You know you’re having a mid-life crisis when you..

• desire a simpler life
• start looking up old boyfriends/girlfriends on Facebook
• realise you’ll never be able to pay off your mortgage
• join twitter so your boss will think you “get” digital
• excessively reminisce about your childhood
• take no pleasure in your friend’s successes
• start listening to BBC’s 6 music
• turn up at a music festival or re-union tours of bands from your youth
• start worrying about job security (doesn’t everyone these days unless you’re a banker?)
• buy an expensive bicycle (or piece of gym equipment)
• decide to learn to play a musical instrument (and that’s a good thing as musicians stay sharper longer)
• take up a new hobby (or a new wife, or mistress or both?)
• want to make the world a better place
• revisit childhood holiday destinations
• start reading obituaries
• worry about thinning hair and/or start dyeing it if it’s going grey (it’s a competitive world out there)
• stop telling people your age (or lying about it or about your children’s ages!)
• flirt with people 20 years younger (or younger than your kids! See my rules below!)
• take up extreme sport

This is according to a survey of 1,000 adults by Crown Clinic, a hair transplant centre.

There were 40 symptoms in all in the Times article but I thought these were the best of them and I have freely adapted some of them based on my own observations!

The term mid-life crisis was coined in 1965 and was thought to happen anywhere between the ages of 40 and 60.

As the average age of company executives has dropped (for CEOs from 59 to 48 over the last ten years) and younger people are able to achieve success earlier the average age for a mid-life crisis is now 43 for men and 44 for women. For men it can last anything from three to ten years; for women it’s not so long, between two and five years.

We laughed when we heard about quarter-life crises in America but what happens there reaches our shores eventually!

FYI If you decide you are having a mid-life crisis here are some rules I posted a while ago to steer you through the worst of it.

Now let me look at those electric guitars again..