I thought the circumstances you describe are what leads to the typical midlife crisis. Not always, but people wake up and realize they're trapped in a life (kids, obligations, job) that sort of crept up on them, and feel like they need to let off some steam.
A lot of (perhaps including the article's authors) modern "mid-life crises" are more what I've heard of as "quarter life crises" - you finish school, get a job, you're in a rut where you don't have an obvious next step and you're starting at possible decades of the same, you get depressed. But now a lot of people are like 35 at that time so it almost overlaps with the 80's version of a midlife crisis. This happened to me, I accomplished roughly what I'd planned professionally at about 30 and then realized it wasn't what I wanted and had no idea what to do next.
> I'd planned professionally at about 30 and then realized it wasn't what I wanted and had no idea what to do next.
Oddly enough, I think this is what keeps me from being ambitious in a professional sense. I just feel like, based on everything I read, hear, and see, that we are all just donkeys chasing the metaphorical carrot tied to a stick. I swear, it's like the hedonistic treadmill is turned up a few notches too high.
There is just so much social pressure to jump into the rat race. I mean, part of me wants to be more ambitious -- to really see how far my abilities and efforts can take me.
However, if I have learned one thing in life it is that everything has a cost. So, what if I do accomplish whatever career goals I set out to achieve? I think a lot of the ambition that comes and goes in my head originates not out of a desire to fulfill my own wants but to kind of self-medicate some deep rooted self-esteem issues/feelings of inadequacy.
Thank you for being vulnerable (to the the extent that you were being) with this post.
My two cents, I deeply agree that "everything has a cost" but I don't find that most unambitious people make a conscious trade off.
Most unambitious people I know aren't doing anything with the time and energy they are "saving". They are just kinda passing/wasting it on things that don't satisfy them deeply.
That's different than someone making a conscious decision (eg not taking the most demanding job in order to have time w the family)
The other thing unambitious people often miss is that working hardcore can be fun and energizing in its own right and it can develop you as a person holistically.
I don't think many ambitious people work hard despite hating it every second. I think they rather enjoy it and benefit from it (similar to someone who likes exercise). At least that's been my experience and perception.
> They are just kinda passing\wasting it on things that don't satisfy them deeply.
This notion that you should be grinding for some sort of passion or satisfaction isn't as real as people make it out to be. Some of the most depressed, broken people you meet are highly passionate professionals, celebrities, and artists who found deep satisfaction in their jobs.
When it comes down to it, mental health things are more complicated than chasing you 'passion', whatever that means.
In my experience the happiest and most stable people I know are financially secure. Not hard workers, not working on some magnum opus. Just plain well-off. One is a stay at home dad who hasn't worked a day since he married his wife at 24. Great guy. He isn't posting on hackernews about life hacks and bragging about the grind. He just golfs and raises his kids and winks when I make fun of him for it.
I think you and I agree (I am the person you're responding to)
The guy you mentioned who's busy raising his kids is doing the most important and meaningful work he can possibly be doing. It doesn't have to be a grind to be meaningful. It just needs to be meaningful...
This isn't the same as the archetype I referred to in my post - a guy who's not ambitious but also is not doing anything meaningful or enjoyable with his time and energy (which is very different from your friend)
I once spoke to a counselor who emphasized the seasonal nature of life. Which reminds me of Ecclesiastes 3 (below). Find your seasonal purpose(s) and move in those directions until they are exhausted. Sometimes one's purpose is simply to rest and pray/meditate on the next purpose and phase.
It's hard to discern motivations, but I always like to pray on if what I'm doing is by faith and is loving. Against those things there is no law. At the end of the day, the only thing gained or lost here is eternal, and I'm not going to the grave with any of the earthly accumulations or losses. So most of the "counting the cost" needs to be in the spiritual domain.
The way to deal with this is to avoid the rat race and all the crap that comes with it: lifestyle bloat, houses that own you, fancy cars, etc. it’s a rigged game.
Your job should serve your purposes. Once it stops doing that, something has to change or you’re going to be unhappy.
The curse of midlife is being able to see the need and justification for bullshit like the rat race, knowing full well you perpetuate it in your own small way by participating, while also becoming cognizant that there’s more to life than empty status signaling. You see the extent to which people self-medicate to keep themselves in the race, and the sheer number of people who simply disengage in some way because they can’t deal with it.
I "made it" (financially set for life) in the past two years after selling my company at 33. I was chasing something like it since I was maybe 15, tired of having grown up poor and wanting better for my family and myself.
I'm still not happy but at least I know I'd rather have money and be sad than also being worried about money on top of that. I definitely need to get back some semblance of meaning in my life, but at 34 now (without kids) and still feeling like I'm 25 because my perception of time is warped by attention deficit.. I feel like the only years I care about are soon to be over (under 40).
The further I get from my childhood the less I want to be here.
The biggest problem I noticed in your post is the tense you're using to describe yourself. You're describing your story in the past tense. You now have the resources to write an even more successful/interesting/fulfilling chapter in whatever line of business is most interesting to you and potentially have another step function in wealth. Each step function in wealth gives you more potential for impact in a measurable way in other peoples' lives. I hope you decide that you're just getting started.
> I just feel like, based on everything I read, hear, and see, that we are all just donkeys chasing the metaphorical carrot tied to a stick.
