Sam Leith Sam Leith

The midlife crisis spread: why are the affluent so depressed?

Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ (1893)

‘You are here’, as those signs in windswept carparks unhelpfully point out. Yup. No mistaking it, you will tend to think glumly as you look at them. I had the same feeling when I looked at a new report from no less an institution than America’s National Bureau of Economic Research. The report is called The Midlife Crisis. It tells us that in the western world, one’s forties and early fifties are associated with problems with sleep, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, disabling headaches and dependence on alcohol, alongside a decline in basic measures of life satisfaction. Well, fancy.

I don’t know about clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, I should say. Not so melodramatic, me. But I can tell you that I wander through the kitchen every day and turn upside-down the bowls and pans my wife has left on the draining board right-side-up, so the water runs out of them rather than pooling in the bottom. And every day when I do this I wonder, just for an instant, if there is some happier alternative universe in which my wife is familiar with the concept of gravity. While she, noticing me doing this through the doorway, wonders, just for an instant, if there is some happier alternative universe in which her husband is familiar with the concept of tea-towels.

The people who are going to die early start, noticeably, getting on with it

There we both are: a 48-year-old and a 45-year-old who once thought that we were in a rock song finding ourselves, instead, in a Fred Basset cartoon. It’s not all that much, in the scheme of things, to complain about: a slight shift in genre, is all. But then, even the more lurid crises that this report details are not, in the scheme of things, all that much to complain about.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in