Crises of Life

Humans of the modern age are privileged to be able to witness a strange condition afflicting men of around 40, where they will, for apparently no good reason at all, go completely crazy. They question the value of everything in their lives (including sometimes, life itself), grow inappropriate facial hair, start dressing at least 15 years too young for themselves, go all spiritual, buy a sports car and destroy all their most meaningful relationships. Yes, at around 40 men start glimpsing their impending mortality, they realise that, statistically speaking, they're probably closer to the end than the beginning. They remember the life dreams they hatched 20 years earlier, the grand plans, and notice not only that none of these dreams have been realised, but that the life-path they are traveling pretty much guarantees that none of these dreams are ever likely to become realised. In short, they get terrified and have something commonly referred to as a mid life crisis.

But why is it that this strange phenomenon should suddenly appear? Surely nature would have evolved our psyches in such a way that by the time we find ourselves old enough to start having to confront these serious issues, we would have enough wisdom inside us to be able to face them in a mature way. When the question is posed in this way, the answer is obvious: we are not evolved to live past 40.

Up to and including medieval times the average human lifespan had never exceeded 33 years. Even as relatively recently as the end of the 19th Century, the average western life expectancy was still only 37. It's only during the last hundred or so years that life expectancy has skyrocketed to today's figure of 67 years. Prior to this, if you were 40 you were either a village elder, or you'd been pushing up daisies for 3 years. We haven't evolved skills to deal with facing the 30 or 40 years most of us can expect after "mid-life", because we've only relatively recently been granted that extended envelope. As human beings, we've invested a lot of time and energy on thinking about how to be young; there are a million attractive options to chose from in that particular life catalogue, but how much productive thought has gone into how to be old? No wonder when men are faced with aging, a good percentage of them decide to go backwards and become 22 again.

But according to a number of researchers (biogerentologists) and commentators, the whole context of the mid-life crisis may be up for review in a relatively short time. Due to discoveries and advances in medicine and microbiology anticipated over the next 20 - 30 years, there is a body of opinion that believes the average life span may be extended fairly radically, within the lifetime of people living today. In a situation where you could reasonably expect to live to say 120 or 130, it'd be morbid to start considering your mortality at a mere 40. Hopefully, under that scenario, by the age of 60 or 70, by which time those kinds of thoughts would be appropriate, we would be mature enough to face them without going crazy and completely falling apart.

Of course, the whole question of radical life extension is completely redundant for that percentage of our species that have the misfortune of living in Sub-Saharan Africa. They are the only portion of humanity that is actually going backwards in terms of life-expectancy. According to the World Health Organisation, the 10 countries with the worlds lowest life expectancy are all in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Sierra Leone bottoming out at only 25.9 years average. This backwards trend in life-expectancy has been occurring over the last 17 years or so, because of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, which is by far the leading cause of death in that part of the world. At 25.9 years, the Sierra-Leonian average life expectancy is approximately equivalent to that of the Neolithic Age about ten and a half thousand years ago.

In Sierra Leone, the extremely low percentage of men that reach 40 generally don't go through any kind of existential crisis. For them the crisis of existing is quite a bit more real.

The Drugs Don't Work

As a kid (in the 60's and 70's) I had the mixed blessing of having fairly modern, enlightened parents who didn't believe in hitting naughty children. Instead my parents, who I assume had either read the works of child-rearing guru; Doctor Benjamin Spock, or were simply part of the benevolent revolution his writings generated, would try reasoning with me, crafting careful sentences that would cause the enormity of my various crimes to seep fully into my psyche until I became, by degrees, conditioned by reason rather than by violence, to behave in a reasonably non-sociopathic manner.

Though this approach had it's negative consequences (self-esteem the size of a rice-grain, paranoiac nightmare of an adolescence that stretched out roughly to the age of 30), I eventually "got my head together" and was able to incorporate this non-violent child-rearing philosophy into a pacifist life philosophy that I still generally observe.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) did not exist when I was a kid. Naughty kids were just naughty and parents had to deal with it using whatever strategies they had at their disposal. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially introduced Attention Defecit Disorder (ADD) to the world in 1980 when it listed the condition in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). By 1994 the ICD had changed ADD to ADHD and a new revolution in parenting was on its way: Now that naughtiness was a medical condition, parents no longer had to waste energy on hitting their naughty kids, or psychoanalyzing them. Instead, all they had to do was get hold of a prescription and medicate the buggers into submission!! Now that's a 21st century type of solution ... why hadn't anyone thought of it before?

Well, of course, they had.

Ritalin (chemical name: Methylphenidate) was patented in 1954 by the Swiss, Ciba pharmaceutical company (now Novartis) and has been given to "hyperactive" kids since the 1960's, although it wasn't until the 90's that it started being prescribed in the prodigious quantities we hear about these days. In Australia over a quarter of a million prescriptions are written for Ritalin each year. For the U.S., though it's difficult to obtain actual numbers, it's estimated that about 5 million kids are on Ritalin.

You don't have to look far to encounter the controversy surrounding this drug and claims of overdiagnosis and over-prescription. Disgruntled non-Novartis-shareholders worldwide are pointing to a generation of compliant zombie-kids, robbed of their personalities and sleep-walking through their childhoods. But really, what did we expect? Didn't we get exactly what we were asking for? We no longer need to look to religion (as Marx did 160 years ago) to provide the masses with their opiate. We enlightened 21st century types have no use for metaphor, instead, we took a page out of Huxley's Brave New World, and got ourselves a real opiate (sorry, an amphetamine actually ...) to force down the collective throat of the the most truly insurgent sector of society; our kids.

And now the 90's Ritalin kids are growing up, going to High School and getting jobs. At last, the dream should be starting to come to full fruition; A compliant generation of zombie-kids, becoming a compliant zombie work-force, what better? Except that something's going wrong. Instead of these kids doing what they're told and getting on with their designated duties, they're going crazy, becoming unpredictable and committing violent and indecent acts!!

Damn! Looks like we screwed up again. Don't tell me we're going to have to start talking to the little buggers again. I don't even know what language they speak these days. How do you say "right" and "wrong" in teen parlance? I guess we're just going to have to ask them.