Nobody warns you that your 40s and 50s come with an unexpected amount of existential admin. This section covers the psychological landscape of midlife and later life — identity, purpose, ageing and the transitions that tend to arrive whether you're ready or not. Honest, informed and written for men who'd rather face these things with their eyes open.
Life Stages And Transitions
In 2007, a film about two terminally ill men compiling a list of things to do before they died turned "bucket list" into a permanent fixture of the language. Nearly two decades on, the phrase has drifted from its original context. It's worth asking what's driving the impulse.
Life Stages And Transitions
It typically starts with a phone call: "Dad's had another fall." And somewhere in the weeks that follow, the relationship quietly changes shape. The son becomes the parent. It's the job you never applied for, but it's yours.
Life Stages And Transitions
As I write this, I am in the middle of moving from a large detached house into a bungalow roughly a third of its size. This is about gains and losses.
Life Stages And Transitions
Older men and technology: they resist it, misunderstand it, and eventually capitulate to it with the enthusiasm of someone accepting a parking ticket. Or do They? This narrative is wrong. The more interesting story is considerably more nuanced — and considerably more deliberate.
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.
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.
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Life Stages And Transitions
After the age of 12, most British men have abandoned their shorts. Along the way, a significant number choose to revisit them. This is not a fashion story. It is, however, a psychological one.
Life Stages And Transitions
The shed has been mischaracterised for decades as a place men go to avoid their responsibilities. The evidence suggests it is, in fact, a place men go to remain capable of meeting them.
Life Stages And Transitions
Death is the one appointment nobody misses, yet rarely gets discussed. Men, in particular, have developed an impressive range of techniques for not thinking about it — most of which turn out to be thinking about it differently rather than not thinking about it at all.