The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  3. Stinginess: There seems to be truth in the stereotype of the old miser. I’ve noticed in myself an increasing reluctance to put my hand in my pocket. Is it a consequence of diminishing resources, especially strength, energy and time, which must all be hoarded so a general hoarding instinct develops?

  4. The Acceleration of Time: Not only is there little time left, but what remains is no longer content merely to pass and actually begins to accelerate. Or, to be more precise, there is a disturbing double effect – time in the short term appears to drag while in the long term it appears to speed up. The psychological explanation is that the time axis resembles a spatial dimension. In a painting with perspective, the distance between two points appears long if there are interesting objects between the points and short if there is nothing between. On the time axis, youth is packed with vivid events, or events more vividly experienced because fresh, a series of first times including that first time; the common feeling of the desultory middle years is that nothing at all is happening. So time in the middle years seems to pass more quickly. This also explains why, although it is difficult to remember what happened yesterday, memories of youth remain startlingly vivid.

  5. Metaphysical Impatience: Possibly a consequence of the acceleration of time, this is a growing rage at the obduracy and recalcitrance of the world, its persistent and continuing refusal to oblige. Though essentially metaphysical, it can take specific form – for instance, as queue rage or, my own version, escalator rage. When I see people blocking an escalator by standing two abreast I could happily strangle both of them.

  6. Uncertainty: Youth is supposed to be the time of indecision and doubt and the middle years the time of conviction. I can only say that, for me, it has been the other way round. Youth was the time of passionate beliefs, enthusiasms and aversions and middle age is the time of growing uncertainty. At one point there came the shocking revelation that I no longer knew what I believed in – or if I believed in anything at all. I no longer even knew what I liked or disliked. Do I prefer sea bass to salmon? Is William Faulkner any good? Do I even care about any of this?

  The middle years made me a castaway on the Greek archipelago of aporia, ataraxia and anhedonia – or, in plain English, perplexity, indifference and joylessness.

  7. Bowel Obsession: This is a strange one. I am at a loss for a theory. But there is no denying the phenomenon. I have an octogenarian friend who is that increasingly rare thing, a wise man, so when he offered to give me the meaning of life in one word he had my undivided attention.

  After waiting for a moment – his sense of timing was still exquisite – he murmured softly, ‘Bisacodyl.’

  There was silence. I was every bit as mystified as he wished.

  Eventually I said, ‘Is that some sort of Viagra thing?’

  He grimaced impatiently. ‘No, no…never mind fucking,’ and the frown relaxed and softened into radiant wonder, ‘the thing is to crap like a young man.’

  8. The Death-in-Venice Effect: My octogenarian friend was disingenuous in claiming to have lost interest in the opposite sex. Throughout lunch his eyes kept returning to the waitress. For the beauty of youth, which youth itself seems hardly to appreciate, astounds and dazzles the ageing. Rilke said that ‘beauty is the beginning of terror we can still just endure’268 – and, not only does this terror intensify with the years, almost everyone young starts to seem beautiful and terrifying. Because the life which blooms so gorgeously in the young body is a promise of extinction to the ageing beholder. And yet the urge to look is unbearably strong. Beauty is the headlight that paralyses the grey rabbit, the blazing sun that withers the spent husk. Turn away the failing eyes. Turn them away.

  On another day I was at a very different lunch with a dentist whose patients included movie stars, television presenters and celebrity chefs. The connection was through our children and wives who had met at a nursery – before the dentist became hugely successful and moved to this large, detached house with pool in an exclusive suburb. Other guests included the affluent neighbours and their wives – attractive women in their forties and fifties who laughed frequently, heartily and knowingly. It was a beautiful April day, full of freshness and promise. Light danced on the still water and champagne flowed as joyously as the torrents of spring. Bottles were popped as frequently and casually as cans of Coca-Cola. It was like one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. I had never known the phenomenon of unlimited champagne.

  By and by, the wives decided to go for a swim. We are bombarded relentlessly by sexual images but always of ridiculously slim, youthful models; the magnificently heavy thighs of mature women are a glory rarely seen. Then, just as the swimmers emerged from changing indoors, our host the dentist lifted a lawn chair and placed it right in front of me, blocking the view.

  ‘You seem a thoughtful type,’ he said. ‘Give me one good reason for getting up in the morning.’

  This was not the sort of request to be expected from Gatsby. Out of sight behind him, the mature Nereids with girlish cries lowered splendid thighs into the dappled water.

  It turned out that, but for his guests, he would probably not have bothered to get out of bed. He slept for most of most weekends and was on a heavy dosage of antidepressants.

  ‘I was one of Harley Street’s first endodontists,’ he explained. ‘Now there’s lots of them…all younger, cheaper and most likely better. So I’ve lost my nerve. I’m terrified of fucking up. My patients are demanding, intolerant, ruthless. They’d ruin me.’ He waved at the house, gardens and pool. ‘Then what about all this? I’m mortgaged to the hilt and beyond.’

