New Delhi, Sept. 27 -- While most of us are living with JOMO, for a handful of urban professionals, it's turning into something deeper: they're choosing to leave the city, or at least spend as much time as they can away from it, in the quest for calm. Increasingly, forty-somethings are moving towards nature- a farm outside Mumbai, a village in the hills, or a slower pocket of Goa.

If you ask people why they're slowing down now, they start with their bodies. "Midlife crisis is often about emptiness," says Dr Sona Abraham, a Kochi-based endocrinologist who sees this play out routinely in her clinical practice. "People have been running on a hamster wheel as young as they were kids-always achieving, always striving." She says the hormonal a...