Q: What might a man having an affair and a man running a marathon have in common?
A: Going through a mid life crisis.

It’s a bit harsh but it’s true enough. Plenty of men choose extra-curricular activities which prove their manliness and vigour, when they reach that stage of their lives commonly referred to as the ‘middle-age’. Apparently, some are convinced that a show of masculinity helps to resolve the crisis of ‘getting on a bit’. 

On Sunday I was cheering marathon runners in London, standing on Embankment just before the 25 mile (40km) mark. Some participants stopped running by that point and were walking. I noticed that most of them were men in their thirties and forties; they looked young, fit but defeated. Women and older men kept on running, perhaps slowly, but determined. I wondered if men in their prime started too fast and ran out of steam. Or maybe they signed up for the marathon to prove something to their peers or themselves but weren’t able to commit to consistent training, distracted by other trials of their strength and toughness: punishing work travel, nights out with the lads, amateur boxing fights etc. I wondered if they had it in them to admit to being in pain, feeling weak and regretting signing up to the ordeal in the first place. 

There comes a point when each and every one of us realises our own mortality. I remember being 29 at that time, overwhelmed by a wave of nausea suddenly taking over me. Happily, it passed quickly. It’s like one of those milestones in life like getting periods or losing virginity when it feels like a big deal one day and ancient history just a little while later. Of course, mid life crisis is a bit more complicated, led by mind-boggling questions “Is this it?” and “What’s the point?”. 

Men (for I’ve decided to frame this article around men) notice how a boozy night is suddenly taking its toll the morning after; how a morning run feels that tiny bit heavier and the press-ups are suddenly less springy than they used to be a decade earlier. It bothers them, which is understandable. Then a curious thing happens: they decide to fight it head on. Typically, a man going through a mid life crisis would enter a Tough Mudder race, buy a shiny new toy or chase a daringly short skirt. Whatever takes their fancy, their partner is often left behind, because a man (strong, tough, hard-core) chooses to fight his demons solo. 

A few weeks back I was having a drink with an old friend of mine. We have not seen each other in a while. John (let’s assume that’s his name) told me what he’d been up to and suddenly opened up. He went through a mid life crisis, wondered about the meaning of life, went camping in the wild and tried a couple of other things hoping to battle it out. I listened to him and found myself captivated by his honestly, his openness and vulnerability. I noticed too how he had relaxed, as if a burden fell off his shoulders just by sharing his innermost fears with another human being. I had to laugh when John had mentioned he might get a puppy but really that softer side of him was a revelation to me. If only all men could tap into their vulnerabilities, share their worries and fears and explore their less masculine qualities. I wager we’d see fewer Ferraris with frustrated middle-aged drivers roaring by.

I went to visit Berlin, a fascinating, an incredibly cosmopolitan and a forward-looking city I've come to love. At Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg I came across an exhibition: "Everyday Life in the GDR". Among many fascinating historic artefacts on display, I found a collection of essays, written by 15-year-old schoolchildren from the GDR on the subject "How do you imagine [your] life in 2010?" The essays were written in 1985. Some schoolchildren chose to write about the future in general, but most essays displayed contained personal ambitions.

In the letter above a young girl imagines herself to be a happily married woman with one or two children by the time she is 39. "Hopefully they are intelligent and have an interesting life ahead of them," she continues. She hopes for advancement in technology ("perhaps there will be cars that a small boy today could not even imagine") and she dreams of travelling abroad ("perhaps every citizen of the GDR can travel to any country in the world"). 

"Perhaps someone from my year will own a big hotel in New York and another one will have his own company. I can see myself sitting at a large table, working as a secretary to a multimillionaire. My husband will also own a big car company and will pick me up from work every day on his Beetle. We'll have a large house, and every year we'll go to Brazil on holiday. In winter we'll go to the mountains."

On a label next to the essay the exhibition organisers commented on young ambitions influenced by the restrictions imposed by the GDR regime: "They wanted to drive Beetles and travel to the West." True, but perhaps those essays were more reflective of the 1980s than they were of the political state the authors had lived in.

In 1985 it was not uncommon for a 15-year-old girl in Germany, Britain, France or the US to dream of being happily married, having children, living in a big house and having a fashionable family car. It is sad to read an essay where a 15-year-old girl limits her ambitions to being a secretary to a multimillionaire, her classmate, perhaps. She does not have professional aspirations beyond that, and a socialist state has nothing to do with that. On the contrary, the communists have done plenty for female empowerment.

