How NOT to do a Midlife Crisis
The midlife crisis is a stereotype for a reason.
It’s culturally sticky because, every so often, somebody does something so gloriously on-brand for the genre that it keeps the whole cliché alive for another decade.
Fast car. Younger partner. Dubious decision-making. An expensive attempt to prove that you can reverse time.
The truth is, most people in midlife don’t do anything like this. What they experience is usually much less dramatic. But that doesn’t make for great headlines.
So let’s enjoy a few celebrity case studies on how not to handle this stage of life.
Cars, drugs, younger women: the classic Midlife Crisis
Exhibit A: John DeLorean, or how not to build a monument to your youth
If there were a patron saint of the textbook midlife crisis, John DeLorean would be a strong contender.
He had already done the impressive bit. Senior executive at General Motors. Career success. Status. Influence. Then came the pivot into something much shinier: a move to Hollywood from Detroit, trophy wives (two in the space of four years), a huge personal gamble, and the now-immortal stainless steel DeLorean car. Why do the classic ‘buy a sports car’ thing when you can make one of your own and attach your entire identity to it?!
It is, frankly, an astonishingly pure example of the genre.
The problem with trying to build a monument to your youth is that monuments are expensive, impractical and not especially good at fixing internal dissatisfaction. The DeLorean Motor Company imploded, and the whole saga ended with DeLorean trying one last roll of the dice, which ended in him being arrested by the FBI in a $24m cocaine trafficking sting.
Not many people take “I’m feeling a bit flat in midlife” all the way to federal drug charges, but he really committed to the brief.
If your response to turning 40-something ends with the FBI, it is safe to say you may have overcorrected.
Craig Charles: the “I should have bought a Porsche” school of thought
Craig Charles has always had the advantage of being funnier than most people describing their own mistakes.
His version of a midlife wobble was not subtle. In his 40s, despite a solid career and family life, he spiralled into a very public drug scandal that cost him work and reputation. Years later, he reflected on it with admirable honesty and the killer line that “I should have just bought a Porsche!”
That is funny because it’s true.
A sports car may be a cliché, but it is still preferable to detonating your career in public. One leaves you looking mildly ridiculous at traffic lights. The other leaves you explaining yourself to producers, journalists and, potentially, your children.
There is a useful lesson here. The midlife brain often starts negotiating with itself. “Maybe what I need is excitement.” “Maybe what I need is to feel alive again.” Fair enough. But there are better ways to source that feeling. A red convertible is embarrassing. A drug scandal is just taking things a bit too far.
Ronnie Wood: adolescence, but with rehab
Ronnie Wood’s highly publicised decision, at 61, to leave his wife for an 18-year-old cocktail waitress was midlife crisis bingo.
Age gap? Tick.
Public humiliation? Tick.
A desperate attempt to prove that you can turn back the clock? “House!”
The whole thing had the feel of someone trying to leap back into their youth rather than grow into a different life stage. It became a tabloid circus, the relationship was chaotic, it didn’t last, and it ended with rehab and the sort of exhaustion that suggests ageing was not actually the worst part of the original problem.
There’s something almost touching about these stories until you remember the collateral damage. Midlife can make people long for vitality, novelty and desire. The trouble starts when they confuse those things with re-enacting their twenties, only with less sleep and more lawyers.
Angus Deayton: irony turns on its owner
Angus Deayton’s scandal had a special kind of British cruelty to it because the entire country had to watch irony eat itself.
At the time, he was the polished, sardonic face of Have I Got News For You. Then came the reports of cocaine use and escorts while his partner was pregnant, followed by the bizarre spectacle of him trying to front the show while the headlines about his own private life were practically reading themselves aloud.
Watching satirists satirise the host of a satirical programme is not so much a fall from grace as a meta-laden trapdoor under your own persona.
If midlife panic makes you think a secret double life is the answer, it is worth remembering that secret double lives rarely stay secret, and it turns out public humiliation is not, in fact, rejuvenating.
And what about women in midlife?
This is where it gets interesting.
The traditional “midlife crisis” story has always been more about the blokes. It is usually loud, macho and external.
Buy something brash. Date someone younger. Start a business with the energy of a man who has mistaken adrenaline for meaning.
Women’s midlife crises, when they blow up publicly, often look different. Less “monument to youth”, more “scorched earth reaction to decades of expectation.”
