Fashion, forget what they tell you, isn’t about looking good. It’s actually there to remind you that you’re not young anymore. And it’s hit this 36-year-old hard. The boot cuts and bomber jackets of today’s youth are as baffling to me as my skinny jeans doubtless are to them. And the land of male grooming is even more foreign. Up top, the mullet is back. A ‘style’ that was till last Tuesday, like dry ice and synth piano, stuck in 1980s music videos. In 2024, it’s making noise on the heads (and necks) of the kids. Down below, young men are trimming, titivating, shaving. Ten years ago, a man’s razor was for his face. Today, there’s fewer hairs on the genitals of Gen Z than in your average pub lasagne.
Life’s ‘poorer cuts’, as Larkin sighed, taste bad and look even worse
I can’t run from the truth in my millennial Converses any longer: my youth is done. Shot. Kaput.
But as crushing as this is to admit, it’s the easy part. The real trouble isn’t the adieu to youth, but the greeting of its successor: middle age. A phrase that evokes big tapestries of brutes with swords. Or – even more grisly – yellowed memories of friends of your parents, those strangers to style. Middle age dressed them in golf jumpers and rubber soles and stripped them of relevance and self-respect. Life’s ‘poorer cuts’, as Philip Larkin sighed, taste bad and look even worse.
Bleaker than accepting this fate, of course, is to deny it. But that won’t stop me. And while I have an urgent interest in halting the stampede of middle age, there also might be good reason to. Wishful thinking? Probably. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false.
At first, I’d imagined that a rebrand would do the job. You can’t escape middle age, but you can rename it. Conquering mortal dread though takes more than marketing. Nothing ever had an image problem without a more serious one lurking beneath it.
Serious, but specific: the problem with middle age isn’t its existence, rather its timing. Because the cliff edge of youth-to-kill-me-now neglects a short but distinct phase between them. A period, perhaps from 34 to 39, when one’s youth has scarpered, but middle age hasn’t yet arrived.
The maths backs me up. We’re living longer, on average to 80. By the time I’m an old man, life expectancy might be above 90. At 36 then, as a matter of fact, I’m pre-middle aged.
Longer living shifts life’s milestones too. One suspects middle age was conceived less as a marking of time than a reckoning with the responsibilities of parenthood. Responsibilities that don’t apply to the growing number of over-30s who don’t have babies (yet) and a mortgage (ever). The phrase ‘40 is the new 30’ might sound icky, but it does make sense. Recently I was looking at a photo of my grandparents in retirement. So I thought. ‘In that one,’ said my mum, ‘they’re 48.’ Today, we’re living longer, and younger.
But there’s another, graver reason to usher in this new age. As any eyewitness to the crime of a 40-year-old wearing an outfit for a 20-year-old knows, the transition to middle age is tough for many (men). That desolate bloke isn’t squeezing into his dodgy jacket to cling to youth, but to resist age. What’s a midlife crisis but a denial of it? A time between youth and middle age then – one that reflects progress in medicine and change in culture – would help desperados like me to make better life choices than that shirt. Easier to cross a bridge to middle age than to take the plunge into it – into the beginning of the end.
Forgive the melodrama. But for 30-something singletons without the vindication of a family to take the edge off, that’s how an MA diagnosis feels. Us wretches don’t want recognition of a pre-middle age stage. We badly need it.
That’s why we also need a name for it. As the Wiki Man has written in these pages before, it’s often only by labelling an idea that we change a behaviour. So let’s hear it for the Intergers – those of us approaching middle age, but mercifully not quite there. Anything that stops this loser growing a mullet can’t be a bad thing.
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