I recently turned 40, and out of nowhere I felt like talking about life and death, the inflation of time and the so-called midlife crisis.
By the way, for an average man’s lifespan the midpoint is not 50, and not even 40 (as many think), but somewhere around 35, depending on your eco-, socio- and geography. Scary? This is just the beginning.
The biological causes of the crisis (an ageing body) are clear enough. The standard psychological ones — self-image, reflecting on career and family, personal growth and other traumas — are clear too; see the Soviet encyclopedia or any coaching channel for details. The only new twist is peer pressure, which got a boost from mass social media. Now you can pick up your phone, compare yourself to a 15-year-old TikTok millionaire or an e-floozy (the new celebrity rich) and wonder where your life’s satnav lost the route. Even arguments like the tiny odds of success in those fields get skipped by the brain in favour of soul-searching.
Celebrities aren’t immune to the self-fulfilment crisis either. When, say, just being a rich genius isn’t enough, and you also have to bring your looks up to perfect, dive into ice instead of mountains of cocaine, and declare yourself the father of not the default one to three, but a whole hundred children. But I digress…
I’m more interested in something like the awareness of time. When you literally realise that life has an end, and it may be closer than the beginning. Memento mori. And middle-aged people are the risk group here, much like the middle class in Europe in 2024: the rich and the poor both live well, and all the costs land on the shoulders of the “middle”. Same with age: with one foot still in a nappy or already in a shroud, there isn’t much to worry about. But the median is the time to think about life.
The clearest way to picture a lifespan is in weeks. Even if you’re not an office clerk, life still ties itself to the weekly cycle. That’s just how it is. Let’s take the graphics from my cheerful app, which Tim buried long ago for being too old, so no ads here.
This is what my forecast looked like when I made the app, but here I’m still 35:
The second version was meant to be even more cheerful (with averaged checkpoints like the typical age of starting a business or the peak of cancer cases):
Let’s make it even clearer. Average male life expectancy in Belarus is really bad, but we’ll generously add half a dozen years and round it up to 70.
Ministry of Health: life expectancy in Belarus is 78 years for women and 64 for men
You get a little chart where every cell is a week and one row equals two years:
40 years and 10 weeks since birth: 2,102 gone, 1,546 left. Scary stuff, turn it off, as they say. And there are two more catches. First: the state of the body in the last years of life (good odds of crossing out a couple of rows at the bottom). Second: the so-called inflation of time. Simply put, the older you are, the faster time runs (subjectively, of course). Take a span of one year: for a one-year-old it’s their whole life, for a forty-year-old guy it’s just 1/40. For a teenager, 15, 16 and 17 are serious checkpoints; for a grown man there’s not much difference between 33 and 37. How time feels after 80 (if you’re lucky enough to get there), we can only guess.
And here come the waves of missed opportunities again, especially if you’re into the most thankless hobby in the world — comparing yourself to other people (to celebs, for extra efficiency).
ChatGPT, give me the actors’ ages when their iconic films came out…
Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in "The Godfather" — 32
Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in "Rocky" — 30
Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in "Forrest Gump" — 38
Edward Norton as Tyler Durden in "Fight Club" — 30
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in "Fight Club" — 35
John Travolta as Vincent Vega in the film — 40
Ryan Gosling as the Driver in "Drive" — 30Thanks, that’ll do.
But you can also look at it from the point of view of a more or less infinite cosmos, where the lifetime of all humankind is a blink on the Universe’s timeline, and the lifespan of some particular Joe doesn’t matter at all. Then it gets much easier to let go of the search for meaning, the worries about X achievements by age Y, or dreams of living another N years. Forget the XYN method — learn to live in the moment.
Enjoy.