In the previous chapter I suggested that attitudes to death in affluent Western societies are not as healthy, open and inclusive as is sometimes claimed in contemporary sociological literature. The harsh treatment of the elderly, the fantasy of one's own autonomous demise, indifference to the mortal sufferings of other people and our alarming failure to address the accelerating destruction of life in the Anthropocene, are more indicative of a disavowal than a reckoning with death. Evidence of growing climate anxiety, on the other hand, suggests that what is repressed by modern systems of social reproduction and control cannot stay hidden forever. The tendency for researchers to theorize climate anxiety as ‘existential’, as an issue of ontological insecurity related to concerns about fate, guilt and human self-worth (Budziszewska and Jonsson 2021), also suggests that fears about the survival of life on Earth, while statistically more prevalent among younger people, articulate doubts about the purpose of human existence that bear some interesting similarities with the anxieties of ageing that we commonly refer to as the ‘mid-life crisis’. Understanding the latter, and contextualizing it socially and historically – which I will do in the final chapter – may allow us to see these similarities as more than coincidental, and in the process to think more decisively about both the need for and the possibility of intergenerational solidarity and meaning.

The mid-life crisis

When we are young we typically acquire aspirations that are important to us because the goals are, from our under-resourced starting position in life, remote enough to feel exotic. Once we have achieved success in their pursuit, however, it is not unusual for the things we valued to lose their lustre.