HOW ART MAKES US

Inside my midlife identity crisis

This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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Three or four years ago, I began buying art. In the evenings, when I was too tired to read and the television had become boring, I’d unlock my phone and start scrolling through the websites of European auction houses, squinting at hundreds of thumbnails of terrible paintings of harbours, nude women, fruit bowls, snowy roofs and flower-filled vases, until something interesting jumped out. Art, I discovered, is like second-hand furniture: with an investment of time you can find pieces that have no monetary value for collectors, and so cost relatively little, but nevertheless have aesthetic worth. Sometimes I’d spend £50, sometimes £250, occasionally, when I found something I desperately wanted, I’d tip over £500. A couple of weeks after the auction, a man from FedEx would arrive with a large, shallow box containing copious bubblewrap, layers of butcher’s paper and my latest purchase which, almost without exception, would look even better in real life than I’d been hoping. No matter how busy I was with work, I’d delay sitting at my desk so I could fetch my hammer and hooks from the cupboard above the washing machine and find a suitable place on a suitable wall for my proud new addition.

There was something entrancing about owning a picture that was unique, and from another place and time. Many of the pieces were mid-century, from the US or Sweden or Germany. You could see the individual brushstrokes, touch the paint. I didn’t usually know what the painters were called (sometimes even the auction houses billed them as ‘unknown artist’) but I sometimes wondered what they’d think, knowing their creation was being appreciated like this, faraway in a different country, two and a half decades into a different century. Maybe they’d be pleased. Maybe they’d be disappointed that that was all their work ever amounted to – a bargain owned by some middle aged man who didn’t know their name.

The walls of our house became crammed with paintings. When visitors came, they’d rarely mention them. I knew what this meant. People like to say nice things (especially when entering a hallway). When they say nothing, they say everything. But this was to be expected. I bought paintings I identified with. Every one of them said something to me. Like the painting of a woman with a crow on her head or the painting of a man walking alone in a blank, blue-grey landscape, or the painting in a perspex box that had mounted on it a filth-smeared notebook with the words SELECTED PROBLEMS FROM THE KL AUSCHWITZ on its cover, or the painting – one of the few whose title I actually knew – called ‘Scarred from Battle’, of a man in a business suit looking like he’s had the worst day of his life. I found these artworks reassuring. They were mirrors that reflected my unconscious back at myself. They helped me know who I was. They reaffirmed my existence.

But they were more than just mirrors. The self is made up of pieces and parts of things we find in the physical, psychological and cultural space around us. We absorb into ourselves beliefs and theories and bits of other people, and also the objects we buy and the places we live and the ways we choose to dress and arrange our homes. We’re made out of ideas that somehow make sense of how we feel inside, what we see outside, and how those two realms interact. This is especially true of art. Music, literature, film, painting – we’re drawn to that which fits with our experience of our interior and the outer world, and when we’re drawn to it with sufficient force, we make that art a part of who we are. This is what identification ultimately is: the addition of some external element to our identity.

The paintings were uncomfortable and they were unpopular and they were from way back in a century long gone, and the paintings were me.

Strip the story from the self, and you’re left with a body filled with feelings.

Imagine going through life in this unstoried state. Your existence would be wordless. There’d be no talking, no reading, and no chatter inside your head: no sense-making gossip or discussion; no rumination; no defensive, self-justifying bullshit. You’d be a feeling-making machine moving mutely through the world, having experiences that continually changed the sensations of your inner-state.

Once upon a time, you were this wordless animal. When you were born, all you did was feel and behave. Your brain was half-formed: it had been semi-wired up inside the womb, your particular neural patterns defined largely by the happenstance of your genes. But then the outside started to contribute to who you are: nurture began to interact with nature. As you grew up, your brain continued its formation in a cultural story-world, a realm of symbols and narratives that helped you make sense of all your powerful, confusing, wonderful, terrifying, bestial feelings and behaviours.

You constructed an identity out of the infinite treasure chest of ideas that you found all around you: stories and the characters you met in them; songs and poems; beliefs; ways of altering your physical appearance and the appearance of your habitats; the things that you bought and were given. All of this and more combined to tell a story about who you were. But you didn’t just choose anything you found around you, to construct your identity. You carefully chose the things that described the feelings and behaviours that were springing out of you, and made sense of the ways they interacted with your day-to-day life.

