Back when I was 20, my hair cascading down to my shoulders, jeans shredded at the knee, I thought it wise to complete the look with a lip ring. Two years later, there I was, supine in an emergency room, surrounded by doctors craning their necks to look and laugh, while I desperately rued my life choices.
As the local anesthetic took hold, my mind returned to the night before: four pints deep and finding the ring broken at the join, I had squeezed the two ends together, clamping it tighter than my lip could ever accommodate. By morning, it had turned blue. With a mouth swollen like I’d kissed a wasp nest, I went for a post-op pint, only for it to dribble out of the existing hole. No more piercings ever again, I swore.
For as long as I can remember, aging has terrified me
Bad as that was, it was hardly the beginning. At 18, determined to arrive at university as an edgier proposition than the boy who had left school, I had my eyebrow pierced, aiming for Incubus and landing somewhere nearer Duncan from Blue. My body, unimpressed by the reinvention, spent the following weeks expelling the bar as it would a splinter. Within months, it had literally grown out, and that was that: no more eyebrow bar to complement the spiky blond highlights I’d also acquired.
Few men have ever had better grounds for renouncing piercings permanently. Yet three months ago, at 41, I found myself in a parlor just off London’s Carnaby Street, sitting very still while a heavily tattooed young man half my age lined up a needle with my left earlobe. Was this a case of me clinging to the vestiges of youth? Or was I morphing into a member of Status Quo? At a party in 2022, I’d spoken about a desire to get an earring, only to be shot down and told categorically that it would smack of a meltdown.
Blame, perhaps, an eight-year stint at a newspaper coming to an end. Left to my own devices, no longer managing a young team whose judgment I had dreaded, I decided to lean into my midlife crisis. Let no one deny that there are worse ways for a man in his forties to come apart. Not for me a sleek sports car – not on a journalist’s salary, come on. I would let my hair grow, I thought, and signal my unraveling with a slutty little earring, as modeled by thirtysomethings like Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
Of course, there is nothing new about the midlife crisis. While the term was coined only as recently as 1957, by a Canadian psychoanalyst called Elliott Jaques, we have been confronting our own mortality, with varying degrees of dignity, since the dawn of time. Go back seven centuries and there was Dante, whose Divine Comedy opens with the line “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (“in the middle of the road of our life”). A poet of 35, by scholars’ reckoning, has strayed into a dark forest and must be led down through Hell by Virgil to find his way out. In other words, Italy’s foundational epic is essentially the story of a beleaguered man, helplessly lost and in the throes of a bruising midlife crisis.
Closer to home, and considerably more acerbic, was Martin Amis, whose 1995 novel The Information follows a failing writer through the indignities of turning 40, and who dismissed the very condition I now find myself in as “an hysterical overreaction to the certain knowledge that you’re going to die.”
The statistics don’t provide much succor, either: in a 2020 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economist David Blanchflower, a former rate-setter at the Bank of England, crunched the wellbeing figures of 132 countries and put the low point of human happiness at 47.2 years of age. That’s to say, I am not leveling out at all, but hurtling inexorably towards it, with five-and-a-half years still to fall.
Whatever the numbers say, my own crisis was always inevitable. For as long as I can remember, aging has terrified me: the day I turned four, according to my mum, I erupted in a paroxysm of existential despair as I lamented no longer being three. Indeed, as someone inherently nostalgic, a martyr to Peter Pan syndrome, I have found each passing birthday cataclysmic, and my 26th remains the nadir.
Struck by the realization that I was now officially closer to 50 than to birth, I drank with such dedication that I was escorted home from my own party at eight in the evening, having disgraced myself in ways that included swinging a punch at a pal and face-planting the cake another had baked me. Four years on, staring down what I naively thought was the utter calamity of turning 30, I took the bait when a colleague listed, on my Facebook wall, everything I was older than: the World Wide Web, Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo, the Premier League, the Channel Tunnel, you name it. The tears were real.
If I needed a lodestar, I found one in Harrison Ford. In 1997, feeling inspired after a boozy lunch, Ford marched into a Claire’s Accessories and had his left lobe done on the spot. He was 55 at the time. Yes, I know, that’s Han Solo; he can get away with anything. But still.
As for the verdict, reaction has been kinder than I deserved. “Oh, I thought you already had one” has been the refrain. Not that there hasn’t been the odd barb. As if to puncture any modicum of self-satisfaction, a less generous friend of mine studied my lobe a second too long before turning to me and, in a strangled Cockney vernacular, borrowing the line David Schwimmer delivers in Friends post-piercing: “I know. I mean, who am I, David Bowie?” Nothing kills your bravado quicker than a comparison to Ross Geller. At least I can console myself by drinking pints that might actually stay in my mouth.
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