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In 2016, Then-44-year-old Hollywood actor Ben Affleck was photographed standing alone outside a building in London. Clad in a blue jumper, dark denim jeans and blue sneakers, and with a salt-and-pepper unshaven beard, the reluctantly famous actor was snapped with a cigarette in hand, head tilted up, eyes closed, inhaling deeply and looking … desperately irritated. Whether he was frustrated at being caught having a sneaky ciggie on a break, was having a mindful moment in the fresh air, was just a little stressed or had removed himself from a situation that had left him fervently annoyed, we will never know. But whatever the reason, I for one have never resonated more with a photo.

Grumpy Ben Affleck looks like how I’ve been feeling lately, and given it’s become an internet meme in recent years, it seems others have been feeling similarly. Memes only gain traction if they resonate. The photo encapsulates that feeling of having to bite your tongue, remove yourself from a situation, close your eyes, gather your thoughts and just … breathe. The chain reaction that leads to this moment usually starts off with a rough baseline feeling of exhaustion, followed by a gradual rising of annoyance in reaction to a situation at hand, then a realisation that we probably can’t say what we really want to say out loud (likely because it’s socially inappropriate), so we just slink away to be alone for a bit. We then return once we’re back to some sort of emotional homeostasis and can tackle the situation with a sound mind.

Now, I don’t smoke and nor am I a man, but in the last couple of years I’ve noticed that I’ve felt like Grumpy Ben Affleck more than ever. The irritation has increased, the tolerance has decreased and the eye-rolling has quadrupled (in real life and in emoji format). I’ve seriously wondered whether I’m morphing (metaphorically speaking) into a grumpy middle-aged man. Now, don’t get me wrong – I know and love many grumpy middle-aged men. This is not meant as an insult. It’s just that I’ve been observing some subtle and not-so-subtle similarities in the way I, as a woman, have been feeling, thinking and behaving lately that remind me of the irritated yet wise male midlifers I’ve worked with or grown up with. I’m a self-aware and introspective person (one would hope, given I’m a psychologist) so all this has had me thinking.

Given the trials and tribulations of my life so far, which I’ve navigated reasonably well, why does this particular moment feel a little tougher? Surely I’ve been through harder moments before. What on earth is going on with me? What’s changed? Why has this pervasive irritation slowly crept up on me? Why do I just want to just run away and spend more time alone? Why am I feeling unhappy about things that used to make me feel happy? Why do I feel more anxiety than I’ve ever felt? Why don’t I want to have conversations about trivial things anymore? Why am I so disappointed with humanity when I watch the news? Why do I feel so tired? Why am I getting a bit panicky that the years are moving by so quickly? Are other people my age feeling like this? Is this going to continue? Am I destined to live in a cabin in a forest with 30 cats? And, come to think of it, why does that sound so appealing?

Naturally, as these thoughts came to me, I started going a bit deeper. When things go a little bit awry, I tend to go internal first to try to figure things out for myself. Perhaps it’s just me getting older, or that I’m not going to bed early enough. Maybe I have too much on my plate and I’m a bit stressed and overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff that needs to get done. Have I been spending too much time by myself, so that people just annoy me in general now? Is it my declining oestrogen and progesterone? That I’m out of alignment somewhere in my career? Should I be dating more? Am I not drinking enough water? Did I just forget to take my vitamin B?

Failing to find any satisfying answers, I endeavoured to search wider, wondering what external factors could be contributing to my shift in mood. Is there anything else that could be contributing to my descent into doom and gloom with a dash of anxiety? Is there something going on my life that I’m worried about? Are there specific people I spend time with who are particularly irritating? Is the world going to pot and I’m just reacting to that? Have I watched too many TikTok doomsday videos? Do I have a ‘pandemic hangover’? Did Mercury retrograde and get stuck there? Are there actually just more people out there who rightly deserve my silent, passive annoyance? I knew something was going on.

And then, at the peak of my pondering on the causes of my Grumpy Ben Affleck metamorphosis, I stumbled on an article about midlife entitled, ‘Forty-seven is the saddest age of all, study finds: “There is an unhappiness curve”’. Then this: ‘“Middle age misery” peaks at 47.2 years of age – but do the statistics ring true?’ And then it hit me. It’s a thing! Many people in their 40s are feeling like this. It’s universal: adults in midlife are likely to be feeling tired, miserable, confused and a tad annoyed. It’s middle age. It’s simply that. Phew. I could do something with that.

I’m middle-aged. Around 47.2. Ripe, mature and well into adulthood. Perhaps smack in the middle – if I’m lucky – of my life. I’ve lived my first half, and now I’m tipping over into the second half. I’m slightly nervous about not knowing whether these invisible life halves will be equal in length, or if the second half will rip me off and be cut short.

I’m not in denial of my age (well, maybe a little), nor embarrassed. I’ve just been busy doing other things and failed to notice that I’ve moved into the midlife age bracket. I hadn’t yet thought of myself as middle-aged. Middle age was reserved for many of my clients, my parents and their friends, my bosses in previous jobs, my university lecturers, my doctors, politicians I had voted for, game-show hosts and the couple that owns my favourite Italian restaurant down the road. Yes, I’ve noticed that people such as my parents have gone from middle-aged to elderly in the last decade, but I neglected to see that I was creeping up behind them, slipping into the middle-age position they just left.

