25 Craziest Mid-Life Crisis Stories You’ve Got To Hear

A mid-life crisis can come in all forms. In this case, one Redditor’s Dad turned to carpentry out of nowhere and started making tables. And, apparently, they’re awesome, so he’s mad about it.

One Redditor said once his friend turned 45, he left his wife, got a girlfriend, bought a motorcycle, got a Cobra tattoo on his bicep, and hit the gym. A sad but classic example of the mid-life crisis.

One Redditor said his father did two things he’d never do: He got an ear piercing and bought a motorcycle. He wore the earring for a year and sold the motorcycle two years later.

One Redditor said he heard about how his Uncle’s boss left his wife, bought a car, and moved to a hotel. Only thing was the boss worked with his wife and just ignored her from then on.

Sometimes a mid-life crisis just involves a bizarre change. In this Redditors case, their dad randomly took up Pilates and built a wood-burning pizza oven in the garden.

At 51, one Redditor’s father got divorced and backpacked across Asia. Wearing prayer bracelets, he came back lighter, tan, and with a disarrayed beard and hair. He was building temples for monks in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. When he returned, he bought a Supra with turbos and crashed it with his 30-year-old girlfriend. He then left for Thailand at the age of 55 to meet up with new friends at a local bar.

A woman recalls how her husband of twenty years, with three shirts and two pairs of underwear in his hand, one day told her he didn’t want to be married to her anymore, jumped in his sports car, and took off without looking back. Up until that single point, they had had a (supposedly) happy marriage.

Sometimes in a mid-life crisis, you make a sudden radical change. One Redditor’s uncle moved to the Canary Islands, married a model, calls himself an inventor, and is trying to be a semi-professional golfer. Sadly, he abandoned his child to do all of it.

During his mid-life crisis, a husband did the stereotypical and cheated on his wife. The woman he cheated with constantly asked him to do things for her, but he eventually wanted to get rid of her. As payback, his wife befriended the woman and forced her husband to help with the things the woman asked for. He’s still paying for it.

Mid-life crises can lead a person to be depressed about their life. In this case, a Redditor said his dad lost his job in his mid-life crisis. Since his father had a two-year non-compete clause, he decided to just stop working and now they’re broke.

One Redditor told the story of how a friend of his was bald, overweight, and had blood-pressure problems. At 38, he had a minor heart attack. Three months later, he sold his company and bought a one-way ticket to Jamaica. He hadn’t heard of him for 18 months until he sent back a picture. He was now ripped with his arms around two women. He got his skipper’s license and sailed rich people around.

One Redditor’s great aunt, at the age of 40, went on a trip to see the world. When she got to Vegas, she developed a horrible gambling addiction. For five years, she refused to come home while she gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars away. It took her entire family to fly out and convince her to come home.

One Redditor told the story about how their parents took two different approaches to their mid-life crisis. Their mom rode a motorcycle for a few years, became a workaholic, and stopped caring about her family. Then, she stopped working and made her husband do everything. On the opposite end, their father decided to get his pilot’s license after putting it off for years. He also decided to become a vegan, reversed his poor heart condition, and lost a ton of weight.

In a study by the PNAS journal, researchers told the story about how Great Apes experience mid-life dips in happiness when they reach a certain age, indicating that all these mid-life crisis stories might not be a mere-human phenomenon.

One Redditor claims his 45-year old friend’s wife never let his friend watch violent or R-rated movies. They snuck out frequently to go see them, anyway. Anytime they saw them, it was exhilarating for him. One day, his wife ambushed him and his friends at the theater and got very angry. Later, they watched the movie “Fight Club” and afterward got super fired up. He wanted to get a drink and not soon after, they found him outside picking a fight with a kid much younger than him. The kid didn’t want to fight but eventually, he took a swing and walked away. His friend ended up hospitalized with fifteen stitches.

Sometimes the craziest mid-life crisis stories are the ones that come out of left field. In this case, writer Leah Prinzivalli tells the story of how her Dad declared he was going to learn to play the trumpet. She didn’t think anything of it until she got an invitation to his recital. He played solo with a group of kids thirty years younger than him. Ten years later, he plays in a band of adults.

A mid-life crisis doesn’t have to always be motorcycles and a fresh start. Sometimes, it takes a dark turn. In Marian Keyes case, she had a meltdown and was frequently suicidal. While the psychiatrist diagnosed her with depression, she claimed it was different, and she felt more crazed and terrified all the time. She wrote her novel The Mystery of Mercy Close during the experience.

Usually, mid-life crisis stories lead to unhappy endings. This isn’t one of those. At the age of 40, Jim Weiss was unhappy with his life of print sales and decided to make a career change in storytelling. Eight years later, he became very successful in his venture with his wife. They made 19 recordings with 300,000 copies sold and won 27 national awards. Sometimes a mid-life crisis might lead to good things!

At 19, a woman got divorced from her ex and met a 37-year-old doctor. Their relationship blossomed and grew until he asked her to marry him. During wedding planning, she found out she was pregnant. When she told her fiance, he got angry and demanded that she get an abortion. Not understanding why he would act this way, she discovered he was married with a three-year-old son. He brought his lawyer into it and said he would pay child support if she didn’t tell his wife. She agreed to it, and he kept up his end of the bargain. Unfortunately, her child was stillborn.

At age 47, Tom Barnhart felt like he was missing something. As he said it, “My kids grew old, so I got a dog. My dog grew old, so I got a skateboard.” A part of Generation X, Barnhart turned back to his 70’s skateboarding days and started hitting the half-pipe.

Radical change is almost the hallmark of a mid-life crisis. One Redditor stated a friend’s dad wanted to go meditate and become a hermit on a mountain in India.

Sometimes it’s the little things people change during a mid-life crisis. In this case, a father and painter who went through a divorce decided to change his painting style.

Saying a fast car and a hot young girlfriend would be too expensive, Dr. Damian Ryan, at the age of 50, decided to take up playwriting instead. He wrote the play SignAL, which made its premiere at the Wollongong Workshop Theatre.

A man twice divorced and in his 40’s got a job to write the constitution for a small Pacific country. While he had no grudges about his marriages, his ex-wives constantly took him to court over alimony and child support. When he left to do the job, he was gone for 14 years during a ton of political turmoil and family drama. He married a third time and had a couple of kids in that marriage. Now in his 70’s, many in his family call those tough years his mid-life crisis.

One Redditor explained he did the polar opposite of what usually is considered a mid-life crisis. In his youth, he traveled as a professional explorer and travel guide for 25 years. In his mid-life crisis, he got a mortgage, wife, and kids. Normalcy is his new adventure.