Good News!!

"Middle age does not really exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Indeed, it wouldn't make any sense anywhere else in the animal kingdom. We humans usually stop making babies in our early 40s. Any other self-respecting species would take the Darwinian hint and die once that happened.

Yet we humans are exceptional because we don't curl up and die. Far from it. Data from life insurance companies suggests that in the fifth and sixth decades of life you are less likely to die over the coming year than at any other time in your life."

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"...cognitive tests show that apart from brute speed, the brain's abilities are not diminished in middle age. They may be reaching their peak."

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"...the changes of middle age represent a developmental stage of life, as distinct and real as infancy or adolescence. Middle-aged development is programmed into each of us. We each possess the genetic recipe for long, healthy, human middle age. And we owe that genetic inheritance to hundreds of thousands of years of human history, during which - contrary to what you might think - humans frequently lived into their fifth and sixth decades."

And as it turns out, there's not much to the proverbial male mid-life crisis, either. You blokes will have to come up with another excuse.