This is why we choose the art that we do. We’re drawn to novels, paintings and pieces of music that reflect, explain and nourish our understanding of ourselves, and our relationship with reality. Psychologists find a reliable link between our personality-types (which are rooted in our genes) and our preference for stories, so that people high in the trait of ‘openness to experience’, say, tend to prefer surrealism and literary novels, whilst extraverts tend to prefer exciting westerns and horror movies. This is also why psychologists in one study found that people considered paintings aesthetically appealing when they were ’self-relevant’. Their personal identification with an artwork was much more critical to their liking it than whether it followed any of the traditional ‘rules’ of beauty, such as naturalness, colour choice and composition. The more self-relevant a piece was, the more emotional they became in its presence, and the more beautiful they found it to be. Our taste in art turned out to be a taste for ourselves.

But, as we’ve already discovered, our tastes, beliefs, possessions, and so on, don’t merely reflect our identity, they become components of it. This was found in a clever study that showed how our conception of who another person is, is partly rooted in their aesthetic tastes. Psychologists already knew this was true of our moral beliefs: previous studies found that when a person’s moral beliefs change significantly, we consider them to have effectively become a different person. A 2021 study found an equally powerful effect when a person’s aesthetic tastes changed. “The striking finding across all our experiments is that (aesthetic) taste changes are among the changes that present the biggest threat to the identity of a person.” This held true in separate studies that looked at tastes in both music and the visual arts.

The art we love becomes who we are. We can see the ramifications of this strange reality play out in today’s culture, not least on the online frontlines, where merciless Swifties go to war with the perceived enemies (including the poor, hunted ex-boyfriends) of Taylor Swift, and fans of Tolkien, Dr Who and Star Wars beat their chests when executives at Amazon, the BBC and Lucasfilm drench their beloved tales in the shallow, predictable and bullying propaganda of identity politics. They rage as if the insult has been done, not to a billion-dollar commercial product, but to themselves – because it has.

Back in 1890, the pioneering psychologist William James wrote, “between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine, the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.” To that list, he could add the books we read, the paintings that move us, the music we play on repeat. The line between the art we love and who we are can be difficult to draw. Art reflects us, and it also becomes us.

In February I turned 50. For many months before my birthday, I’d been excited about what 2025 had in store. I had several new projects to launch, all of which I felt were worthwhile. But then, one after the other, the professional disappointments came. On top of all that, my father-in-law had recently died, and my own father had died and my mother had Parkinson’s and my beloved dogs had turned 10 and 12 and started to be shaped like barrels and to walk slowly when I took them out in the back fields, and I had started to look actually old, like a real old man.

When I was in my thirties, I noticed that people aged 40 still looked pretty good, but people aged 50 did not. Something happened specifically during that decade, and it was bad. A switch switched. And nobody got away with it. The botox doesn’t work. I didn’t try botox, but I did start spraying Unthin on my bald spot and jabbing Ozempic into my gut, and I started going to CrossFit, and cycling regularly, and yet still I was a bit fat, and still bits crumbled from my teeth, and still the skin on the backs of my hands was becoming crepey and loose, and when I had to put video-clips of myself on social media from some podcast or other, I could see that things were happening to my face – beneath my chin and at the sides of my mouth – and that, when the light shone on my hair from above it looked white and whispery thin, and you could see right through to my scalp. I was covered from head to toe in ageing. Nature wanted me unfuckable, and so had forced me to wear my own rotting like a uniform, a repellant skin that would walk with me all the way to death.

A few weeks after my birthday, I was scrolling through YouTube when the algorithm suggested a live performance by Nik Kershaw, the first pop star I ever became obsessed with. Curious, I clicked on it, and listened to him sing:

You could’ve been a movie star

You could’ve been a hero

You could’ve won a bridge too far

The best you get is no cigar

The next day, without really thinking about it, I made a Spotify playlist from tracks I remembered especially liking from Nik Kershaw’s first three albums. Back in the 1980s, when these songs were released, Nik Kershaw had been a god to me. When I joined the Kershaw Klub, they sent me a little tin badge in the post which I wore everywhere, and a signed photo that I covered in protective sticky backed plastic. Sometimes I worried it was a fake (could it really be real?) and sometimes I just sat there gently rubbing my thumb over the grooves his blue biro had made. At school, it was one of the main things people knew about me – that I loved Nik Kershaw. He was the largest and most important component of my identity. Between the ages of nine and twelve, I must have heard the songs on his first three albums thousands of times.

Talk tougher than James Cagney

Act smarter than Charlie Chan

Love longer than Valentino

Or you never will be a man

I clicked on a recent video, and watched Nik Kershaw promoting a limited edition book. Back in the 1980s, he’d been kind of beautiful, with a feminine face and leonine hair. In fact, as I came to think of it, he kind of resembled my first love, Katie. But in 2025 he looked like a retired geography teacher. On the cover of his book, he wore wraparound shades and a grey goatee beard. He looked like he owned a motorbike that he polished on Sunday mornings, and was about to ride it to a roadside cafe on an A road for a fry-up.

