Good advice, from a 36 year old middle aged man 3 years into a midlife crisis after a massive work-related burnout event.
A couple more pieces of advice from me:
* A midlife crisis has its own glacial pace. Be prepared to be upside down for a long time.
* Be prepared not to be the same person you were before. Be prepared to learn there is no turning back.
* If you're in a midlife crisis, your previous life was simply not good enough and reality has caught up to you. Go through the process, and you'll become a better person.
* Outsource your mental health during this phase to professionals. Not even your spouse might be able to accept what comes out of this reconfiguration of yours. You will probably need the help of someone that is not invested in your previous existence to hold you in this trying time.
--
3 years in, it's getting better, I miss part of my previous life, but I know who I am now, how I operate, and I won't compromise to fit someone else's mould anymore. In your childhood you had no say in how you were grown and pieced together. You had to carry whatever they had built for you until you broke down. Now is your chance to start over and do a better job at it.
It was being a little cheeky. And if a massive burnout whose first month was having daily panic attacks and 3 years to recover is garden variety, I am afraid to know what a serious one entails ;)
Depression was part of the baggage I was carrying around all my life. It's hard to say, given the state of things, but perhaps depression is one thing I was lucky to shed during this phase.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but both my parents passed away in their mid-50s, and after my startup failed at 35 I hit something like a midlife crisis.
If you believe mid 30s is middle-aged, then it becomes middle-aged - and unfortunately, for some that might be true.
Fortunately for me, this crisis led to a serious investment in my health and fitness, and though I obviously cannot predict my future, I'm far healthier now than anytime in my adult life. I fully agree with the sentiment to not waste a midlife crisis.
No age is too early for a crisis. One model I have heard is that we need to reinvent ourselves every 7 to 10 years. I had one crisis of reinvention at 30. Now at 38 I am in another one.
isn't a midlife crisis is just a label for burnout / depression at the end of the day? everybody who is depressed feels like life is stuck and going nowhere.
Yeah, I'm 49 and wondering if I shouldn't have a midlife crisis or something. Although reading the article, is it possible I had mine 12 years ago when I quit employment and became a freelancer? I've been a lot happier since, but it's really still the same career.
I've always wanted to create games, though. Whether computer, board or RPG. Should I quit my current freelancing and start doing that then?
Wow, 3 years, that's a long way. Congratz on making it this far and good luck on the road still ahead.
39yo here, just stopped shy of a full burn-out & after a month with a lot of confusion, crying and panic decided to hand in my notice. That helped a lot, but I'm not really well yet ~3 months in. Mainly sleep is an issue. My body seems to enjoy triggering tiny panic attacks when I'm falling asleep, which makes falling a sleep complicated >_<
I've been struggeling with sleep and anger issues for many years now, but it had come to a point where I did not want to accept being angry anymore. Anger turned into crying and despair, but that is frankly progress. I got some help, it was not great, but it helped me understand a lot about myself. In the end, this gave me the courage to quit and think about life in a different way.
Now I just have to figure out where to go from here. Stick with what I know and do it better or do something different entirely. Not a clue how to figure that one out yet.
Anyway, thank you for sharing. It's good hearing from other people that went through similar things.
Changing your career doesn't necessarily mean you're having a mid-life crisis.
Changing your personal circumstances doesn't necessarily imply a midlife crisis.
Every definition I know of includes a sense of existential angst, a feeling of regret, of lost potential, of questioning identity, of a fear of mortality.
But simply realizing you're unhappy in your life or circumstances and want to change them isn't itself indicative of a mid-life crisis by any meaningful definition I'm aware of.
A midlife crisis is quitting your desk job to sell ice creams on the beach in the Caribbean. Getting to the point of doing it, not just thinking about it.
It means you'll never be 18 or 23 or 30 or 35 again. The youth that you took for granted is gone forever and time will march with you until your death. Death may be maybe be 2 years from now or 40 years from now, fully knowing that you body will start failing. Even if you have 40 years, not all of them will be good years, especially the last ones. Once you are gone, that's it, all the time you spent improving yourself and building wealth will be for naught, at least for you.
It's what people say they suffer when they made bad decisions for decades and figured out they missed the good part(s), happens a lot to people who sacrifice everything to climb the corporate ladder or focus too much on work or other artificial goals. Not everyone goes through it
May I ask for further advice on your fourth bullet point about “outsourcing your mental health”? I understand you might need to shop around like you maybe go to a cognitive-behavioral therapist, or psychoanalyst, or buy a Transcendental Meditation (TM) course.
My midlife crisis at 40 was more like a midlife epiphany. We moved from a perfectly good and totally beautiful city (Bath, UK) into the arse end of nowhere in Devon to live in a shack in the woods with no running water and to be near the sea.
