Enlarge image
»New Shepard« at take-off: Phallus approaching
Photo: Zuma Press Wire / action press
How do men who have it all cope with their midlife crisis?
In the past with Porsches, villas, super yachts, tribal tattoos and girlfriends who were half their age.
Today they fly into space.
At least if their names are Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.
The two billionaires, 57 and 71, made the "tail comparison" headline-headed by having themselves recently shot into the infinite distance.
Granted, Bezos' New Shepard rocket also looks like a phallus, but this is supposedly for practical reasons.
The Star Trek of the »Egonauts« is the ultimate signal of our affluent society obsessed with young people, in which everything is feasible and nothing makes you happy and some even in retirement age do not want to believe that they have passed their zenith.
NASA's true space pioneers - including Alan Shepard, the first American in space, after whom Bezos named his spaceship - used to inspire the world.
Bezos, Branson and Elon Musk, who even wants to go to Mars, inspire memes.
"You will hate it on Mars," warned Sharon Stone in 1990 in the science fiction dramedy "Total Recall", her fictional husband Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on a similar midlife trip into space.
"It's dry and boring there." (What Schwarzenegger found on Mars was even worse.)
Boys and their toys
.
As someone about the age of Jeff Bezos, I can empathize with him.
The more you have, the less you seem to have.
There is no property that alleviates the merciless trauma of aging that the zeitgeist tells us, neither the three-story penthouse in Manhattan nor the largest townhouse in Washington.
In the end, what is left to you but the escape into space, that "
final frontier
" as Captain Kirk intoned?
Although the Amazon founder was not necessarily
in
space (depending on who you ask) and still not
really
allowed to call
himself an
astronaut (says the US aviation authority FAA).
Co-passenger Wally Funk, 82, had at least earned the ten-minute journey, having trained as an astronaut for years, but never allowed to start for NASA.
Bezos had trained for 14 hours, spread over two days.
Bungee jumpers have to practice longer, and statistically that's a less risky way to live out your existential fear.
On the other hand, I can't even look straight down from the Empire State Building without feeling dizzy.
And anyway, I don't have $ 28 million to fly with Bezos or $ 250,000 for a window seat with Branson.
That's what happens when you dutifully pays your taxes while the richest person in the world sneaks through with a tax rate of 0.98 percent (and feeds his workers with a $ 15 minimum wage).
The ostentatious insignia of the midlife poster boy Bezos are all too familiar to me.
The cowboy hat.
The "Top Gun" glasses.
The sinfully expensive Omega watch, model "Speedmaster Moonwatch", which Bezos wore ostentatiously over the sleeve of his fantasy spacesuit.
In my case it was a baseball cap even though I'd never played baseball, motorcycle goggles even though I didn't ride a motorcycle, and a Rolex even though I didn't wear watches.
I was in my mid-30s, a midlife premature baby, when I slid through my own melodrama with such equipment.
But instead of going into space, I flew to Australia to find what was missing until I realized that I was just running away from myself.
"Are you a Bezos?"
My crisis was private, Bezos has been living out his publicly for years.
He bought the Washington Post.
He was suddenly wearing skin-tight muscle shirts that emphasized the biceps.
He started an affair with a reporter whom he sent adolescent text messages that ended up in the National Enquirer.
He divorced a woman who prefers to give away her money.
With his joyride in the direction of orbit, Bezos has completely made himself the »international (interstellar?) Symbol of the man in the midlife crisis«, confirms »New York Times« reporter Jacob Bernstein - and asks us all: »Are you a Bezos?«
Bernstein, 41, should know.
Especially since his mother was the writer and screenwriter Nora Ephron, who died in 2012 ("Harry and Sally", "Sleepless in Seattle"), who spoke about her personal battle against old age and death in a humorous but merciless way: "Our faces are lies," she once wrote , "And our necks are the truth."
Am i a bezos
My face is lying, my throat is telling the truth.
When it crashed in my life back then, I didn't buy a newspaper publisher, but impulsively did some things that I neither needed nor could afford, for example my second home in Miami Beach, the maintenance of which almost ruined me.
I also wore tank tops for which I was far too old and sought my fortune in hapless affairs.
Established adolescence
When that phase imploded, at least I was young enough to start over.
Without a second home, without muscle shirts, without affairs - and without money.
They were lessons I never forgot.
But if you never run out of money, you probably never learn either.
Richard Branson's thirst for adventure almost cost him his life: in 1985 he almost drowned when he was sailing across the Atlantic in a sailboat, in 1986 a parachute line tore him, in 2007 he was injured in a failed bungee jump, and over the years he crashed four hot air balloons when I did counted correctly.
That didn't stop him from inviting his grandchildren to his latest flight of fancy, which he celebrated with a VIP party in the New Mexico desert, including a champagne shower, the primeval gesture of established adolescence.
Branson giggled like a teenager.
Other rich men try safer antics to appear younger than they are.
Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg, 37, recently swept across the water on a wakeboard, and VW CEO Herbert Diess, 62, promptly followed suit three weeks later.
The youth who followed them trolled them on all channels.
Still others openly admit that no money in the world can cure their Weltschmerz.
For example, the filmmaker and self-made billionaire Tyler Perry, in whose villa Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan stayed before they found a permanent home in California, far from royalty (a royal version of the
midlife crisis
).
Perry, one of America's richest blacks and a good (and well-connected) friend of the Obamas, posted a sad selfie on Instagram.
"This is what a midlife crisis looks like," he wrote.
"I'm 51, single and wondering what the next chapter of my life will be like."
I'm not single anymore, my (first?) Midlife crisis was a long time ago, but the question of the next chapter continues to concern me.
The countdown is on: The corona year has reduced our life expectancy here in the USA more than it has for generations - for men from 76.3 to 74.5 years.
22 months less time.
Maybe Jeff Bezos still has a place free for the first journalist in space.
