Mid-life crisis in men— “Is it in the mind or is it real?”

In the world of interior designer and landscaper Amutabi Ungala Nasibi, it speaks volumes when an elderly man with greying hair uploads content on the social networking platform TikTok.

“You find a mzee (old person) there dancing to children’s songs. It’s just stupid,” he remarks.

In Nasibi’s thinking, such behaviour is one of the tell-tale signs of a person grappling with a midlife crisis. 

“Those are midlife crisis issues. TikTok is not for us,” says the 58-year-old Vihiga-based entrepreneur. He also thinks there are makes and colours of cars that greying men shouldn’t be driving.

Whereas midlife crisis is a terminology sometimes used in a derogatory way to describe people desperately trying to find the best way out of a time cul-de-sac, it is an inevitable situation that comes with many dilemmas for people in their 40s all the way to their 60s and even beyond.

For men, these midlife battles come in the form of financial regrets, depression, reckless behaviour, yearning for a youth gone by, disintegrating families, and a diminishing libido.

Questioning one’s abilities

According to Mr Chomba Njoka, a psychologist who has written extensively on masculinity, the midlife crisis in men involves introspection into what the man has achieved and what he can do with his remaining years.

“The first half of a man’s life is more focused on capacity building on an individual level. Most men developmentally seek social status based on economic and career competence,” the psychologist, says.

“The next half quizzes a man’s life philosophy: has he achieved his own identity by 40? He may not have much more to create or develop regarding that, but he is faced with a greater dilemma of meaning beyond the constructs he had in his youth, money or status,” he adds.

Mr Nasibi advises fellow men of whatever age not to judge themselves too harshly, lest they spend their sunset years soaked in worry and self-hate.

“Never, ever, think that you have underachieved. There is no set age limit for you to have done A, B, C, or D. You can make it at whatever age. I always give people the example of the guy who set up KFC. That guy finally made it at the age of 62. He never gave up. You do not have a time limit as to when you can make it,” Njoka says.

And according to 70-year-old Felix Okatch, a marketer, author and chairman of the Association of Professional Societies in East Africa, any man feeling insufficient should benchmark with his friends.

“Try to interact with your friends who you think have achieved. Even you, you have achieved, by the way, but try to interact with friends and talk,” he advises.

“When you talk and share freely, you learn more. The problem you have; someone probably has a similar one. So, talk to your friend and solve it. There is a saying that if there is a problem when you share it, you reduce the problem by half. When you don’t share it, it multiplies by two,” adds Mr Okatch.

Strained relationships

Mr Nasibi also notes that the fact that some men in their 40s or 50s are now in their second marriages is a sign of the midlife dilemmas hitting home. 

“You will notice that most of them are in their second marriages. The first marriage never worked. I don’t know why. Our generation was just unlucky,” he says.

Mr Nasibi himself is in his second marriage, raising two young daughters with his second wife. He had three children with his first wife, the eldest aged 26. He takes comfort in the story of the late Charles Njonjo, Kenya’s Attorney-General between 1963 and 1979 who got married at the ripe age of 51 and lived long enough to see his children become adults. 

“So, you’re in a second marriage, married to a younger woman, and because of all these worries that you have, the things that you haven’t achieved in life, things that you never did, things that you wish you had done, you find that they start affecting your libido, and now you can’t perform in bed, and not because you’re not functioning. When you have many thoughts, you will find that you can’t get it up. And then you start having fears that because your wife is young and you can’t get it up, she’s being (satisfied) by another man. My friend, that is a third issue that starts giving you even more stress,” shares Nasibi.

Okatch, on the other hand, admits to neglecting his wife as he grappled with his own midlife crisis. This happened when he had become a marketing manager, a position he had been coveting since leaving university. He admits that he travelled a lot and paid little attention to his wife, with whom they have been married since 1979.

“In my case, I turned to writing and my wife turned to religion,” says Okatch, who released the book Luo Clans and Legends last year. 