We went with two small (8 and 5) kids (responding to those here saying it's not possible - it is!) and downsized from a busy city life to a quiet rural one.
Our intention was to stay a year. After two years we mentioned going back to the kids and they put their feet down - the most relaxed kids in the world decided they knew what was good for them: splashing about in rivers with sticks, fires on the beach, mud, a tiny school, more present parents, late nights lying on a hill looking at the stars. So we listened to them and stayed.
We're still in the country, by the sea, and our kids are now nearly grown up. We're having a blast. We're here for them. They're here for us. We'll never be rich but we're a great family unit.
If we hadn't had the guts to do a crazy thing (I give all credit to my wife for having the idea!) and decide pretty much off the cuff to follow our "crisis", we'd never have discovered our new life.
We've been very fortunate with our circumstances and I never forget that - but fundamental to all of this has been making the leap. Fear of the unknown can be countered by just doing it, knowing that crazy looking decisions can create amazing futures. Doing things is often better than curling up in fear and not doing them.
We just did the lightweight version of that, moved from a major city to the beach, but still in a beach town. It came about due to my wife’s midlife crisis induced by major (now solved) health problems. We’ve lived at the beach for three weeks and already it feels like our best decision in many years.
(We kept our old jobs and are working mostly remotely. The commute is two hours each direction by train, but doing that once a week is fine by me.)
Yeh, we run a small web consultancy. I also have another business which is a little more platform-y / SaaSy. Wife has also learned how to be a florist so is building that up too. All fun stuff :-)
- What about friends and family? Are you further from or closer to family? Did you have friends nearby? Did your kids? What is your familial and social circle now, compared with then?
- What about school?
Sure - well, my wife is from the North East so her parents are problematic from a travel point of view, and definitely worse now given that we don't have easy access to trains / airports now. We've mitigated this by having them come to stay for longer periods of time so it's good that I get on with them :-)
We didn't have any friends at all down here when we first moved. The village was extremely welcoming, and in large part (as ever) the kids going to (a small and friendly) school massively helped to build some initial connections, many of which continue to this day.
We now have a really nice circle - people round these parts are very much not obsessed with work in the way we've found with other places we've lived, which is a bonus for us. Lots of variety in what people do with their leisure time, lots of home workers, and in general people seem more relaxed.
Massive downside about our particular part of the world is the terrible lack of diversity. We also miss bits of city culture and have to travel now to go get our culture / food / music - but we find we can sort of "top up" on a monthly basis and then run back to the sea feeling refreshed :-)
Bath might be beautiful, but it's definitely not perfectly good!
It's at the same time too small to be interesting (you need to drive an hour to get to Bristol), but too big for having those advantages you mention for Nothing-by-the-Sea.
If you need another 'kid' (48m) in mid-life-burnout-crisis to join you - I'm your guy!
-
I have been going through MLC since the beginning of pandemic - and I am trying to figure out what to do as I dont ever want to go back to the type of tech work I was doing (SF currently has the largest commercial real estate vacancy in the country, and I dont see that getting better - and for a decade I built out the tech in many of the large office spaces in SF and for many hospitals...
I cant go back to that.
I want to do something analog/creative and non-tech related.
I grew up in the scenario you describe with your kid - growing up as a latch-key-kid in Lake Tahoe in the 80s was AMAZING - just leaving the front door and walking off into the wilderness and stomping through streams, building tee-pees out of shaking aspens that we would chop down. Build booby traps (terribly)...
Kids need to grow up in the woods - not in the cities.
Midlife crisis needs to be split into the "responsible for kids" and "not" categories. The "not" people can do wilder/riskier things, although I suspect on average they don't since fear of things massively outweighs "can you actually do it" factors. Probably the paper boxes we build are smaller than the metal ones outside of them.
Normalize transition in your kids lives'. It will serve them so much better in the long run.
I had my own dramatic "mid-life crisis" a few years ago in my early 40's and have two teenage kids (pre-teen at the time).
We didn't hide anything from them, including the overall shape of the career issues, relationship issues, hopes and dreams, how we were handling regrets and commitments, and so on.
Of course we didn't involve them in all the nitty gritty (and what we shared, we do so with respect to their relative ages and levels of experience), but the idea that hiding what it means to be a complete, imperfect and yet aspirationally evolving human being from your kids is a major opportunity lost.
Now my kids know that just being successful doesn't mean you're happy, that everyone goes through changes of heart, that our goals and dreams evolve, and that this is a natural part of life.
I'm a huge fan of parental role modelling through action and reflective practice. Showing them how you go through your own life transitions helps them tremendously in theirs.
