The irony is crushing: just as I start to make sense of Freud's famous question, "what do women want?" the bastard Time comes along and ruins everything.

Having agonized over the mysteries of female desire for most of my life, I realize—at last—that many of the things women want are really not so baffling after all. There was no Great Event, no Damascene epiphany, that led to this discovery; I simply started to find myself muttering, as Thomas Huxley reputedly did on reading Darwin's paper on Natural Selection "How silly of me not to have thought of that!" And what's so terrible about this you ask? Surely better late than never and all that? Yes, I suppose so, but my problem—and this why the irony is so poignant—is that suddenly very few women seem to notice me any more—not in the way they used to; certainly not in the way I want them to. As a result I suffer from frustrated desire—what we call in the trade, discontent.

John Steinbeck—an authority on discontent—was well aware of this irony. In his charming novel Sweet Thursday, Fauna, the wise and kindly madam of the Bear Flag brothel, laments to the young misfit Suzy:

If I was your age with your face and shape and what I know, there wouldn't be no man in the world could get away! I got the know-how—but that's all I got.

How I sympathize. I increasingly feel that my meagre spoonful of know-how is all but redundant too. And as the spectre of a womanless future looms, I can't help but re-evaluate my own mottled past: I don't know about Fauna, but I let a couple of good ones get away.

The reason for all this woe, in case you're still with me, is that I'll be forty in a few weeks. Forty. It was always just a number, but now, suddenly, here it is in close-up Technicolor with booming surround sound and full gut-wrenching realism. I don't know what's worse, the disgrace of arriving at this age having achieved so little, or the shame I feel when I think of the opportunities I've squandered. How did so many years slip by while I wasn't looking? I keep hoping there's been some kind of mistake, or even (last resort) that I'll wake up from this unpleasant dream. It's absurd, I know, but I really don't feel any different—in here—from when I quite literally rolled in the hay with a girl called Lucy Crammond nearly thirty years ago. And as if this humiliation weren't outrage enough, another mortifying truth hit me last night: the next landmark is, well, I dare not mention the number—it's too horrific. Needless to say, there's no mummy to kiss this one better, no miracle that will transform me, no way to put the clocks back. The effects of time—the bastard—can't be avoided. Not for long anyway. A facelift and a Ferrari might appear to offer respite, but such things are a pathetic defence—a Maginot line erected against the inevitable. "The end," as Steinbeck says, "is now not so terribly far away." 

Alright, I exaggerate a bit. I'm not exactly at death's door. I'm healthy, educated, and I live in comfortable San Diego. Moreover, I'm a man. Women go through neurotic episodes like this too, obviously, but for them the milestones of age must leave an especially bitter taste given that nature deals the distaff side a very low blow when it comes to their reproductive plumbing, so I probably shouldn't moan too much.

Not that I am unscathed. Nature—pitiless as ever—has inflicted a cruel wound: unquenchable desire. Worse, my desires aren't even of my own choosing! It's not just me of course—none of us gets to pick what we desire anymore than we get to pick what is true. We either feel a longing for someone, or something, or we don't. The desiring machinery gets switched on while we're very small, and by the time we're big enough to think about our urges it's usually too late to do much about them. Try as we might, no amount of wishing or will power is going to transform a turn-off into a turn-on, which not only explains why most Americans detest Marmite, but also reveals why none of my would-be concubines are swooning at the mere sight of me: they see me as an increasingly decrepit specimen. This is not a comforting thought. Desire, it seems, is an idiot tyrant that dwells in all of us; a greedy brat with no conscience, no restraint, no reason. It just screams "I want that!"

Which brings us squarely back to discontent. But while it's hard to see where discontent starts, as Steinbeck says, are there any clues as to if, where, or when, it might end?

I think the short answer has to be no. As Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Darwin, among others, have shown, in any natural economy there is always more demand than supply; more mouths than food; more desire than satisfaction. Steinbeck goes further and wonders whether it might be even worse for some of us. True contentment might be impossible, he says, because bubbling away beneath our discontent is shame. Shame—because we're not living as bravely, as compassionately, as completely as we could, or should. And even if we were—even if we could somehow manage to live the Good Life—Steinbeck says we would still come up short, because we can never satisfy that other, peculiar desire most of us have: for a good conscience—something we cannot have while we know innocents suffer. He says we therefore trundle towards death with a bad conscience—a debt incurred through neglect of our duties to life and each other. Worse, the more we try to satisfy conscience and pay down our debt, the more it demands of us. In a particularly lyrical passage he asks:

"What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me? . . . What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay, no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.

But even if we are doomed to die in hock to conscience, perhaps all is not lost. As the downtrodden of history have shown, there is always hope—the eternal feathered thing, the relentless thought that things might change. For Steinbeck—the Great Bringer of Hope—the possibility of change is a mysterious force that is both highly subjective yet beyond our control:

Change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtain at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts will not satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn't discontent the lever of change?

A few years after writing these lines Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize. With characteristic optimism, in his acceptance speech he stressed the importance of literature in celebrating humanity's "proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit." Stirring stuff. The next time desire is screaming in me and it's all I can do not to drool, I'll try and keep that in mind.