  So his story continued – depression, exhaustion, chest pains, loss of libido. There was no need to explain this last symptom. He never once turned to the abundance and plenitude just behind him, not even when the wives emerged and scampered, dripping, towards the house. I tried to look round him but, of course, missed everything. There was only a flash of towels and laughter, mocking, on the air.

  Meanwhile, he was regarding me in an intense, thoughtful way that seemed to suggest expectation of wise counsel. But the times do not venerate the sage.

  He said, ‘Your teeth badly need whitening.’

  Nevertheless I persisted. ‘What age are you now?’

  ‘I’ve just turned fifty-four’.

  I suggested that he was probably undergoing the episode. This is nothing like the cliché of the ‘midlife crisis’, which is supposed to make men of forty buy open-topped sports cars in fire-engine red and roar off in search of young women with large breasts. As in the case of the dentist, the episode is more likely to encourage the opposite – a complete loss of interest in sex and an overwhelming reluctance to get out of bed. It is also more likely to occur in the fifties and it happens to women as well as men. When my friends and relatives moved into their fifties most of them had episodes, which varied in duration, intensity and style, but had in common an abrupt, unexpected collapse, the symptoms of which varied from extreme, lasting depression to intermittent panic attacks. This collapse seems to be the result of a sudden loss of nerve, a failure of certainty and confidence, an overwhelming feeling that ‘I just can’t do this anymore’.

  My own episode began with sudden bolts of terror at the prospect of having to deliver large lectures. I had been doing these for years when, out of the blue, came anxiety, chest pains, heartburn, sweating and the shakes. The authority, knowledge and teaching ability acquired over a lifetime disappeared into terrifying blankness, leaving only one certainty: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

  How did I get out of it? I’m still not entirely sure, but it was probably by a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, though without being aware of the practice or the term. Firstly, I allayed anxiety by meticulous, detailed preparation of material, so that there was no need to remember or improvise. Then I reminded myself that, after twenty years of competent lecturing, this fear was irrational. Finally, I forced myself to establish at least the appearance of authority over the students. It was th
em or me, and it could not be me.

  But what causes the episode? Many factors are involved. There is the awareness of change and physical decline, of personal impotence and insignificance, of a world growing ever more indifferent, demanding and ruthless while one’s own strength and energy diminish. There is the loss of faith that brings the feeling of being a charlatan, an old fraud. And there is the certainty of death and of being swiftly forgotten as though one had never existed. But perhaps most significant is the death of potential, the failure of imminence. We live in constant expectation, believing always that something will turn up, some invitation or opportunity, and then we will step forward to seize our destiny and become at last our true selves. But the middle years bring the sickening realization that nothing is going to turn up. There will be no magical deliverance. This is indeed all it is. Worse still, this meagre all-it-is will actually diminish.

  So all these termites eat away at confidence, silently and invisibly but relentlessly, until confidence suddenly crumbles and collapses into the dust. The worst fear is that the panic and depression will become permanent – and perhaps even intensify. But most people get through the experience and look back on it with astonishment. I understand it now as a kind of initiation rite: as adolescents are initiated into adulthood and life, so the episode initiates adults into ageing and death. It is the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness, the last valley, that, in Farid Ud-Din Attar’s poem, the birds must fly through to emerge and discover themselves as the Simorgh.

  The reward is that everything brightens up afterwards. The graph of the set point, the default temperament, is a U shape, with the high mood of youth declining to a minimum low in the middle years but then, surprisingly, climbing back to its earlier height.269 And the graph of marital satisfaction follows the same shape, dropping steadily in middle age but, if the couple can stay together, rising again in the later years.270 Even memory follows this curve. Septuagenarians have intense memories of youth, remember hardly anything about the middle period, and have intense memories again about the recent past.271 All the surveys seem to agree that the middle years are a crock of shit. According to the World Health Organization, depression ‘is already the single leading cause of disability for people in midlife’. There is even evidence of a rise in the suicide rate of the middle-aged. In the USA between 1999 and 2004 the suicide rate for the young remained stable, while the rate for those in the age range 45 to 54 rose by nearly 20 per cent and the rate for those in the older age groups dropped by an average of 10 per cent.272 The U shape of the temperament curve seems to be becoming more pronounced. But at least there is good news – if you can hang on rather than hanging yourself, things may look up.

  There are several reasons for this. Ageing involves much involuntary detachment – retirement from a job, departure of children from the home, an easing of sexual appetite. The nature, needs, desires and oddities of the self are better understood and, therefore, more easily controlled. There is greater awareness of what will bring satisfaction and what will not. And, though the circumstances of age may be more depressing than those of youth, it seems to become easier to suppress negative thoughts. In brain scans of younger adults the amygdala reacts both to positive and negative stimuli, but in older adults it tends to react only to the positive.273 The theory is that the prefrontal cortex becomes better able to control the amygdala. The ego has finally learned to tame the id.

