Endangered: the middle-aged man May 29, 2015

May 29, 2015
Endangered: the middle-aged man
Simon Kuper

‘Besieged by rising robots and women, no wonder many of us end up fighting the zeitgeist’
It’s easy to laugh at Nigel Farage. On the night of the recent British general election, tired and emotional, he resigned as leader of the UK Independence Party after failing to win his own seat. “I feel an enormous weight lifted from my shoulders. I have never felt happier,” he said. But four days later, to the dismay of many Ukippers, he “unresigned”.
Britons now debate whether Farage is a buffoon, a narcissist or a megalomaniac. However, there is a sadder explanation: he is just a middle-aged man. He presumably figured out that if he quit his job aged 51, he was most likely headed for the oblivion reserved for men of his age. Average male earnings in Britain peak aged 50, says the Office for National Statistics. When Farage told a newspaper after unresigning, “I’ve decided I will name the date when I stand down,” he was expressing a classic middle-aged man’s fantasy. The date he provisionally named was 2035, when he will be 71. In response, Ukip’s deputy chairman, Suzanne Evans, told the BBC: “I think it’s a joke. He’s done this for 23 years. Have a holiday. Have a holiday, Nigel. You know everyone needs a holiday.”
These are dread words for any middle-aged man. All my cohort knows how Farage feels. We can only hope to handle our own inevitable career demise with a bit more grace.
Illustration of a middle-aged man by Luis Grañena©Luis Grañena
For most of history, maturity was prized. In early 1955, the leaders of Britain, the US, West Germany, France and Japan were Winston Churchill (aged 80), Dwight D Eisenhower (64), Konrad Adenauer (79), René Coty (73) and Ichiro Hatoyama (72). The under-60s simply couldn’t be trusted with responsibility. As late as 1993, the former Republican official Marlin Fitzwater could say of Bill Clinton’s relatively young White House staff: “A few more fat old bald men wouldn’t hurt the place.” Fat old bald women were then still ineligible for power.
But then the cults of youth, tech and gender equality hit us with a triple whammy. To quote Italian novelist Tommaso Pellizzari: “For the first time, elderly people’s knowledge, the thing that made them the most revered and listened-to social group, is now mostly considered stuff to be stored in the attic, and then thrown away when moving out. What an old man knows, the way he learnt it, is an obstacle to future knowledge.” That explains the purging of ageing men and their fat salaries. It’s tempting to tend to think that the more you earn, the more valuable you are. In fact, the more you earn, the more vulnerable you are.

In Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), the seminal work on male middle-aged career demise, Willy Loman gets canned. A salesman like Willy, another character explains, rides “on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man.”
The terrible thing is that canned middle-aged men usually do blame themselves. That’s because until the moment of canning, most of them had convinced themselves they owed their success strictly to personal brilliance. Had they told themselves, “I’m just another forty-something white male born into a reasonably functional family, and so now I’m head of department, long may it last,” the canning would hurt less. But middle-aged men typically construct their sense of self around their career. When the career collapses, so does their confidence. Suddenly they feel like losers. Hence the famous finding of sociologist Katherine Newman of Johns Hopkins University that unemployed American managers blame themselves for their unemployment.
After canning, the middle-aged man is often forced to spend more time with his family, which typically isn’t pretty for either side. Worse, thanks to medical advances he can now expect to live into his eighties without a job identity, doomed unto eternity to bore others with half-baked reminiscences. The British Labour party’s newly canned leader, Ed Miliband, may go around forever telling the story of his 25-minute meeting with Barack Obama. Miliband is only 45 but the top line of his obituary is already written. He may have to unresign too.
Besieged by rising robots and women, no wonder many of us middle-aged men end up fighting a rearguard defence against the zeitgeist.
Instead, we need a new strategy. We must stop defining ourselves by our jobs. We grew up thinking, “What shall I do when I grow up?” whereas we should have been thinking: “What shall I do after that?”
We could borrow our new strategy from women, who have always been encouraged to construct their identities as mothers, not workers. Alternatively, we could learn from young people and base our identities on our Facebook pages. If we don’t find a new way of coping, we are all going to end up like Nigel Farage.
simon.kuper@ft.com; Twitter @KuperSimon
Illustration by Luis Grañena

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