Work And Retirement
During the middle years, the relationship between money and identity undergoes a shift that the financial planning industry covers in considerable detail, yet the psychological dimension is hardly touched on.
Understanding Your Mind
Self-awareness is the psychological equivalent of flossing — universally recommended, rarely practised with any consistency, and the subject of guilt whenever the question is raised directly. Do men engage with it, and does patchiness matter as much as the self-help industry insists it does?
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Practical Tools
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.
Relationships
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.
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Relationships
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.
Understanding Your Mind
Men hide shame with impressive efficiency. They have been doing it for a long time, and they have developed an extensive repertoire of concealment strategies.
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,
Relationships
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.
Body and Mind
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.
Work And Retirement
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.