Very amusing article in by Simon Kuper in The Financial Times, where he argues that modern men are so occupied with their profession, while living "as hostages to their children and spouses," that nobody has the time for a mid-life crisis anymore.

Nowhere in my peer group have I witnessed a textbook midlife crisis. Nobody has the time. Anyway, my "Generation X" was never much given to fantasy. Our teenage soundtrack featured gloom merchants like The Smiths, we came of political age after all utopias had collapsed, and then graduated into recession. The dream among my peers isn't a Ferrari and a 22-year-old model. My last contemporary who still went to nightclubs -- and got stared at as a freak -- recently stopped. I don't know anyone who believes youth can be recaptured in some exhausting spree.

Rather, the dream now is of a cafè latte alone: a small victory in the struggle to preserve fragments of what Orwell called "ownlife" amid the onslaught of mortgage, toddlers, in-laws and physical decline.