Mojo Rising

This awareness had begun several years previous, whispering white noise heralding an unspecified sense of barely palpable psychological discomfort. At that time it was not disappointment per se, rather a mild sense that that he was lacking........something. A bit like feeling rather peckish but not quite knowing what it is you want to eat, or if indeed you actually want to eat at all?

This nagging sense of unrequited psychological hunger blossomed over time into something more consuming, to the point where he was left with little choice but to enter a sustained period of self-contemplation. Was this a mid-life crisis he wondered? Doubtful, he thought. If it had been, surely he would be actively pursuing various ill-advised lifestyle changes and appendages. Sports cars. Tinder. Exercise. Rather, the phrase he settled on in his own mind was mid-life malaise.

This seemed much more manageable to him, suggestive as it was of something mild, reparable, and loosely continental. It also, if truth be told, sounded a bit more interesting.

During this self-examination he felt for lumps on the most obvious suspects for his condition.
A degree of physical frailty had been manifest since puberty, the genetic endowment bestowed by a maternal grandfather with the demeanour of a wrestler and the build of a jockey. This frailty had become accentuated by a decline in his late thirties in what had only started out as a barely moderate level of muscle mass. He wondered in repressed awe at the confluence of biological and lifestyle factors that served to deliver a fallen chin with pencil-grade legs and arms bookending the central mantelpiece of a distended belly. At secondary school his sports teacher had accused him of having “Wednesday legs” – as in when’s dey goin’ to break? He always remembered that.

But he accepted his physical shortcomings in the same way one accommodates a long known friend who was never really liked in the first place. Reluctant acceptance giving way to begrudging munificence. Indeed he found that he barely gave his appearance that much thought anymore. As such he concluded that his mid-life malaise was not a reaction to what some might regard as quite noticeable physical shortcomings.

He ruminated on his professional life, although that was probably too grandiose a term for it. Career-wise, he had failed comprehensively to elevate himself above the none too giddy heights of lower-middle management. His was not a career ladder – rather one of those collapsible steps short people have about their kitchens. But what had he expected when he knuckled down in his late twenties, securing an entry level position in supply chain logistics? After all, it was not the function within many businesses where future CEOs were hot-housed. And also, if he were to be brutally honest with himself, (and he might as well be, or what was the point of this introspective inquisition anyway?), he had long since acknowledged in himself a rather immutable lack of ambition.

In his teens he had mistaken it for some form of Zen-like inner-peace, a “not going to get distracted by the quest for material success” outlook that would help him reveal the true nature of the world he inhabited. By his late twenties, having had it pointed out in no uncertain terms not by one, or two, but three girlfriends, he had accepted that he was actually just quite lazy.

So no, lack of career progression was not the rat nibbling away at his psychological wellbeing.
Love, then. The lack of a meaningful relationship. No significant other. The butler in the mid-life malaise murder mystery. Well, yes – he would have liked not to be divorced, that had been very unpleasant. Ideally he would have found his soul-mate, rather than his arsehole-mate as he had come to think of her. He was, he supposed, mildly jealous of the very few couples he knew who seemed genuinely content with each other. But he had never genuinely felt content with his ex-wife, or any of his girlfriends before or after her. Thus whilst he had certainly enjoyed moments of his various relationships, and some had had more of these moments than others, he could not legitimately consider himself a “relationship natural”. With these considerably tempered expectations in this area, he did not really feel he had underperformed. And so his discomfort was not ascribed to this specific domain of his questionable achievement.

His thoughts turned to the nature of happiness. Happiness, he had read somewhere, was a positive residual after subtracting our expectations of what our situation should be from the reality of what our situation is. You might be in fairly unpleasant circumstances, but if you had anticipated a complete and utter shit-fest then you could still feel quite cheery. In undertaking the rather sobering stock-check of his warehouse of minor disappointments, he considered at some length exactly who he should be comparing himself to in anchoring his own situation and setting relevant expectations. How did he actually expect to feel at forty-nine? What type of life did he actually expect to be living? Should he compare upwards, for instance to his section head at work (nice car, recently holidayed in Costa Rica), or maybe those pseudo successful ex-school mates who relentlessly post on facebook with mock modesty of their progeny’s achievements (so proud of my little angel Gretchen – has got 27 A*s in her GCSEs and is off to Cambridge – and she’s only 11! Will miss you like crazy, but follow your dreams baby girl)

If the simple equation for happiness held true, then it was actually compellingly obvious that upwards comparison would only ever lead the wrong way. Instead, compare yourself to people with crappy lives, benchmark expectations accordingly, sit back and feel the waves of wellbeing crash over your bows.

And in the absence of any other startling epiphany, that is just what he resolved to do.