Kate Moss has just turned fifty, and here we are, three of her contemporaries arguing over a coffee about whether the midlife crisis exists or is merely an irrational apprehension.
The supermodel celebrated in style, at the exclusive Laurent restaurant in Paris. “And why wouldn't she celebrate it?” I exclaim, while looking at the newspaper's website at the photos of her black sheer dress and those of her suggestive boyfriend, thirteen years younger than her.
It is hard to reach the halfway point of life. That difficult age in which nothing grows except impudence and in which some collapse under the adulthood of the children, the old age of the parents, the heartbreaks, the mortgage and employment regulations without even knowing when everything started to go wrong.
My friend X maintains that at fifty there is nothing to celebrate. For her, always aware of her appearance, turning 50 was something terrifying: “Whoever claims that women are entering the most fantastic stage of our lives is lying.”
Everyone knows their own thing, I say.
My friend Y sees it from another perspective. With her children grown and divorced, she says that she now does whatever she wants. She is financially and emotionally independent. She feels powerful. “Like Moss, no, she is a lot of Moss. “I'm like Griso!” she jokes. In case the reader does not know, Susanna Griso has confirmed this week her relationship with a businessman, with whom she has been with just a year after breaking up a 23-year marriage and three children. “Susanna Griso, unleashed talking about sex: 'I feel like having fun,'” we read in the headline. That's having understood everything.
After having a few laughs at the expense of colleague Griso and the bedskirts, the conversation returns to the starting question. My friend X is convinced that there is a sociological explanation for what happens to us when we reach the threshold of fifty, in both sexes. According to her theory, which she attributes to economists and sociologists, the midlife crisis is due to the socioeconomic problems typical of these ages, such as divorces or debts, although the effect of aging, real or felt, weighs heavily.
But what if you don't go through a divorce or have debt? What if age does not mark your vitality? Sociology fails here. Maybe we have to look for a biological meaning. My friend Y goes on Google, does a little digging and finds a study published in the journal 'PNAS' that concludes that the midlife crisis comes from monkeys. Humans share with 508 chimpanzees and orangutans a vital period of years that are confused in emotions and of a haggard gray color in biographical terms. The researchers found that the animals enjoyed greater well-being in youth, that this decreased in middle age and resurfaced in old age, similar to the "U"-shaped curve in happiness in the human species.
Oh.
The good news is that we already have an answer. The bad news is that the crisis may be inevitable.
