Séamas O’Reilly: When I was a kid, mid-life crises were something men did on TV and I wanted in
If anyone was owed a mid-life crisis, it was my dad, and yet the craziest thing he did in his middle age was get really into genealogy
The mass of men”, wrote Henry David Thoreau, “live lives of quiet desperation”, and while I might quibble on the “quiet” part, it’s true a lot of us do yearn for something more. His words have been used as shorthand for the foibles and frustrations of ageing men ever since, a siren call to that peculiar phenomenon known as the “midlife crisis”. Even the term does seem quite hopeful – indeed, some people are having ...