Yes, come to think of it, the signs of middle age have been there for a while. I have a ‘special’ chair I like to sit on in the lounge room, I pick the plain vanilla flavour at the ice-cream shop, I know the exact time of year I need to prune my roses, I save plant clippings in little jars, I internally sigh when people ask me to go out in the evenings, I love nothing more than walking around old bookstores and I have a strong urge to move to a quiet and remote coastal town where nothing happens.

Middle age is the cluster of years halfway between our childhood and old age. The exact range is up for debate – and with eternal youth seemingly on everyone’s agenda, I can imagine it will continue to be – but at present, it describes the period between 40 and around 60 years of age. With advances in medical technology (and moisturiser) many would disagree, saying that these days the middle-age years could be stretched out well into our 70s. Some people class themselves as middle-aged in their 30s, while others reject the idea for as long as they can and don’t identify with this term until they’re well over 60.

Of course, to add to the confusion, on top of our biological age, we also have a subjective age, which is determined by how we feel in body and mind. I was describing the concoction of grumpy emotions I’ve been feeling of late to a younger male friend of mine, and he resonated straight away, saying, ‘I feel like that now’ – he is only 35. So perhaps the unhappiest age may or may not be 47.2 exactly but stretched out around ten years or so either side, all depending on how we are feeling, physically and mentally, at the time. We can argue all day about what chunk of our life is classed as midlife. It doesn’t matter. We’re unlikely to be walking around calling ourselves middle-aged and might even, like myself, be in subconscious denial of it. But I think it’s a helpful discussion to have given so many of us have been feeling a little ‘off’ lately.

Midlife, middle age or, if we believe the birthday cards our friends satirically gift us once we crack the big 4-0, ‘over the hill’: it all sounds a bit vanilla, really, a bit mature, a bit like all the excitement in life is behind us. The ‘prime of our life’ sounds a bit more exciting, as does ‘midlife renaissance’ or, if we want to sexy it up a little more, ‘milieu de vie’. Everything sounds better in French.

In this period that we call middle age, however long it may be, there are a lot of changes. Like a lot. And these changes can cause us some angst. I’ve seen this phenomenon often over the years, in my clients, my mother, my friends and now myself. Even social media is awash with conversations explaining the changes that occur in midlife.

Or complaining about them.

And all these changes are happening at the time in our lives when we seem to be most under the pump and when our mental load is at its peak. We wear multiple hats and are in multiple roles, often not having much of a village to share the overflow. We’re part of the sandwich generation, with elderly parents to look after but simultaneously with kids who need us to pick them up from school and to make sure they’re at football practice on time. We’re often at the peak of our careers (and trying to figure out if we still like the career we naively chose 20 years ago). And, of course, we’re trying to get up at 5am for sunrise yoga because that’s what the 20-year-old influencer told us we need to be doing to look as healthy, happy and successful as them.

We’re living in a fast-paced modern world that is exponentially advancing at a rate our human brains can’t keep up with. On the other hand, humanity seems to be going backwards with heartbreaking global crisis after crisis, which we’re helplessly watching play out in real time on devices glued to our fingertips.

Whether it’s body changes, career changes, children getting older, caring for elderly parents, dealing with the loss of loved ones, relationship changes, friendship changes or keeping up with the fast-paced societal changes that we never seem to be ready for (or all the above), as the current generation of midlifers we have a lot on our plates. We’re trying to be wise, be cool, be healthy and be accepting of the fact that our bodies are changing. (It’s a thudding realisation, as a woman especially, when you move to brush a white hair off your cheek but realise the hair isn’t on your cheek, but rather growing out of it.)

But excitingly, yes, there’s some good stuff that happens during this period! And I welcome it. I’ve spent a lot of time working with people who have journeyed through middle age and have heard about the difficult transformation that they too encountered during these years. With hindsight, many report that the internal struggle of middle age is just what they needed. They realise they wouldn’t be where they are now without it; that the middle-age havoc and ambivalence of mind while navigating myriad internal and external changes needed to happen. Tapping into the wisdom acquired during the middle-age journey has led them to refine their lives. They needed to change their ways, they needed their life to change, they needed the push to head in a different direction. Life needed to get better. And it did.

Middle age can be a deeply evaluative time. For many midlifers, this is the opportunity to hop off the socially constructed pathway they were thrust on in their early years and start laying one that is more aligned with who they truly are. The midlife years can be a beneficial transformation, not something to fear. It’s a time that may elicit a host of negative feelings (just ask Ben Affleck), but these might be telling us something about ourselves and our lives. With deep reflection, we can tap into the learnings from our first half of life and apply them to the second half. Life can get better than it ever was before. As David Bowie once said, ‘Ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.’

So, whether you’re already annoyed in your 20s, you’ve had enough of everyone by your 50s or you’re feeling a bit WTF about life in the years in between, this book is for you. While we might not all go through a stereotypical midlife crisis we are all vulnerable to mini crises on the bumpy road towards our mature adulthood years. These moments might render us a bit stuck, a bit blue and a bit grumpy at times, but there’s wisdom that can be found in each of them if we just think about them a little deeper. We can use that wisdom to build a beautiful life of serenity, fulfilment and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Visit Marny Lishman’s website