Something that is less analogical and more biographical: we are primates chasing and arguing over the shiniest and new type of banana. The analogical part left is what the "banana" might be.
As primates, we are unbelievably ill-equipped to handle the Internet. This dream of the Internet connecting us together turned into the nightmare it is because it taps into our primitive emotions, which ends up being most of them.
I find no solace in evolutinary psych “explanations” during dark nights of the soul. It feels like nihilism dressed up in Science, with an undertone of “well this is the best we got so tough luck!” to be frank.
I just gave an observation. If one wanted to do something with that observation, then I think it's fair to say that we should design our technology with the limitations of our emotional intelligence in mind. We cannot keep assuming that our emotional intelligence is infinite and can absorb everything we throw at it. Our emotional capacity is limited, and so we should acknowledge that and design our systems with that in mind. But, we don't.
By the way, nihilism is a valid approach as a philosophy and has several important things to say. It is not what it is commonly understood to be.
which factually points out that most people go through several crises in their adult life. As a rule of thumb you have one every seven years or so. I had one around 30, another in my early 40s, and another at 49. If you read between the lines in Freud you could also get the picture that a psychoanalysis would be likely to span the duration of such a crisis (say 18 months) and improve the outcome you get.
The author, Gail Sheehy, gave a talk at Ithaca College about a decade ago and actually said that she disowned that book for a few reasons:
(1) Passages is positive for divorce as a way that people who are evolving at different rates and in different directions to realize themselves. She realized later on that divorce is overall highly destructive.
(2) The paths that people take aren't quite so predictable.
(3) Passages was based on a study of graduates of an elite school, one thing that stands out is that none of the case studies consider serious deprivation, in fact you never once hear that somebody wanted to do X or Y but didn't because they couldn't afford it. In the sense that the experience of most people is "dark matter" you might want to read
In particular divorce might work out well for somebody like Bill Gates or Elon Musk who can trade in their tired old nag for a hot young thing but for most ordinary people and their families it's profoundly harmful.
Sheehy went on to write numerous more books on the same subject.
Love this, maps really well onto my experience. I see (and feel) a sharp deliniation between do-ers and be-ers, with the be-ers wishing they could do, and the do-ers not having time to process what they're doing.
> for ordinary people and their families it's profoundly harmful
People want (and believe they deserve) what they used to have, or what they see someone else has. I think the crux of the midlife crisis is coming to terms with tradeoffs. Everyone has spent potential to get where they are, and there aren't do-overs.
"I think the crux of the midlife crisis is coming to terms with tradeoffs. Everyone has spent potential to get where they are, and there aren't do-overs." << This. It is at the same time crisis-inducing and very motivating, depending on your situation and personality. You look down the pike and think "If I have an average lifespan, I can kick this shit into gear and have the whole timespan I've already lived to get some stuff done" or you think "I only have (x) years left, it's too late already." But either way, the crux of the matter is that you have a limited set of choices left. You had a limited set of choices before, too, but young people don't realize that. They don't quite feel the chapters being ripped out of the book of life yet, they don't see the just-pruned branches falling from the tree of life... Every affirmative choice you make is also a choice that kills something else. And this is not bad, necessarily -- a well-pruned fruit tree yields more fruit, without breaking. But it's not how we've been raised. We've been raised with limitlessness. We have not been raised with the interior disciplines of pruning and weeding and culling.
I had the sense last year that the limitless desire for a different life is a destructive force.
Mid-life crisis examples of how this desire shows up as regret: "What if I had stayed with that previous girlfriend instead of marrying my wife?", "What if I had moved to this other city instead of my home?", etc.
My personal conclusion is that this limitless desire is a dark pit of despair with no bottom. This may be part of the reasoning behind the tenth commandment seems to be applicable - "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
That desire can be toxic to the point of destruction is mostly treated as a foreign concept to our contemporary world.
So, I made the conscious choice to go in the other direction toward the light, and to see what adventure awaits over there.
Not sure fully what that means yet, but a part of it at least is accepting and embracing my own life as it is today, including all of the constraints.
It seems to me like the path out of the mid-life crisis is about signing up for the next adventure, letting go of the past, and looking forward to what's still to come. And most definitely not letting "desire for else" ruin my gratitude for the fact that I am highly fortunate, and still quite able to live, experience, do, and be so much.
it doesn't deal with the "voicelesness" of the "working class" (closer to the British idea of "working class" than the Marxist one, notably "working class" people in Britain frequently aren't working) but that voicelessness is a defining characteristic of that group. Anyone who finds a voice has left that class and can't really speak for it.
You are asking a lot of the word often here. Also, the perspective of who it is healthy for is skewed according to the data out there on outcomes after divorce.
Most people are ruined financially by it. If you are a pro baseball player or Hollywood actor you can afford to lose half your wealth and support two households. People in the bottom 80% can’t afford it.
A lot of (perhaps including the article's authors) modern "mid-life crises" are more what I've heard of as "quarter life crises" - you finish school, get a job, you're in a rut where you don't have an obvious next step and you're starting at possible decades of the same, you get depressed. But now a lot of people are like 35 at that time so it almost overlaps with the 80's version of a midlife crisis. This happened to me, I accomplished roughly what I'd planned professionally at about 30 and then realized it wasn't what I wanted and had no idea what to do next.