The standard solution is to purchase an unnecessarily expensive sports car, get divorced, and start a relationship with someone half your age, but generally not in that order. Taking a great interest in extreme sports or starting a rock band also seem to be quite popular.

 

All of these therapies are based on the premise that one can stave off the psychological effects of ageing by acting like a child. How this helps, I'm not sure. Pretending not to be getting old is not likely to be an effective long-term strategy.

In my case anyway, I'm sure this approach won't work. My mid-life crisis is an existential one, caused by the realisation that I owe my existence to a series of astonishing events and that I am a self-aware collection of chemicals. I know this probably not a standard mid-life crisis, but let me see if I can explain why it is significant.

My body, my brain, my feet my eyes, and everything else that is me, is made up of water, proteins, fats, carbohydrates and other bits and pieces. All of this stuff is essentially composed of just three chemical elements: hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. That's what I am, and what you are.

For me to exist, all of these elements need to be present here on earth. Hydrogen was present at the beginning of time and there's apparently plenty of that about, but carbon and oxygen did not always exist. They had to be manufactured and the only place in the universe where heavier elements can be created is inside stars through nuclear fusion. Every atom of carbon or oxygen inside my body was created billions of years ago inside a star.

All this carbon and oxygen had to find its way out of whatever star it was manufactured inside and then end up on this planet. This happened about four and a half billion years ago when the carbon and oxygen, along with a bunch of other gas and rocks, was swirling around what would eventually be our solar system. Enough material collected together and, thanks to gravity, collapsed on itself to form this planet. A big dull lump of iron, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel and a few other things became planet earth.

But that's all it was, just a bunch of gas and rocks orbiting the sun. Then after a billion years, in an extremely unlikely event that we are yet to detect on any other planet, some of the inanimate matter on the primeval earth came to life. At first this life wasn't much to look at, and it certainly wasn't aware of its own existence. But time went by and after billions more years, this life became more complex and more diverse until one day, probably about 200,000 years ago, the first modern human was born.

This species survived, continued to reproduce, spread across the planet and eventually built roads, cities and fast food restaurants. Generation after generation eventually led to me being born about 40 years ago. And here I am. Or more accurately, here we all are.

I am hydrogen, carbon and oxygen that knows that it exists. That's more than can be said for most of this planet and practically the entire universe.

The fact that I am able to reach this conclusion took the birth of a universe, the smelting of heavy elements inside stars, the collapse of a collection of rocks and gas into a planet, the birth of life and the evolution of a species with a sophisticated enough brain to be self-aware.

That's my mid-life crisis right there.

The fact that life of any kind exists is both incredible and profoundly beautiful. But the existence of a living creature that has evolved to the point that it is aware of its own existence is astounding. That this creature is me places me in a highly privileged position in the universe.

My crisis is of course that what I do with this astounding privilege is I get up in the morning and go to work in a bank. I help groups of humans buy and sell things built by other groups of humans. The banality of my day-to-day life in comparison with the significance of the events that led to my existence seems an impossible thing to reconcile to. Certainly, not through the purchase of a Porsche or plastic surgery anyway.

But the solution to my existential crisis is a lot simpler than even that. The solution is to realise that working in a bank or anywhere else doesn't prevent me from recognising the simple beauty of life. All I have to do is to look at the life around me, at my wife and my son, and to smile at the good fortune of our existence.