I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I think mid life crisises stem from a lack of ownership over one’s free time.
Exploring this further…
Richard doesn’t make plans for his free time and so when someone asks for a favour or invites him to some event he feels like he can’t refuse because he has nothing else on.
So he complies.
And occasionally a task or event he genuinely wants to do slips in but most of the time he’s living someone else’s life and it compounds.
Eventually it compounds so much that Richard doesn’t recognise his life, forgot what it was like to decide for himself and has to take drastic measures to rectify the situation.
Thomas Duggan 