Engagement Farming A Mid-Life Crisis

Dr Stuart Woolley
4 min readJul 24, 2024

Copy, Edit, Paste or Copy, “AI”, Paste? They both circle the same drain.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

Apparently, according the ever resourceful and informative Wikipedia, the apparent age range for experiencing the colloquial “midlife crisis” is between the ages of 45 and 64.

Additionally they’re “less common than popularly believed” too, which is something of a comfort for someone who’s already well ensconced within the target demographic.

It was therefore with some surprise that I read another remarkable triumph over adversity post on LinkedIn¹ saying that the poster had experienced theirs, and basically got completely through and were well and truly over it by the age of 44.

With only the most minimal amount of interest possible to continue I made the mistake of reading the first paragraph or two, knowing that as the aforementioned crisis is “less common than popularly believed” I could objectively judge the article from my favourite moral high ground, along with a suitably large dose of enjoyable schadenfreude³.

Naturally I was immediately sidetracked by a Teams “Hello”, waited apprehensively for several minutes for something to happen, the couldn’t remember what I was doing when I remembered I was doing something else before I was staring at the empty, infuriating, window.

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Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.