“My wife has now become a bishop,” he adds.

According to Njoka, the psychologist, men become more isolated in their 40s than women.

“Women approaching 40s with increased (hormone) levels become more ambitious and explorative and find more fulfilment in economic endeavours. They are more open to discovering themselves. Men, on the other hand, pay more for their sins in their earlier years. They seek more relational comfort,” he confers.

In midlife, the men we interviewed note that at this age men are likely to be financially well-off, meaning they are likely to attract a wider pool of women than when they were younger.

Okatch jokes: “When you have money, they come to you easier than before. You wonder, ‘Oh, life is easy like this?’”

This creates conflict in their marriages and with strained unions, divorce becomes apparent.  “Most men fight the fear of being denied access to their children,” Nasibi notes.

He says that once separated from their spouses, “Some don’t even have a rapport with their children.”

Revised goals

It is also in midlife that some men review what they wanted to achieve in their lives. 

A 2011 report in Scientific American explained how this happens.

“Data reveals that many middle-aged adults reformulate their aspirations in the wake of a life review, gravitating now more towards maintenance goals – essentially, keeping things status quo and safeguarding their future – rather than setting their sights on lofty new dreams,” it notes.

Nasibi explains it as the dawning of reality. “When you are between 20 and 24, you have dreams of changing the world. You have all the solutions to all the world’s problems. In fact, you think the older guys are fools. You wonder: why haven’t they already done this?”

“By the time you are hitting the late 30s, you realise those guys were not fools. And you start adjusting your dreams. By the time you’re hitting 50, those adjusted dreams haven’t been achieved. Then you start panicking. Now you are heading towards retirement and you do not have any savings. Because you are in your second marriage, you have young children in school. These are things that worry a man,” Nasibi says.

Nasibi is forthright enough to confess that his earnings journey has had its highs and lows, teaching him dozens of lessons along the way.

“I saw my first million when I was 26. So, for me, I have seen money come go and I became totally broke. I had nothing, all my friends ran away from me, and I came up again. I got millions again, and then I went broke again. And I wasn’t going broke because of misusing money or anything. Sometimes it’s just a bad investment that sinks all your money,” shares Nasibi. “This time round I’ve not sunk like the other two times; it was because Covid hit. Being a businessman and there being a prolonged curfew, there are many things I couldn’t do,” he adds.

Financial decisions  

Speaking of earnings, worries about financial stability tend to compound during midlife when the impact of the financial decisions a working man made in his prime begins to hit home. 

“Career success in the 20s and early 30s significantly impacts self-esteem. Life satisfaction is impacted greatly by career stability. The less predictable a man’s career is in his 30s, the more likely he is likely to have a crisis in his 40s because he may not be able to afford things or have savings to mitigate against reduced economic ability,” said psychologist Njoka.   

While some men grapple with shortage, Okatch says, others reach their midlife when there is financial relief as children will have completed their schooling.

“A level reaches where the threat of a child coming home due to school fees arrears isn’t there. And you have your own house, so nobody is threatening to lock your door,” says Okatch, noting that such relief can lead some men to err.

To avoid too much worry about finances, experts advise working men to save for their retirement from their first day they make an income.

According to Mr Paul Rege, the head of retirement benefits at Madison Insurance, planning for the future should never be optional.

“It is at the point of joining (a gainful activity) that you need to start saving for retirement. Just the very fact that you’ve got an engagement for a formal job means that retirement is looming, however far,” the financial expert says. “Therefore, the right time to start saving for retirement is the day you sign your contract paper.”

And according to Mr Paul Njoki, the head of wealth management at Standard Chartered Bank Kenya, a typical Kenyan man lives around 30 years after retirement.

“It’s very easy to retire at 65 and you live all the way to 90 or 95,” he says. “People get a proper job at (around) 30 then work until 65. That’s 30 years. Then they retire and live for another 30 years. So, it’s a big challenge: how will you be able to work for 30 years – eating, drinking and living – then have enough to spread through to the (30 or so) years you won’t be working?” he poses. 

