How about
Some old furniture to smash up?
Boffins investigating the feelings of hundreds of chimpanzees, orangutans and varied great apes say that the creatures get depressed in their middle years just as humans - perhaps especially human males - do. They consider that this affirms Charles Darwin's famous dictum to the effect that if we would seek to understand …
'it could also one day eliminate such social scourges as 50-year-old men on powerful motorbikes'
50 year old men on powerful motorbikes are much less of a scourge than 20 year olds on the same bikes and both are less of a scourge that spotty teenagers in 'souped up' Novas!
Here's the car icon again :-)
I always figured the mid-life crisis kicked in around the end of a pre-agricultural human's typical lifespan. In the grand scheme, the ability for the majority of humans to live into old age is a very recent phenomenon; our bodies are adapted to a lifespan of about 40 to 50 years and start to fail in increasingly obvious ways after that age. The depression only seems natural in that case. We'd be subconsciously, but intimately aware that our body is reaching a lifespan limit that our species has experienced for millennia and as a result we'd get all existential and depressed, but not really understand why. Those humans that live longer would cheer up, because they might just live forever.
Oops.
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I'd always assumed the U-shaped curve of happiness corresponded with the inverted U-shaped curve of intelligence. When you reach middle age you're at the perfect balance of brain power, which declines after your 20's, and experience, which increases with age. At middle age you're in the position to see how crap the world is and how little you can do about it. Everything before and after that is blissful ignorance.
As far as I am concerned it's about not having made even my first million at 50 and then realizing a bit later I can have a waitress and receptionists all the same. Now, there must be better explanations. Optimism as the last resource, death of on optimist considered rare. We need to study our grand fathers some more, perhaps they speak to us. Death in prison will that matter. Shit.
Stop please. Even in the U.K. it can't be okay to use that word exclusively, instead of scientists, researchers, etc. It can't be necessary to use the word boffins in every single science article. At least try one article without the word, and see how it feels. It will feel really good to me.