I don't think that's what they were talking about. I think they were talking about "if you have kids, you still have to support them financially, and that massively limits your options for experimentation".
Thank you. I turned 40 this weekend, and have spent the last few months if not years wondering who the hell I am, and thinking about all the cool projects, startups, languages and learnings I'd love to explore.
However, I also have a 3-year old I'm taking care of who drains me of all my excess time and energy. I can't do any of this stuff. I'm exhausted at the end of the day, and with my 1-2 hours at the end of night after my kid goes to bed, I'm certainly not writing the Great American Novel.
Maybe when he's older I'll have time for a midlife crisis.
> Maybe when he's older I'll have time for a midlife crisis.
If you're like me, yes. When I was 40, my daughter was 3, and I didn't have much time for worrying. Now both my kids are tweens and my direct day-to-day responsibilities as a parent have declined so much that I have plenty of time for a proper midlife crisis. It sucks more than I ever imagined, though I'm working through it and feeling a little better about the future.
51 with a 2 year old son (my one and only kid, who was technically impossible, hence why he is "late", but then here we are...). He's awesome, but I'm in the same place (2nd paragraph). And, even worse since I'm 51. I have to practically physically claw back any time I need for myself. It's exhausting. I'm hoping to make enough money again by next year where my partner can quit her job and my son can enter a special program (that unfortunately has 51 weekdays off, which was too many for 2 full-time parents), and the division of labor will be different.
That's how I was around 40 (though my children were 6 and 3 at the time). I'm definitely going through a midlife crisis. One thing I've learned about myself in this period (it started last year) is that there is nothing worth losing your own mental health over. If you aren't mentally healthy and stable, those you care about the most are going to suffer all the more for it. Sometimes you have to pick the least of multiple bad options, and often "powering through" is not that.
Yes, you will have more time later. Now is the time to invest as much attention as you can into your child. It is the investment you can make now that will pay off massively later on.
"mid-life" is such a varied but also changing term.
Many many moons ago said mid life crisis was when the kids were starting to get older, 16-ish or older even. Mid life crisis meant you suddenly had more time on your hands than you remembered what to do with.
Now mid life crisis is a couple of years into having kids more often than not it seems. That seems like a way different situation. On the one side you have kids that want to do their thing anyway and on the other you have a totally dependent on you and the family toddler.
I struggle with this—if you have kids, sometimes staying the course feels like the "responsible" thing to do. But plenty of people get laid off out of the blue, and plenty of people pursue their dream and have a thriving second career.
There is probably no right answer, but I guess the question is: "what decision can you live with?"
That’s tricky though, because the decision you can live with becomes the decision your partner and children also have to live with - and they get much less choice in the matter.
not going to help anyway. midlife crisis and other related mental problems can never be resolved by outward solutions. you can distract yourself for a while with exciting new hobbies (like getting a motorbike) but it will come back and even harder at that because then you will feel like it's even more hopeless as even this exciting change didn't really solve the underlying issue. but some people also just get used to being unhappy and that's about it for them.
The midlife crisis is a need for novelty, specifically the brain is not stupid, it sees that everything around is either collapsing or freezing in place and it wants to fight that, reverting to the days of college when everything was about building up and dynamism.
If and only if you get back to the same levels of building up and dynamism of the college days , and you are still sad/depressed, you could claim that the thing is not outward related.
Yes but the options are far more limited. Your midlife crisis can't be "I only do solitary mountain trekking now because that's what makes me happiest" when you have children who need you.
It reminds me of the kids/no-kids bi-modality of the covid "lock-downs". All the stuff in the news was like "everyone's learning to bake!", while the reality for most people I knew was "everyone is running an office and a daycare simultaneously from their home!".
Nice metaphor. I like the paper = financial, social constraint and metal as "down to the metal" physical limitations. Kinda clunky though, needs a few rounds of workshopping!
My wife and I at (46 and 48) went all out 2 years after our younger son graduated and two years after Covid.
TLDR; we downsized from an our house in the burbs and our cars bought a vacation home/investment property in a resort in Florida where we live half the year and we nomad the other half flying across the US.
I turned 40 last year, shortly after “making it” to my career goal: CTO of a hyper-growth start-up.
Shortly after my birthday, my daughter, who had just started middle school, was hospitalized because she was suicidal.
What I believe has been a midlife crisis exploded with such tremendous force, I thought I was losing my mind. Thank goodness for good therapy, which I immediately sought.
This is the most profound reconfiguration I’ve ever experienced.
I’m excited for the person I’ll be at the other end of this, and how my life will feel, but I’ve learned there is no planning for any of this. There is no white-knuckling any of this.
I’m relearning how to connect to myself and how to shape a life around that connection.
It’s not easy. It’s not close to done. It’s exciting. Terrifying.
