Why battling the mid-life 'joy drain' might be easier than you think

“When you drift through some unheralded point in your 40s,” McGarr writes, “you start accumulating actuarial risks. The odds of illness, heart attack, or the chances of losing a parent go up. But there is another risk – particularly acute for men. There is a risk you will lose your capacity for joy.” Part of the reason for this mid-life joy-drain, he suggests, could be society’s expectation that older men should somehow be more “serious”. But, he points out, “Men, as they move upwards in the demographic boxes, don’t have to conform to demands for ‘seriousness.’” His suggested solution? “Find something you knock some craic out of, and knock that thing hard.”

It sounds straightforward, but it can be trickier than it sounds. For me, the twin pursuits of surfing and snowboarding have always brought me bucketloads of joy, but as I stumbled into my mid-forties I found I had less time to devote to them, and – as I missed more swells and skipped more trips – I started to justify these lapses by questioning whether a middle-aged man should really be indulging in such childish pursuits in the first place. Last year, though, I started making a conscious effort to – as McGarr would put it – knock as much craic out of my sideways sliding pastimes as I could. And now, well into what the cruel laws of mathematics will only allow me to describe as my late forties, I find I’ve been enjoying them more than ever. Partly, I think, this could be because the acute time poverty of middle-age teaches you to appreciate rare moments of “me time” in a way that a time-rich twenty-something brain simply couldn’t grasp. Additionally, though, I think it’s because age and experience make you better at being honest with yourself about what you really enjoy.

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After many years spent sliding around on a snowboard I have now, like an Act Five Lear, come to gain at least a smidgin of self-knowledge. I know, for example, that there are certain things I’m never going to master: aerial tricks, rail slides, anything that involves riding backwards for more than about five seconds. But I also know what I like: making fast, wide powder turns, weaving through evenly-spaced trees and – above all – finding a quiet, powder-stuffed gully and surfing it like it’s a couple of giant, back-to-back waves. As the years have rolled by, this last aspect of snowboarding has become my personal holy grail, the point at which I derive maximum craic, but it requires multiple factors to come into alignment at once.

First, wherever you are in the world, you need to identify a likely looking gully. Ideally, it should contain as few obstacles as possible – nothing puts a downer on a good gully run like having to scrub off most of your speed half-way down to avoid slamming into a rock. Its sides should be high enough to trap blowing snow, but not so high that you lose momentum on your way up to the top. The floor of the gully needs to be wide enough for you to transition easily from one side to the other and the whole thing needs to be steep enough for you to be able to generate speed between turns, although not avalanche-steep, and certainly not so steep that you end up scratching down the middle of it in survival mode rather than launching yourself up and down its walls like a bar of soap zinging around a sink.

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Once you’ve spied a gully you like the look of, you need to be prepared to bide your time. It’s OK to make a couple of exploratory laps when the snow in there is old and crusty, just to get a feel for the thing and work out the best line, but you don’t want to risk drawing too much attention to your find. Studying it from a distance is fine though; in particular, on windier days make a note of which wind direction blows in the most snow.

Finally, when the snow does arrive, you need to be prepared to get to your new-found fun zone as quickly as possible. If it’s inside a ski area boundary, figure out the best combination of lifts to get you there in a hurry and have a back-up combo in mind in case a key lift is out of action. And if you’re hiking, pack plenty of snacks and water so you have energy for as many laps as you can reasonably manage.

Over the years I’ve found some beautiful gullies in some unlikely places, but on a trip to Scandinavia earlier this winter I found my favourite so far: perfectly pitched so you could keep your speed all the way down, perfectly sculpted to facilitate joyful, weightless turns off the tops of the banks. And the best thing? Turns out this one doesn’t even need a fresh dump of snow to get good – a strong enough wind blowing in the right direction will load it up with all the powder you could possibly want. My best day there was in a 30mph SW wind, -12C air temperature, -24C with the windchill, feather-light snow pouring in like cold smoke over the right hand bank. Snowboarding may be a deeply unserious pursuit, but I fully intend to keep knocking the craic out of it for a good while yet.

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