Midlife crisis; a theory

In my world of parallells and comparisons...well, here’s another one.

As anyone who knows internal combustion engines really well will tell you, there is an odd but true phenomenon that is often witnessed in the final seconds or minutes of an engine’s life; it suddenly runs better and smoother and stronger than it ever has, puts out fantastic race-winning power (if that’s what your engine’s doing) and stays like that for an unpredictable but short time until it physically blows up. Something breaks, and pieces scatter. I don’t know if there’s a good explanation for this out there, but I guarantee you this is a real thing.

And it struck me that when you describe that effect, that looks a lot like when a guy reaches the point in his physiological schedule where his testosterone is about to drop from, say, a useful level, to what inevitably, and horribly, feels like a useless level. And that ‘useless’ hits hard. I don’t think you can overstate the magnitude of that event in a man’s life. He’s about to lose a major part of his self-esteem.

So maybe there’s something in the male brain, probably all the way down in there in the original, primal part, where the most basic instincts are, that triggers a final attempt at procreation before the ability is gone. This is just a dumb theory of my own, based on what I know and on what looks to me like common sense, so I have no authors or articles to cite, but I’ll bet there’s stuff out there that sounds like this. The drive to procreate pops up here and there as a primal instinct, and generally looks exactly this out-of-place in our society, but it’s easy to see how necessary it was back when we struggled for survival as a species.

So, maybe it’s a last gasp. And, of course, maybe it’s not this at all. But you need a theory that reaches across the male population and affects nearly all of them, regardless of personality type, or status, or any number of things; it just hits men, period.

I’ll be watching to see how this plays out. Maybe it won’t hold up, or maybe it’ll grow as I learn and see more. It’s a theory.