Midlife: A Philosophical Guide is the result.

He is forty-one and has been contemplating his own self-confessedly mild midlife crisis for the last six years. Kieran Setiya is a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I sometimes trace the beginning of my midlife crisis to that exact moment standing at the window. The garden was sodden with dew and a silent promise of the first lovely day of May. At dawn I went to the window and looked out. She was easily the most sexually uninhibited woman I had ever encountered. She led me back to her single room at the field study centre and took off all her clothes. Frank’s bottle-blonde helper came with me. Asked what he would like to drink, he said, ‘Torquay’. ‘Torquay?’ he enquired, on average about twice a minute after that. Was I from Torquay? Alas, no, I wasn’t from Torquay, I said. I think that for him the word Torquay equalled happiness. The special-needs chap next to me had the word ‘Torquay’ on the winkle. We sat at a refectory table in facing rows. Why didn’t I meet them later for a drink at the local inn? The local inn is 13th century, low ceilings, beams, dim. Frank said they were going to the local field study centre for a weekend away. At first glance she appeared to be pathologically shy. She was a slender bottle-blonde, and had unusually thick lenses in her glasses – the proverbial jam-jar bottoms. I was walking the dog along a country lane when a minibus full of special-needs adults pulled up. Frank, my usual sparing partner at the karate club, was also a full-time carer.

Kieran setiya midlife crisis