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When a Man Turns Forty


Article # : 17712 

Section : LIFE
Issue Date : 6 / 1990  2,298 Words
Author : Bob Silverman
Bob Silverman holds seminars and gives lectures on the male mid-life crisis.

       When I turned forty, one thing more than all others characterized my life: I was quite unhappy. Like most men, I blamed this unhappiness on everything and everybody other than me: "It's my wife's fault…. The job is killing me…. I need more money."
       
        I didn't like being unhappy and tried to do something about it. So after more than fifteen years of holding job titles like controller or chief accountant with a series of Fortune 500 companies, I left it all to head a nonprofit human service agency. I decided to do something more personally rewarding than just making more money. At about the same time, I walked away from a twenty-year marriage, casting family, friends, financial security, and many years' worth of material acquisitions to the winds.
       
        I didn't know it at the time, but I was experiencing a typical male mid-life crisis. I spent the next five years learning everything I could about it.
       
        Male mid-life crisis is a fact. It's neither a joke nor a contrived excuse for unusual behavior. It's a time of life that demands growth and change, an unmarked passage leading either to ruin or to the beginning of a better way of life.
       
        Eighty percent of all men in their middle years reevaluate the lives they've built. They struggle with questions like, Am I happy? Is this what I really wanted? Is this all there is? How much time have I got left? What now?
       
        Of this 80 percent, a large number will, in one way or another, forfeit a good measure of the rest of their ... (1999 of 12457 Characters)
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