Over the next few weeks, the disappointments kept mounting. It was failure on top of failure. Driving to the supermarket and to Ashford station and to quiet woods and fields to slowly walk my slow dogs, I kept my Nik Kershaw playlist on repeat.

I played the game, I lost

I even took the blame, I lost

I think I’ll change my name to Lost

And then I got sick. I suspected it was covid when the cough failed to develop to much, but I started to feel strange sensations in my body, and especially my head, like my consciousness had shrivelled and become loose, and was rattling around in there, banging against walls of bone. It was a heavy dose, the worst I’ve had. I lay in bed for four days, watching The Sopranos, drinking blackcurrant Lemsip and eating Fruit and Nut and Charlie Bighams. In the space between feverish dreaming and ‘where’s the gabagool?’, I thought about my year of turning 50, and how different it was turning out than I’d hoped. When I was busy writing Selfie and The Status Game, I’d believed that I was building a thing, and that that thing was going to come in the future. But now it was looking like those books were the thing, and they were in my past.

Look behind you

There’s the man you’re chasing

Look behind you

Let’s go human racing

It was the 50 switch. It had happened to me, and it wasn’t just about my appearance. The switch had switched on my entire life. I whatsapped my agent, ‘I’m trying not to spiral.’ He replied, ‘DON’T SPIRAL.’ I thought about Nik Kershaw. He looked like a middle aged man and ‘middle aged man’ is a term of abuse. When people use the phrase ‘middle aged man’ they mean ‘embarrassing’ or ‘creepy’ or ‘sexist’ or ‘past it’ or ‘ugly’ or ‘irrelevant’ or ‘sit down’. Middle aged men are ‘gammons’. They are objects of contempt, and they kill themselves at a higher rate than any other group. I’d been mocking middle-aged Nik Kershaw, and I’m one of him! Jesus Christ. I’m not even young middle-age. This was my identity, now, and there was nothing I could do about it.

DON’T SPIRAL. How was it that these pop songs, written between 1984 and 1986, described so perfectly how I was feeling in 2025? It didn’t seem possible. When I came to think of it, maybe they described how I’d felt for most of my life. Why had I become so immediately and completely possessed by Nik Kershaw, at the age of nine? Maybe because his songs spoke directly to how I felt about myself, and how my particular self was creating my particular reality, even back then. I remembered being at a disco during a school trip to Butlin’s in Barry Island and asking a boy called Gary, who was good at football and tanned and popular with the girls, with his little tufts of hair that came down in front of his ears like sideburns, if he could teach me to breakdance. He sneered and walked away, leaving me sat alone in the shadows of the disco on a stackable plastic chair, the lights flashing red.

You might be an oil tycoon

You might be a Cobb cartoon

You might be a Gershwin tune

You might be, but you’re not

Had it helped me, listening to all these depressing, self-hating Nik Kershaw songs on repeat? Was it a balm for my identity stress, through the latter period of my pre-adolescence? Or was it a cause? That is, during my formative years, did these songs – that I had played and replayed obsessively, on vinyl and in my head as I walked to school – helped actively form my identity? If the art we enjoy becomes us, had these songs built into me a model of the world that said human life was a pointless race that I would be doomed, forever, to lose? Had Nik Kershaw ruined my life?

On day four of my sickness, I came downstairs to make another blackcurrant Lemsip. I sat weakly in the room beside my office, waiting for the kettle to boil. There, leaning against the bookshelves, were perhaps a year’s worth of paintings, all unboxed and ready to be hung. I was still buying art, albeit less frequently. Somehow the excitement had gone out of it. All the works I’d bought over the past twelve months and more had been left, leaning in piles, dusty, unseen, unloved, waiting to find their place. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to care very much about them.

Soul destroyed by life’s demands

With nothing to believe

Our hero sits with head in hands

And heart upon his sleeve

DON’T SPIRAL. At the age of 50, in a period of death, decay and failure, my identity had taken on a feeling of translucence and impermanence, as if it was dissolving. At some point, I would have to pull myself together, and build a new sense of myself. I’d have to embrace the idea of becoming someone different, but someone who was still worthy of life’s rewards, regardless of all the signs of my decline. And I would have to get those pictures hung, and feel excited by them, and reassured by the story they told of who I was, even if right now I was in that chaotic space between stories, much more at an end than a beginning.