That doesn’t make them calmer. It just makes them different.
Less "Monument to Youth" more "Scorched Earth"
Liz Hurley: the countryside will not save you
In her 40s, after the safety pin dress and a highly publicised life of glamour, Hurley did something that baffled the fashion world.
She retreated from the high-gloss celebrity lifestyle and bought a 400-acre organic farm in the Cotswolds.
Which, in its own way, is magnificently midlife.
At some point, many people hit a phase where they start romanticising “the simple life” with the intensity of someone who has not recently had to manage livestock, mud, machinery, or cash flow. The fantasy is always the same: I will leave behind the noise, buy some land, and become the sort of person who says things like “we’ve had a wonderful crop of beetroot this year”.
Then reality arrives in muddy wellies.
Hurley later admitted that running a working farm was stressful, expensive and considerably less charming than the fantasy brochure version. Which is useful for the rest of us, because “maybe I just need a farmhouse and an orchard” is a very seductive thought when what you actually need is more alignment, rest and a clearer sense of self.
Kerry Katona: if enough external changes fixed internal problems, we’d all be sorted by now
Kerry Katona’s public life has long been chaotic, but her 40s offered a particularly vivid example of trying to solve internal instability with external reinvention.
Surgery. New looks. New relationships. More attempts to reclaim a younger identity.
It’s a familiar trap: if this version of me doesn’t feel okay, perhaps a newer version will. Then another. Then another. But identity is not about changing outfits, and distress doesn’t care how recently you’ve updated the packaging.
Eventually, the thing that seemed to help was not another dramatic overhaul, but slowing down and building some stability. Which is less glamorous, admittedly, but much more effective.
Ulrika Jonsson and Anthea Turner: from “good girl” to “absolutely not staying quiet anymore”
Ulrika Jonsson and Anthea Turner offer a different flavour of midlife upheaval.
For women who have spent decades being the capable one, the polished one, the agreeable one, the sudden urge in midlife is not always to look and act younger. Sometimes it is simply to stop performing the version of themselves that everyone else found convenient.
Ulrika’s later-life public persona became much more outspoken, less accommodating, more openly rebellious. Anthea Turner, after the collapse of the “perfect home/perfect life” image, threw herself into physically punishing TV formats and a kind of very public resilience campaign.
In both cases, you can see the same dynamic: when the role you’ve played for years stops fitting, there can be a fierce temptation to swing hard in the opposite direction.
From pleasing others to pleasing yourself. From staying quiet to shouting from the rooftops. From “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this for you” to “watch me blow up the whole set”.
It makes sense psychologically. It is also often a very expensive way of finding out that freedom and acting impulsively are not the same thing.
The real split: monuments to youth vs scorched earth
If you stand back from all these stories, there is an interesting pattern.
Men tend to do the “monument to youth” version of a midlife crisis. They try to buy, build or date their way back into vitality. The sports car. The new business. The younger partner. The public overcorrection.
Women, when they blow things up, are more likely to go for the “scorched earth” version. Less “I need a faster car”, more “I am done being what everyone else needed me to be”.
Different expression. Same underlying problem.
Both are trying to answer a midlife question with an external reaction.
Both are looking for freedom, energy, selfhood and a different way of living.
And both often discover that if you haven’t dealt with the internal part, the restlessness simply relocates.
It moves into the Porsche. It moves onto the farm. It moves into the new relationship. It packs its bags and follows you until you deal with it.
So how should you do midlife?
My own take is that most people are not actually having a crisis.
They are experiencing misalignment.
Something about the old design of life is no longer working:
the way work fits
the way energy is managed
the way relationships are being held
the way meaning has been outsourced to busyness or success
That doesn’t require a monument. And it doesn’t require scorched earth.
It requires honesty, reflection and redesign.
Midlife is not a sign that you’ve failed to become a stable adult who never has to ponder difficult questions again. It’s often the stage of life that finally makes those questions impossible to ignore.
Handled badly, it can become a tabloid cliché.
Handled well, it can become an opportunity to redesign your life intentionally for the person you’ve actually become.
A much better outcome than an FBI bust, short-lived flings, or six acres of beetroot.
If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, the good news is that midlife doesn’t need to become a crisis. It can be handled much more intelligently than that.
This is exactly the work I do with clients: helping them make sense of what’s really going on and redesign midlife intentionally, without blowing up everything they’ve built.