Why Success Feels Empty at 42
At some point in the middle years, a significant number of men achieve something they wanted and discover, with considerable inconvenience, that it doesn't feel the way they expected.
Latest
How to Build Resilience Aged 40+
Resilience is one of the most overused words in the self-improvement industry. It appears on posters, in corporate training programmes, and in the titles of books written by people who have confused having a difficult morning with surviving genuine adversity.
So You're Going to Be a Granddad
Becoming a grandfather is one of the more significant events in a man's later life. It is also, it must be said, one of the more bewildering — arriving with a set of emotional responses that nobody quite prepared you for and a title that makes you sound considerably older than you feel.
Divorce After 40: How It Affects Men
Divorce after 40 is, for most of the men who go through it, one of the most significant psychological events of their adult lives. It produces loss, grief, disruption to identity and risk to physical and mental health. It is also survivable and manageable.
Why Men Withdraw
The male withdrawal is one of the most reliable and least understood phenomena in relationship psychology. The man disappears into himself, or the garage, or he has a sustained interest in the middle distance.
Shame in Men
Let's begin with a distinction that matters more than it might appear. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am something bad. The difference is between an action and an identity. Guilt is about behaviour. Shame is about self — total, corrosive, and considerably harder to shift
Rocket — but not the Saturn V kind
Picture the scene. You're in a modest little restaurant that used to serve things properly. Enormous pies. Chips with everything. Puddings dense enough to alter the Earth's rotation. The kind of place where the menu was laminated, the waiter and the cooks were all called Dave,
How to Have Difficult Conversations — for Men Who'd Rather Be Anywhere Else
Most men would rather dismantle an engine, file a tax return, or watch a documentary about the migratory patterns of Arctic terns than initiate a difficult conversation. This is understandable. It is also considerably more expensive over time than the conversation would have been.
The Great British Paunch: A Meditation on Middle-Aged Spread
At some point in the middle years, most British men acquire a paunch. This is not news. What is news — or at least, what most men have been successfully avoiding knowing — is what it really is, where it really comes from, and what, if anything, can realistically be done about it.
Career Change After 40: The Fear, the Research and the Reasonable Case for Jumping
Changing career after 40 is either the most sensible thing a man can do with the second half of his working life, or a moderately terrifying leap into the unknown dressed up as liberation. In most cases, it is both of these things simultaneously.
Man and Dog
The relationship between men and dogs is one of the oldest in human history. It is also, it turns out, one of the most psychologically significant — and one of the least likely to be recognised as such by the men most benefiting from it.
Why Your Kids Need You to Act Your Age
Are you the cool dad? The one who's more mate than parent, who insists on being down with whatever the current generation is down with? This version is more common than it used to be, considerably less useful than it appears, and occasionally mortifying for everyone involved.
Life Stages And Transitions
When the Children Leave: The Empty Nest and What It Stirs Up
The empty nest is one of the most significant transitions in family life and one of the least prepared for. Most parents spend eighteen years getting their children ready to leave. Almost none of them spend equivalent time getting themselves ready for what happens when they do.
Body and Mind
Alexithymia: When You Can't Name What You're Feeling
There is a word for the experience of having feelings you cannot identify, describe or make sense of. Most men who have it have never heard the word. Many would find it uncomfortably accurate.
Body and Mind
Is Everything Irritating At 50?
By the age of 50, a significant proportion of men discover that the world has become substantially more annoying than it used to be. This is not imaginary, not inevitable, and considerably more interesting psychologically than it first appears.
Body and Mind
Men And Lubrication
Alcohol has been the social lubricant of human civilisation for approximately ten thousand years. It has also been responsible for considerable human misery. These two facts exist simultaneously and require acknowledgement in roughly equal measure.
Body and Mind
When the brain filters give up
Uncle Derek. The one who says the thing that everyone else was thinking but had the collective sense not to say out loud. He is simultaneously the most entertaining and most mortifying person at the table. There is a reason for this, and it is considerably more interesting than simple rudeness.
Body and Mind
Brains, Blokes, and Boredom
The brain does not retire when you do. It continues operating on the same fundamental principle it always has: use it or watch it quietly deteriorate while you're watching daytime television. The choice, within certain limits, is yours.
Body and Mind
Why Men Who Fix Things Are Onto Something
The man in the garage with his hands in an engine, the one rebuilding a wall on a Saturday afternoon, the one who spent three hours fixing something. They are, it turns out, doing something rather important.
Life Stages And Transitions
Staying Relevant
Relevance is not something that happens to you. It is something you maintain — or don't — through a series of choices that most men don't realise they're making until the moment they notice they've stopped being made.
Body and Mind
The Curse of Late-Onset Illnesses in Men
Men have a well-documented tendency to arrive at serious illness later than necessary, sicker than they need to be, and more surprised than the evidence warrants. This article is about why that happens and what it costs.
Practical Tools
When You've Lost The Plot
Overwhelm isn’t a character flaw. It’s not some moral failing, like leaving the toilet seat up or thinking cargo shorts are a good idea. It’s simply what happens when you keep stacking demands higher and higher until the whole thing starts to wobble like a badly built shed in a gale.
Life Stages And Transitions
Becoming a Dad When You Should Know Better
Having a child in your 40s or 50s is increasingly common, frequently unplanned, and almost entirely unlike the experience of becoming a father at 25 — in ways that are sometimes better, sometimes harder, and occasionally both simultaneously.
Understanding Your Mind
Loud Music, Bad Taste — And Loving It at 57
Middle-aged men are expected to make peace with Radio 2 and accept that the music of their youth has been appropriately filed under nostalgia. Some of us have declined this invitation.