One reader commented:
“White middle aged and older men suffer from depression and commit suicide at a higher rate because their life centers around career, status and making money…”
The writer commented:
“…many Boomers are reluctant to accept the realities of aging.”
I’m gonna’ let you in on a little secret: Nobody accepts aging. Nobody. It’s something we all deal with either through denial or prescription medications.
There are exceptions:
1] Those who manage to keep themselves so busy [and distracted] in their careers that they don’t have 5 minutes to think about it.
2] People of low ambition and correspondingly low expectations in culture groups of similar mindsets.
The rest of us have to fight our way through it with varying degrees of success.
I have no way of knowing what Robin Williams felt the day he took his life. No one can stand in another person’s shoes, to inhabit their lives.
But what I can say with absolute certainty is that successful older men do feel intense pressure to maintain relevance, both physically and professionally, and when either one of these falters, the emotional fallout is usually disastrous.
Most people visualize successful older men sitting on a beach in Tahiti, waiting for the gulls to drag them out to sea. But what they fail to consider is that the very things that got them to where they are still burn. Beaches are nice for a weekend, but boredom is usually just around the corner, and, after that…indignity.
