Running, women, fun, erections. Those things are all distant memories now. All that stands between you and death's frosty grip is around 40 years of vomiting children, rapidly expanding spouses and systematic organ failure. Smiling is just a futile exercise, muscle groups practicing for an event that will never happen. Oh woe is you. Quickly though, while you're able, you must spend money, lots and lots of money. Unnecessarily expensive items are the only thing keeping insanity from your breakfast bar. Buy them. Buy them all.

So here are our five recommended gadgets for any man who's really starting to miss being 20. Not that any of them will in any way help you recover those long lost feelings of freedom and sexual excitement, or even make you feel particularly good about yourself, but they might impress your friend's children. Which is better than nothing, eh? Unless you're a paedophile, in which case, that's not cool man. Seriously not cool.

First up is the Fascinations AntWorks Illuminated Blue, an item so space-age and impressive that its name is phrased as question, possibly because that's how people in the future will talk. Anyway, it's basically an ant farm except instead of earth there's space gel, from space. This means you can see straight through it and and at all times know exactly what every ant is doing. It's a bit like Big Brother for ants. 

Next is the Zafirro Iridium, a razor made of meteorite, sapphire and platinum. We're not entirely sure why you would ever even think about making and selling one of these unless you knew a lot of suicidal robots, but they did anyway, and priced it at exactly $100k, because everyone knows a sad robot is a rich robot. On the plus side it's a limited edition piece with only 99 being made, so maybe you could join a club with all the other wealthy yet deeply unhappy robot who bought one.

Third on our increasingly unrelated list is Maopost.com, a company that will take a photo of you and then, given a few weeks, stick you into a hand painted oil-based chinese propaganda poster. Can't really explain it anymore than that, other than to say it's the best idea anyone has ever had.

Fourth is, admittedly, more for the musicians among you, although if you're having a mid life crisis and not making some weak attempt to learn the guitar or get your childhood band back together then you're either still in denial, or just quite a negative person. Anyway, the item we're looking at is a DIY guitar pick punch which enables you to make a guitar pick out of anything (assuming you can punch through it, we assume). Who wouldn't think you were cool with one of these? No one. In fact, you could make picks out of all your credit cards, which really show exactly how much you like to stick it to The Man. Lots, apparently.

Finally, for those of you that hate 3D films exactly as much as every sane human being should, and wish things were like they used to be, we've got a set of glasses that converts the 3D images in the cinema back into 2D. Hopefully. It might be a joke, but we hope not.

So there you have it, a fine selection of mid-life crisis gadgets that don't revolve around expensive electronics and large motored convertibles. We'd also like to thank reddit.com for all their help finding the articles in question. Thanks internet. Thanks a lot.