We don’t often stop to think about it, but anyone over 50 is, if they are lucky, in the second half of their life. While it may be fun and eventually end up in work-free relaxation on the sunny uplands, getting older can also mean physical decline, real or imagined redundancy, and a distinct lack of purpose, all with the fact that at the end of the line is your own death.

Psychologist Frank Tallis has written his latest book Wise: Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life to help us with the philosophical, psychological and spiritual sides of this period. Old age will still not be for cissies, as the late movie star Bette Davis had embroidered on her pillow, but Tallis’s plan is to offer inspiration and resources for a more thoughtful, less terrifying way of welcoming the twilight years.

A key word is adaptation. We don’t necessarily need to stop more youthful pursuits, but we may benefit much more by not expecting life to be the same. It helps to see the first half of your life as acquiring things — a partner, children, home, career — and the second half gradually reducing what matters to you. In doing this, Tallis would also say we need to aim for “wholeness”, a bringing together of the conflicting sides of our personality.

Freud said that no man truly believes in his own death, but Tallis believes it benefits us to wrestle with the idea of mortality. He points readers towards philosophers, such as the Romans Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but he is particularly keen on the Greek slave turned Stoic philosopher Epictetus who encouraged his followers to realise that we never really possess anything, even life.

Wise is not a prescriptive self-help book, but a story-filled inspiration, gently nudging readers away from the obvious longevity hacks to more thoughtful, less self-centred thinking. It’s not pitched as a mental health booster, but when you see read that a third of over-65s experience significant anxiety and depression, you start to see that even the act of reading a book focused on purpose and meaning is likely to set you on the right road for the last part of the journey.

Frank Tallis discusses his book Wise and explores our understanding of mortality and purpose in the second half of life.