On psychoanalysing oneself

UPFRONT:MY VERY GOOD FRIEND is buying himself a drum kit. He hasn't played drums in 20 years and lives in a house with two small children. I may not be an authority on child-rearing, but I think it's safe to assume that Dr Benjamin Spock et al are not big on drum kits and little children being in close proximity.

Could it be that the drum kit was meant as payback for three years of sleep deprivation to date, as in: ‘Let’s see how you tantrum-prone tykes feel about a little high hat when you’re the ones trying to catch some zees, eh? Not so much fun when the shoe’s on the other foot, now is it?’

But no. “I’m having a mid-life crisis,” he tells me, with the deepest of sighs. He is barely 40 years of age. I concede that he may, mathematically speaking, be in the middle of his life, but anyone who knows him can testify that the man has barely put adolescence behind him.

“Aren’t you supposed to at least have some interim phase as an actual adult before hitting mid-life?” I ask. He is too busy playing air drums in his newly-purchased designer shades to pay any heed.

It’s not that I don’t understand the temptation to hanker for one’s misspent youth. It’s just that you should, at the very least, have put some distance between yourself and that misspent youth if you’re going to be convincing about the hankering bit.

In other words, it’s difficult to be sympathetic when someone is pining for a youth they only put paid to last weekend. Given that these days you can drag the arse out of your adolescence well into your 40s, it hardly seems appropriate to hit a mid-life crisis when you’ve only just teetered into adulthood proper.

But try telling that to a grown man, wailing down the phone about roads not taken, at dawn on a Monday. In the early morning light, a mid-life crisis looks remarkably like your average hangover to me.

I quickly enter “mid-life crisis” into Wikipedia in order to assemble an arsenal of symptoms he’s not exhibiting (thereby bursting his mid-life crisis bubble and rescuing his wife and children from a lifetime of amateur drum fills).

This tactic backfires dramatically as I immediately discover that I, too, have all the symptoms of a mid-life crisis. In search of an undefined dream or goal? Check. A desire to achieve a feeling of youthfulness? Check. The need to spend more time alone? Check. The only thing that goes against me is my actual age, and we all know that’s the most relative part of the equation.

It now seems altogether less likely that my friend is entirely to blame for his delusions of mid-life crisisdom. A large part of the problem, as far as I can tell, lies in the fact that he was introduced to the concept in the first place. He is nothing if not suggestible, and the downside of being well-versed in pop psychology is that one simple bad mood can balloon into something more existential alarmingly quickly.

Thus a preponderance of emotional self-awareness has sent us sliding dangerously into omphaloskepsis, with each emotional state examined, labelled and often embraced as we negotiate our way through the pop-psychology lexicon.

There’s no end to the crises we can summon with an A-Z of psychobabble to hand. Syndromes, disorders, complexes and issues – an assortment of conditions that ensure nobody gets a clean bill of health.

If, for example, you have a tendency to indirectness and ambiguity, you could, say the gods of the internet, have co-dependency issues – or, indeed, be verging on the passive-aggressive. Then again, you could just be Irish.

I’m not saying that psychological examination isn’t helpful – and often necessary for people to get the best out of their allotted time on the planet. I’m just suggesting that it’s best performed by people who are trained in the field.

Because, while a healthy dose of introspection is to be entirely recommended in many circumstances, self-diagnosis isn’t necessarily the way forward. Buying a drum kit, however, just might be.

The real question here is not what name I should put on my friend’s malaise, but why a man who has always loved drums has spent so much of his life without the means to indulge this passion? What if the problem to date has not been self-absorption – but a lack thereof?

I’m suddenly struck by the notion that perhaps my friend is not so much in crisis as finally hitting on the clichéd truth – that life is short. That, as far as we know, we’ve only got one shot at living it. That the beat goes on until it stops forever, but until it does, he should play it loud and joyously and as much as he possibly can.

“Go buy that drum kit,” is my advice, once my confusion of metaphors clears. What’s a mid-life crisis, after all, but a reminder of our own mortality? And there’s nothing in my entire arsenal of pop psychology that can counter that.

Besides, what’s the worst thing that can happen – money wasted on a drum kit? Sure aren’t they the words one Larry Mullen once pinned to a noticeboard at Mount Temple school. All I’m saying is it didn’t do him any harm.