Only for those who can afford it?
By Ali Ansari
It started as just another long drive back home to London after watching a nail-biting cricket match in Manchester. The traffic was light, the post-match adrenaline still high, and somewhere along the motorway, the conversation turned to that timeless question: what next?
We’re both in our mid-forties and old enough to have built stable careers, raised families, and ticked plenty of boxes, yet young enough to still feel that restless spark of possibility. So we started making a list of things we still wanted to do.
Travel more. Learn new skills. Get fitter. Maybe start that business or start a music band as both were music lovers.
For the next hour, the car was full of ideas and laughter. Then, as the list grew longer, we looked at each other and realised what was happening!
We had driven straight into that familiar cliché they call the midlife crisis.
The conversation turned philosophical instantly an we started discussing what exactly is this “crisis”?
After a few hours of motorway philosophy, we concluded that it’s not really a crisis at all and it’s more like a recalibration. It tends to visit people who’ve been slogging for years, building a life and a career, and who finally reach a stage where they can pause and ask, “What else can we do with our time and energy?”
It’s often misunderstood as vanity …the fast cars, the gym obsessions, the sudden urge to play guitar or chase something new. But beneath that is something deeply human: the need to feel alive again, to test whether that spark is still there.
Research suggests that only about one in five adults ever experience a true midlife crisis, and it’s more common in cultures where opportunity and achievement are abundant. Which makes sense as it’s a strange kind of privilege, really, to have done well enough to wonder if it’s enough.
As we talked, we mapped out the arc of this phase. It starts with experimentation, a burst of curiosity that pushes you to revisit passions or pick up new ones. Then comes the quieter realisation: the loss of youth, vitality, and that boundless energy that once made anything seem possible.
But if you stay with it long enough, something remarkable happens. The restlessness turns into realignment. You begin to see yourself differently and not through the lens of what you used to be, but through what still matters. You stop chasing lost time and start investing in meaning.
In that sense, midlife isn’t a breakdown at all. It’s a checkpoint, a pause before setting off on the second half of the journey with more awareness and less urgency.
As Tom Hanks once joked, “It’s not a mid-life crisis. It’s a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up with everything and go, ‘I have everything, but I’m still unhappy.’”
He was only half kidding because that question, “We have everything, but what now?”, can be the spark that leads to something better.
We decided not to dramatise ours. We’d diagnosed the feeling, understood it, and agreed to skip the usual script. Feeling oddly enlightened, we turned the conversation to music which is something we’ve both loved and shared for decades.
By the time the London skyline appeared, we were no longer dissecting midlife. We were already living the answer and reconnecting with what made us feel alive in the first place.
Maybe that’s what midlife really is: the point where you accept the loss of youth, rediscover the joy of purpose, and realign with your identity.
The road ahead is still open, it’s just a little quieter, a little wiser, and, if you’re lucky, still full of music.
Fun fact: That drive eventually led to something real. We ended up creating a full music album, now complete and streaming on Spotify. You can listen to it and explore more of our work at aliaansari.com.
