I was recently reading an article that attempted to explain why middle aged men have heart attacks. The article suggested that the culprit is eating or drinking to excess, or lack of exercise or “possibly” stress. I suggest that the authors of the article have never known a middle-aged man. If they had, they would not have to ask.
First off, suggesting that lack of exercise is the culprit is absurd. Most of the middle-aged guys I know spend at least 2 or 3 hours each night tossing and turning from worry, and no one will tell me that that does not count as cardio exercise.
Similarly, blaming eating and drinking habits is absurd; our eating and drinking habits reduce our stress. Middle aged men drink too much because, well, who can blame us? And the researchers apparently do not realize that sometimes, after a long day of work, that a bag of Doritos is the only thing that keeps us from opening fire at the mall. The researchers need to dig deeper.
A middle aged guy’s heart attack risk is not due to job stress. Sure, by this time in our life most of us have gotten to the point where we have responsibility for projects or people or profits, but we’ve spent our careers planning for that. Of course there’s always a 25 year old waiting in the wings; a young guy with good hair and shiny teeth who understands terms like “social networking.” We know that he can probably do our job as well as we can, and at a fraction of what we are earning; we just don’t think about it.
It’s not fair for middle aged men to blame their kids for their heart attacks, although it seems that a lot of the guys I know have sired selfish little cretins who don’t remember they have a dad until they need money. Baby Boomers were “involved fathers.” They announced “Baby on Board” and devoted their lives to making sure their kids had it all. The kids are grown now, but still not financially independent, so dad keeps opening up his wallet, out of a vague sense of guilt that he wasn’t involved enough when the kids were growing up. The fact that Dad “wasn’t there” because he was working night and day to pay for soccer camp and class trips to Paris, (as opposed to disco dancing til dawn,) is immaterial.
We can’t blame our heart attacks on our aging parents, because we know that although they are increasingly frail, and tend to fall down a lot, they’re not driving us to an early grave on purpose.
We also can’t blame our wives or partners because they are generally in the same age group as we are and are as freaked out as us that they somehow made the jump from youth to middle age with no transition time whatsoever. No one ever told any of us that the years would be so short.
The talking heads tell us that middle-aged guys die early because of the economy or politics or war, which is just silly. Politicians are slime, and always have been, and, out of necessity we have adopted a detached fatalism about our finances, even though many of us were closer to retirement 10 years ago than we are today.
No, the reality of why middle aged guys have heart attacks and die in the prime of life is quite simple. It is irrational, but it’s because if we examine any aspect of our life we often feel a little bit …. empty. And we are left with a nagging uncertainty about whether we could have worked harder, planned better or done more.