Such questions, Mr Njoki says, should guide the financial products a person takes while saving for retirement. He advocates for investments that ensure the saved amount brings in more returns than the inflation rate and which make it easy to get cash, compared to land that may be hard to benefit from as one ages.

Nasibi advises fellow men not to fear taking another craft after retirement. “You retire from being employed, you don’t retire from life. You can work until the day you die. Even now, I’m still setting up some things,” the 58-year-old notes.

New occupations and habits 

From our interviews, we gathered that some men pick new hobbies as a result of midlife considerations while others pick new vices like drinking.

“(Some) begin to try compensating with indulgence,” says Njoka.

Okatch said he has seen some men pick golf and other activities, especially because of the need to socialise.

“It’s a period of emotional change,” notes Okatch.

Because midlife hits when a man has to start thinking of relocating to the countryside, Nasibi says, another stressor comes in the form of resettling in one’s rural home.

“When you start investing in shags (countryside) when you’re younger, relocating won’t bother you. Which is again what some of us did,” shares Nasibi, who relocated from Nairobi and set his business base in Kisumu a few years ago. “These are the guys you find in shags taking two beers in a pub alone. Stress kills them quickly.”

To which Mr Njoka adds: “The loneliest period for a man is perhaps his 40s. It can be lonely but in all philosophical and psychological measures, it certainly is a different time for a man to gaze deeply into his base self and ask existential questions.”

Impulsive decisions

Okatch said there is a tendency for men to make impulse decisions as they battle midlife crises. This is when, he says, a man can decide to cheat on his wife for no reason at all.

Some, he notes, do it to see “what they missed, not that they want to spoil their marriage”.  “It is a result of emotional turmoil,” he adds.

Focusing on legacy

In midlife men will start being more worried about their legacy.

“The realisation that life is progressing rapidly and may be already half gone can feel overwhelming. During midlife, people often consider issues such as life purpose, loss of youth, mortality, their legacy, and their sense of accomplishment and physical adequacy,” says goodtherapy.org, a platform that connects the public with therapists in the United States.

Njoki, the Standard Chartered executive, says legacy planning is one of the things on the minds of affluent Kenyans.

Health consciousness 

It is no secret that the older the body gets, the more susceptible it gets to diseases like cancer. According to Nasibi, midlife comes with increased dread of such problems.

“Men worry a lot about their prostate once they hit midlife, yet most of them shy away from being examined to ascertain that they are okay,” he notes. “Maybe it is because of the invasive nature of the examination. No man likes fingers up his (bottom).”  

Feeling offended that someone said that you are in a midlife crisis? You need not to. According to a 2015 paper in America’s National Library of Medicine, it is not all gloom.

“Those in midlife are faced with juggling multiple responsibilities and dealing with physical and cognitive signs of ageing, and they may experience a good deal of stress trying to handle it especially if accompanied by financial difficulties,” says the paper by Margie Lachman.

“Yet midlife can also be a peak time in many areas including earnings, position at work, leadership in the family, decision-making abilities, self-confidence, self-esteem, and contributions to the community,” it notes.

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SIDEBAR

A psychologist’s tips to men for navigating midlife

The reality: Midlife crisis is certainly a philosophical and psychological inquest for a man. He must discover himself but, most importantly, build his capacity to be able to adjust, and expect anything but be more prepared.  

It’s inevitable: Whether you have money in your earlier years or not, the midlife crisis is almost assured, ultimately its skills and activities that build or support your new philosophical journey.

How to cope: Join a church even if you are not religious or a cultural group that gives you a higher meaning. Give back more to the community, and build and mend relationships close to you, especially with your spouse, children, family and close friends.  

Money: Secure your long-term finances and simplify your life early enough. Do farming, join a course. Do it not for money but for something higher.   

Socialising: Stay connected and be in circulation to be more useful. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Psychologist Chomba Njoka