The Late Midlife Crisis

Life in Ancient Troglopolis was hard. I remember it well. Like it was a hundred million years ago. You’d wake up in the morning, brush the leaves off you, regain consciousness, open your eyes, and find that your best friend has been eaten by a pack of coyotes. Right on the day of the most important match of the year. You get used to everything, except watching an important match alone. With whom could you discuss it now? With the coyotes? Who would bring beer and potato chips to the cave? As I say, life was tough.

The troglodytes limited themselves to scurrying through the jungle in search of food, dead or alive. With huge, sharp spears they chased their prey. They hunted them, chopped them up, and then roasted them over the fire for a long time, because Japanese restaurants had not yet been invented, where the sole winks at you and wags its tail when served on your plate.

But hunting and eating were not everything in those ancient times. Hominids also drank strange concoctions. Maybe that’s why they spent some time painting. It was unnecessary, yes, but they did it. Although it is true that in this aspect their advances were surpassed in a very short time, as soon as it became fashionable to give pots of finger paint to children in kindergartens.

The latest studies confirm that primitive men spent a lot of time sleeping. Only those who have not spent a few days in the jungle with one of these isolated tribes for centuries can be surprised by this tendency towards horizontality. Prehistoric man had only two positions: horizontal and vertical. And the vertical is very risky when you live surrounded by two hundred idiots whose main hobby is throwing sharp spears fast and in every direction. The number of accidental deaths in Neolithic times far exceeded the number of accidental deaths in Neolithic times. Chilling fact. I know what I am talking about.

The troglodytes had a short but intense life. They understood that the first gray hairs of their thirties are a good excuse to submit to old age. They assumed it without too much stress. Among other reasons, death was the norm in the Paleolithic. A living Neanderthal is always an exception. In fact, no anthropologist has yet managed to find living Neanderthals. This proves that their normal state is death.

You would never have said it but cavemen were very narcissistic. Only that can explain why they wore colorful bird feathers on their heads. They hung the brightest rhinoceros teeth around their necks. And the troglodyte girls painted their faces with all kinds of filth, and tied the slenderest mammoth femurs to their heads. The boys howled like monkeys and the girls danced to the sound of loud drums that would make a one-armed drummer sound good. Not much has changed in that respect over the centuries.

Enormously vain, prehistoric people never considered the possibility of doing sports. And, like us, they reached their forties with the strange feeling that the party was coming to an end. None of this led them to join a gym, to avoid fat in their food, or to weigh themselves to avoid being overweight. On the contrary, they hunted and ate more mammoths than ever, with the vast amounts of cholesterol that they must have had. You just had to see what they ate. I have a small mammoth at home and I can assure you that it feeds exclusively on butter and strawberry ice cream. And he has been dead since the quaternary era.

Along with my generation, I am going through the late midlife crisis. Much less bearable than in the prehistoric era, because due to medical advances the life expectancy of man has been prolonged in an almost unconstitutional way. Perhaps this is why I am so surprised by the attitude of my friends. Most of them are rather troglodytic. And yet, a fever for health and wellness that has me worried pervades my surroundings.

Everyone around me is joining gyms. Someone should remind them that they’re going to die anyway. They dress up in tracksuits! They go to the gym and get on a thing they call a treadmill, and it works just like those wheels they put hamsters on to show they are incapable of intelligent activity.

Ignore the myths. The midlife crisis is nonsense, the first gray hairs, the big one is the forty-somethings. A couple of nights ago I met an old friend for dinner. Just turned 40. Brilliant professional career. He had just come from doing three hours on the exercise bike and was in a sorry state. Sore, stiff, and with dark bags under his eyes that were much bigger than mine; it’s hard to beat the dark bags under a journalist’s eyes.

He said his skin glowed with health. But I would have said he was pale, perhaps dead. The conversation was brief. The properties of boiled apple peel came up several times. He called the waiter at the restaurant. He ordered still water and a salad. And then I swooned. Not so much because of the salad. But because he said it was to share. I think the West is crumbling. We idiots today are no longer like the idiots of yesteryear. I long for the Paleolithic midlife crisis. I urgently need a spear and a herd of mammoths full of cholesterol.

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