Why midlife crises happen: what went wrong for the Sandwich Generation

You don’t need to be middle-aged to have a midlife crisis, but it helps. It can happen as early as age 30, but now that we’re all living longer, ‘middle age’ often refers to 45-65 year-olds.

Middle age isn’t as much fun as we expected it to be. We’re old enough to know the things we shouldn’t do, but young enough to decide to do them anyway, and now we can’t blame anyone else when they go horribly wrong.

We think we’ve got life sussed, but somehow the goal-posts seem to keep moving. The more we learn, the less we know. We’re determined to live within our incomes, but somehow we keep borrowing more money. We’re surrounded by friends and family, but we’ve never felt more alone.

We’ve made a bit of progress with our careers, but perhaps not as much as we’d hoped, and now we’re worried about losing our jobs because at our age, we’d be unemployable. We know each other well enough to achieve great sex, but to be honest we’d rather have an ibuprofen and watch TV in bed.