  Thrilling sexual adventures and career developments are increasingly improbable. So the siren call of the world becomes easier to resist. There is less need to be like everyone else, as well as less need to be liked and less need to like – and so less compulsion to be accommodating. One of the great glories of later life is contrariness, provided it remains conscious and does not harden into mere eccentricity. One of the most thrilling research findings I have come across is a survey by Howard Friedman of the University of California which concluded that not only is cheerfulness unrelated to longevity, but that the chronically cheerful have a shorter than average lifespan: ‘It’s bad advice to tell people to cheer up and they’ll live longer.’274 So here is another good thing about ageing – stick around and you may get to dance on the grave of the smiley face.

  On the other hand, mindfulness, attention and learning new skills do appear to extend life, as well as improving its quality.275 So the tendency of age to shy away from the new and difficult may literally be fatal. There is even evidence that the brain, far from being doomed to steady decline, can generate new neurons right up until death, a miracle known as neurogenesis.276

  Best of all, the failure of imminence, which seemed so catastrophic, may be revealed as a blessing. For the spell of potential is an evil spell that occludes the senses and deranges the mind. When the spell finally lifts it is easier to learn the crucial lesson – that the journey is more important than the destination, the activity more important than the outcome. This is the conclusion that turns up again and again. The struggle to learn is more valuable than the learning itself, thinking with no particular purpose is the most enjoyable form of thought, absorption in a difficult skill – the flow experience – is more rewarding than any recognition, striving to love is more satisfying than being in love. Everything must be its own reward.

  It becomes clear that the life being lived is indeed all it is – but, hey, it is not so bad after all to be able to see, hear, taste, walk unaided, run up stairs and sustain an erection with merely human rather than chemical assistance. In fact this is astoundingly good. The natural world stands revealed in all its sublime abundance and the human world in all its sublime absurdity. But this wealth is on offer for only a strictly limited period, so there is an obligation to appreciate. In what may be the last speech Shakespeare wrote, he said: ‘Let us be thankful for that which is.’277 The strange and unexpected gift of age is gratitude.

  Whichever way life is regarded, it seems to assume a U shape. The curve of strength, energy and ambition is an inverted U with a high in the middle; the curve of temperament is a U the right way up with a low in the middle; and progress through life is a U laid flat, a switchback where stops are first passed going out and then again coming back but with less burdensome baggage and more appreciation and gratitude. So the ageing couple can be lovers again but without the exhausting battles of youth and the burdens of child rearing. And it is possible to be a student again but without the tyranny of career, curriculum or examination and with the ability to choose and actually enjoy the study texts. Of course, the final stage of the switchback is second childhood, a phrase that assumes more and more meanings as this stage approaches, though, for once, these are meanings best left unexplored.

  The crucial factor on the return leg of the U is acceptance of ageing and mortality – not easy in a culture of eternal youth. Who now would say, like Rilke, ‘I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us’?278

  And the cities of the sibling society have banished death. When I was growing up in a small town in Ireland death was a constant presence. Every time I visited my grandfather he listed, with malevolent delight, the contemporaries who had recently died. The local paper had one page of news and several of death notices. Funeral corteges regularly moved through the streets and all the passers-by stopped, removed hats and solemnly bowed their heads. There were large wreaths on doors and wakes lasting for days to give the entire community time to view ‘the remains’.

  But now, in the city, death is invisible. There no corteges, no notices, no mention, no ‘remains’. Years can go by without even a trace of death. It is like the flourishing city rats – always close but never mentioned, much less seen. There are no wakes – and, in secular cremation services, most of the mourners never see the corpse or coffin, much less the cremation. It is like a retirement-from-work party but without the retired employee.

  People used to say things like ‘when I’m gone’, ‘I won’t live to see that’ and ‘not in my time’. But now no one mentions finitude. As we
draw closer to death we should become more aware of it, but the opposite is often the case. The problem is that living is itself as habit-forming as any of the activities living involves. We just get terribly used to being around. As E.M. Cioran put it: ‘The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.’279

  So the new solution to death is to banish it from view and from mind, and to take refuge in habit. But only awareness of transience can give life its savour. Mortality is the spice of life.

  In his essay ‘On Transience’ Freud rejected the argument of a young poet who believed that impermanence devalued everything in life: ‘On the contrary, its value is heightened! The value of transience is one of scarcity over time. The limitation of the possibility of enjoyment makes it even more precious.’280

  Awareness of mortality can provide the focus and intensity so often missing from experience and is another gift of the later years. The time-rich young are as presumptuous and careless as the materially wealthy – if everything may be purchased then nothing has value – but the time-poor old know that very little may now be purchased and so everything is valuable. Sexual pleasure, for instance, is immeasurably enriched and intensified by the knowledge that it may not be available for much longer, cut off by incapacity or the death of a partner. One of the most heartfelt lines I have written is: ‘If every time could be the last it’s as good as the first.’

  Literature, from Homer on, abounds in eloquent reminders to appreciate the miracle of earthly existence. When Odysseus tries to console Achilles in the underworld with news of his renown on earth, the legendary warrior replies:

  Let me hear no smooth talk

  of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.

  Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand