This article was published in the Canberra Times and other newspapers in 2013. 

Roll up. Roll up. Pick a crisis, luv. Any crisis. You will not beat our price on any crisis, big or small. We have a comprehensive crisis range. We have big fat crises that wreck your health, destroy your career, mess up your family and really muck up your hair.  We have little crises that you can have for one day. Maybe your latte is too cold or your wifi keeps dropping out. These user-friendly crises are known as First World Worries and, really, you can swear and curse at the world or throw a hissy fit and it’s done. For a small additional cost you can have your very own bespoke crisis. So why don’t you try a designer crisis, Luv? We could give it a name. We’ll call it a Midday Crisis. They’re very popular these days. You can throw the hissy fit. Get it out of your system and it’s done and dusted by Happy Hour or wine o’clock as we like to call it in the crisis business.

So many life crises are discussed in the media these days, you would think there was some dodgy spiv hawking them from a street cart.  You wanna buy cheap crisis? You will have heard all about the Mid-Life Crisis. Carl Jung first identified this crisis by having one. He took to his backyard for several months making little canals for toy boats. I’m not sure how the Canal Knowledge helped Jung, but his Mid-Life Crisis was hardly catastrophic. He didn’t run off with a blonde babe 20 years his junior. He had affairs instead. He had also, wisely, married into money and his wife, Emma, looked after their 5 children while he was, um, otherwise occupied. 

The Mid-Life Crisis is an identity crisis. It is real enough and can be devastating. It happens when you arrive at the mid-point in your life, around 40 or 45 perhaps, when you’ve created an identity that lives up to others’ expectations but it is not, in fact, based on your true self. Emotions that hound this age-based crisis include feelings of emptiness, dissatisfaction and entrapment. Men run a marathon or buy a Porsche or a motorbike or trade in the old wife for a new, faster, sports model to discover too often, and too late, that kids are an optional extra that she wants. Less cashed-up men get a tattoo, grow a ponytail and go out clubbing. One friend got a dragon tattoo, which then appeared on the cover of Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even before the tattoo ink or his blood had dried on his shoulder his mid-life crisis had turned into a cliché. 

Women go for a more spiritual awakening. They eat, pray, love. This may or may not involve shagging a foreigner in Bali but will, most likely, involve yoga, dietary supplements, a book club, new shoes and/or alcohol. One friend gave party drugs a good hammering.  She’d arrive home from a night out giggling and full of love for the universe to be confronted by her tight-lipped 18-year-old daughter complaining ‘Mum. You’ve done it again, haven’t you? You’ve taken drugs.’ By morphing into Eddie from Ad Fab she had become yet another cliché, but one with a very bad headache the next morning. 

I’m not quite sure how you can become your ‘true self’ trapped inside a cliché. But now even the Mid-Life Crisis is going through a crisis because a newer, brasher life crisis has appeared on the scene and up-staged the Mid-Life Crisis. This is the Quarter Life Crisis, which psychologists claim, hits 25 to 35-year-olds. The Quarter Life Crisis kicks in when the twenty-something party persona struggles with the yoke of adult responsibilities such as a regular job, one partner, a functional car and a fixed abode. Thirty, say, is looming on the horizon and you don’t have a full-time job, a career plan or any idea at all really. And you still live at home with mum and dad. (Perhaps, it should be called the F***ed Econony Crisis).

So you have the mid-lifers struggling at 40 to 45 to throw off the yoke of adulthood and the quarter-lifers struggling to take on the yoke of adult responsibilities. So if you really play your cards badly, you could end up in one non-stop 20-year crisis. 

But there is one more crisis. This one I’ve based on observation. I call it the Late Life Crisis. You are over 60 and something very strange starts to happen. You are being dismissed from the culture. You get a Senior’s Card that entitles you to travel discounts and cheap pub meals at 6pm! You are no longer allowed to forget things. Now you suffer from ‘senior’s moments’. You are sidelined as the old guard at work. Instead of being diagnosed with an illness the doctor says ‘well, it’s what you should expect at your age’. Marketing types don’t even bother with your demographic. You’re too set in your ways. They can’t flog you new stuff. And this is what I’ve found. All my friends are getting ‘boring’. Not quite all, but too many for comfort. They are disappearing into their own life bubbles. They’re fading to grey. If they can’t reinvent themselves and find new ways to live in old age, they are going to turn into something really terrifying: their own parents.