Today we live in a different age with our ambitions reaching far and beyond having a nice marriage and a car. With our parents' generation looking at work with a 'grin and bear' attitude, we are now seeking meaning and fulfilment in addition to financial compensation. A previously unprecedented number of young professionals look for jobs in the charity, NGO, social enterprises in the UK and the US. Large corporations are no longer the magnets they used to be because such values as "stability" are being replaced in the pecking order by "adventure". No wonder that our parents are finding it so hard to understand us, when we leave 'sensible' jobs in pursuit of a different lifestyle where the boundaries of "work" and "recreation" are deliberately blurred. 

A friend asked me for advice on whether to go for a job he was interviewing for. I told him to write down everything that was important to him in a job, including money, status, intellectual stimulation, perks, fit within a team, personal fulfilment, meaning etc. The next step is to rank these values, bearing in mind that the pecking order may very well have changed over time. What was important to you when you were in your 20s may be less important in your 30s or 40s or 50s. What are the top priorities for you now? Does the new job prospect address them? 

An ambition is a dynamic beast (ambitio is Latin for "going around or about"), which tends to pace around the cage if you don't let it out. I'd like to think that a 45-year-old woman who had shared her ambitions with us so openly back in 1985 has new aspirations today. I'd like to think that she has her own much sought after graphic design agency, and that apart from Brazil she had also travelled to Argentina, Venezuela and Peru. Perhaps she is taking up capoeira, learning to code and will climb Matterhorn this year. 

Long weekends are terribly useful to tackle the important home chores you’ve been meaning to address … since Christmas. How many of you have compiled a ‘to-do’ list in your head ahead of Easter? How many of you have managed to avoid it? 

Bear with me, I am not sending you on this ‘guilt trip’ for nothing. According to research referenced by Professor Richard Wiseman in his book 59 Seconds, "24 per cent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. Presumably this figure underestimates the scale of the problem, given that it can only be based on people who completed the questionnaires on time”.

Ahead of the working week, no doubt piled up with assignments and deadlines, let’s tackle the problem of procrastination. 

Procrastination has been famously illustrated in a classic Russian novel Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. The protagonist, Oblomov, starts with unpaid bills, apathy and bored idleness and ends up perishing away, unable to combat his own sloth. He dies from procrastination. His heritage to the world is the word oblomovschina, with “Oblomov” at its root - it means procrastination.  

The phenomenon stems from the ground fertile with self-doubt and fear of failure, perfectionism, being prone to boredom and availability of easy distractions (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube), overestimating the scope of the project and then feeling crushed by its enormity, low willpower and “feeling that life is too short to worry about seemingly unimportant tasks.” If you have a junior who routinely delivers minimally researched work full of glaring typos, you know what I mean. If your offspring would rather play online games, then revise for exams, help is at hand.

In the 1920s a young Russian psychology graduate named Bluma Zeigarnik was having tea with her supervisor in a café in Vienna. They were both watching the waiters and spotted a curious thing: when a customer asked for a bill, the waiters could easily remember what the customers had ordered. However, if a customer came back to query the bill just a moment later, the waiters struggled to remember anything about the order. Professor Wiseman, quoting the paper published in Psychologische Forschung by Zeigarnik in 1927, writes: “It seemed that the act of paying for the meal brought a sense of closure in the waiter’s mind and erased the order from their memories.” Zeigarnik then devised a number of experiments and confirmed that once an activity was done and dusted, the mind “breathes an unconscious sigh of relief”. By contrast, an unfinished activity keeps nagging at the brain, causing anxiety. 

We can draw two helpful conclusions from these findings. First, it helps to break any work into manageable chunks. If you are working on a presentation, it helps to write its outline first, have a coffee break, then tackle the executive summary, then work on the case studies, then break the rest into discrete sections and tackle those. The same logic applies to spring cleaning, planning your next holiday, finding a new job. 

The second helpful tip is brain anxiety. Once you start something, the brain is ‘anxious’ to finish it. What you need to do is to start! Take any piece of work and promise yourself to persevere with it for fifteen minutes. This is how I’ve put together this article. Once I start writing a new piece for my blog or an article for a magazine, I know that once I begin typing, I am halfway there. It is (almost!) that simple.