hill of beans anyway.

Or that’s the theory. So on the other hand: yippee!

Just another 14 months or so and it’ll all be over. I’ll get happier, and happier, and happier — and just as I reach my peak happiness, I’ll drop dead. 

Source: Read Full Article