Buzz Bissinger, 60 with Caitlyn Jenner, 65
I thought this picture was interesting, so I decided to share it with you.
I have nothing more to say…other than the fact that enough money and success have a way of opening doors to behavior that might otherwise remain hidden behind pleated khakis and anonymous Internet hook-ups.
~~~
“I’m sitting at a white plastic table in front of a wine bar. It’s one o’clock on a Tuesday morning and an empty parking lot is the only landscape.
The streets are deserted.
Most guys my age are asleep. Their time came and went, and they let go in that unconscious way most men do when their stories have been told and the end is a long, drawn-out epitaph.
But, I stayed behind, along with the rest of the itinerants of the night.
I have no place to go that I haven’t already been, and nothing to do but wait and hope and sometimes pray for mercy that relevance and that one big love will one day redeem me, but it never does. Not really.
We’re beyond salvation. Most of us.
There have been exceptions, but the grace is never a hundred percent and you have to make peace with that the best you can.
We’re members of the bitten, the damned, the fighters against the forces of time until we no longer can.
Most of us are children of narcissists, narcissists who never died because narcissists never do—they’re just recycled and the kids are left to clean up the mess.
I wonder where all the time went. Time is all I have left to make a final stand.
I remember my first midlife crisis at 28. The rest is a blur.”
~~~
The “buzzword” for most men I know is relevance.
To my late father, it meant carrying a business card with his name on it next to “Chairman and CEO.”
This gave him relevance no matter what else happened to be going on in his life.
Symbols like these are the quintessential calling cards that legitimize driven, proud men.
It’s otherwise known as a good “back story” every man needs to get the right party invitations.
I inherited this “gene,” if you will, and continue to struggle with what it means to feel a viable part of a world I’ve already traversed a thousand times.
Aging rockers continue to tour long after the songs have been written and the money’s in the bank. They don’t know what else to do with themselves, and more importantly, the limelight is better than no light at all.
Movie producers keep producing movies because they want to feel like they have more stories to tell, that there’s still juice in the tank…that they’re still viable.
I even heard a guy in Aspen say that no matter how much money he had to throw around during ski season, he still felt invisible:
“Hell, $200 mil is a drop in the bucket for a lot of these people. I can’t win.”
What he was saying was that he felt invisible in a world where money and power and influence and connections are the sole determinants of human value.
Sadly, for many men this is the fuel that keeps the soul alive.
In case you’re wondering, I don’t exclude myself from any of this.
In 2013, 78 per cent of the 6,233 suicides registered in the UK were men. That’s a rate of 19 deaths per 100,000 population.
That more men take their own lives than women is not new. But in 1981 the men’s total was only about double, or just under, the women’s.
Now it’s nearly four times as many.
Since 2007, in fact, baby boomers have had the highest rate of suicide of any age group in the United States.
Historically, people between the ages of 40 and 64 have had one of the lowest rates.
To complicate matters, baby boomers are now sliding into the over-65 demographic, an age group that historically has had one of the highest suicide rates.
Making matters worse, suicides among middle-aged men with mental health issues have soared by 73% since 2006, which may be attributed to a combination of alcohol, job loss and debt, as compiled by the University of Manchester’s National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness.
Oh boy. Want more?
“Our findings show that within mental health care, middle-aged men are particularly at risk,” said Prof Louis Appleby, the director of NCISH who was formerly the government’s mental health tsar and leads the national suicide prevention strategy. “The problem is not simply that they don’t seek help – they are already under mental health care – so we have to understand better the stresses men in this age group face.”
How about this?
More men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers fighting in all wars since 1945.
I’m neither a Sociologist or Psychiatrist. In fact, my only authority in this area is interpersonal exchange and an open heart, for which I have earned several Doctoral Degrees.
Men my age and socioeconomic niche are, generally speaking, over-achievers. They made their “piles” working hard, passionately over many years.
Many have been married and divorced a few times over.
The majority have children somewhere.
Now they’re smack in the middle of the Baby Boom generation, with nowhere to go and nothing to do that they haven’t already been done a thousand times before.
Only this time around, they’re older – a lot older – with far less time to enjoy life the way they did when the journey started.
It’s a small window of opportunity in which to reinvent oneself before everything becomes a hobble along a windswept beach on the edge of oblivion.
With this as a backdrop, here are my 5 top reasons middle-aged men off themselves:
1] Loneliness
Heterosexual men in mid-life are dependent primarily on female partners for emotional support.
One reason for this is that they’ve never explored anything beyond sports stats with their “friends.”
Women, on the other hand, maintain their independent relationships throughout life – divorce notwithstanding – which is one reason they outlive us.
To wit, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts were three times higher among divorced men, and two times higher among separated men compared to married.
This is the quintessential dichotomy about men: While we love sex, we love relationships more.
2]Reluctance to seek help
Professor Shirley Reynolds, from Reading University, said one of the reasons for the rise in suicides is the fact only around ’15 per cent of men with depression and anxiety seek help’.
Most men my age practice intimacy-avoidance. They’d rather swallow a pack of Gillette straight razors than open up about clinical depression.
For one thing, depression is not manly. Men don’t suffer depression unless it’s tied to warfare, in which case it’s called PTSD, an acceptable acronym.
Anything else is an indication that you’re either gay and in denial, or didn’t get into enough fistfights when you were a kid.
In either case, you’re screwed in the eyes of middle-aged frat boys who are themselves gay, and in denial.
3] Money
Okay, I know a few people who put bullets in their heads when the market crashed in 2008.
Not having any money after have a shit-ton of it sucks more than just about anything else, excluding colon cancer, which is a close second.
You lose your house, your cars, your vacations…and usually, your wife.
So now you have nothing at age “60” and have no interest in starting over at Dairy Queen.
I get it. Use the gun. 30 years mopping floors or flipping burgers just isn’t worth it.
Plus you’ll never get laid again as long as you do happen to live.
4] Feminism