To the author’s point: I’m not wasting this opportunity. That doesn’t mean I’m writing books or or doing things to keep busy. For me, wasting this opportunity would be ignoring the incredible self-reflection, forgoing the reconnection with self, and powering through the burnout and discomfort to keep on with plans I laid for reasons I’m not sure I fully understand anymore.
There is a peace I’m sensing, and I can’t wait until I’m fully aligned with it.
For those of you experiencing similar, I wish you the best. I think our best years are ahead of us.
If you don't mind sharing, where did you find a therapist, and what is their background? It seems like there is such a wide range of options, and I'm a bit hesitant about the online platforms.
Also not OP, but if you open up with any mental health positive people in your life, that's a great place to start. They may even have a recommendation which will really ease a lot of your worries going in as it largely is a personality based thing in my experience.
Also - give a call to some therapists. You can choose some arbitrary screening criteria that make you comfortable - like if you only want to talk to men because you're a man and worry about that, or if you want to find an lgbtq-oriented therapist, those types of things can be filtered. There are even faith-adjacent therapists - but I personally would be uncomfortable with that - but they exist!
Once you have a list after filtering down of 3-5 therapists, call each for a consult. During the consult, if you don't like the therapist, cross them out. After calling 3-5 you can choose the one that your gut tells you. If you can't commit even then, then flip a coin on them to be honest. If your gut tells you to go with two different ones, choose one at random and try it out.
Finally one other thing that I found surprising was even if someone marks cognitive behavioral therapy on their listing (A lot of them do!) - they may not use it in a 'tool-based' fashion. Meaning, you won't get a lot of homework.
If you are someone who needs take home work to be able to function, this could be a question you ask during your calls.
Here is an example of how it could go:
You have the criteria:
1. Must be LGBTQ positive
2. Must accept my insurance
3. Must be skills-based oriented around processing emotions
With these three, if I cannot find the information on their page, I can ask them during the consultation call something like:
1. If you don't accept insurance, can you do a super-bill so I can file a claim with my insurance?
2. Do you do skills-based learning as part of your practice
They may say "no, but I do X, Y, Z" in response
Anyway, I'm not editing this down but hopefully that helps a little.
Not OP but I had the same problem as you, too many options. My advice is to just pick one and try it, you'll have a much better understanding of what you need/want after you've talked to one. If they don't give you a good feeling, you pick another one
I did what rednalexa suggested: asked for help and recommendations from folks in my life who have used mental health professionals and swear by them.
When I met professionals for an initial consultation, I paid close attention to my comfort with each and how I felt about sharing the deepest details of what has been one of the hardest periods of my life.
Through those recommendations, I found someone with whom I felt comfortable and chose to move forward.
Like many things in life, I recommend just taking a first step; in this case, an initial consultation. Follow your gut, if you can. Don't feel good about it? Don't move forward.
I struggled to find a good therapist and had sort of given up for a while, but years later I was able to find a really good one (which happened to be a neuropsychologist) through a referral from my psychiatrist. You might have some luck attempting something similar if you can.
Sorry to hear about you and your daughter, and I hope you're both doing better. Was she a heavy social media/cell phone user? It's been shown to cause mental issues in teens, especially girls.
I believe it differs dramatically for each person. What works for me may not work for anyone else. Here's what is working well for me:
* Taking long walks on trails, without my phone or podcasts.
* Tending my little garden.
* Meditating. Not some prescribed formula, but something I sort of "fell into." However, some common meditative tools have proved very useful: body scans and breath work.
* Being deeply curious about myself. Why did/do I want X? Do the reasons feel right? Why did Y make me angry/sad/happy?
* Practicing acceptance and letting go of things that don't serve me.
The tricky part is that I don't believe any of this would work for someone else if they just tried to go through the motions of it.
I do believe, though, that being deeply curious about yourself is the way to start in figuring out what you need to connect.
Question your motives. Question your emotional responses. Dig until you understand. Dig harder when half your brain is screaming at you in pain to _stop_ digging.
This is hustle porn. All of Kleon's books are hustle porn. A lot of, "you just gotta, like, do, man." Not a lot of whatever the hell that means for the millions of folks who exist in the long tail of every creative market, struggling day in and day out to try to escape the doldrums of their day jobs, but never making it. Year after year. YouTube video after YouTube video. New social media site after new social media site. Kleon's (and others like him, one of which I would consider Paul Graham) success is in no small part due to selling you a story that success is attainable.
But it's probably not. Hustle porn makes its bank on you thinking you're going to be the one to beat the odds. You're probably not. You buy the books and t-shirts and the prints and the seminars and you fill the coffers of someone else's success.
You probably don't even really want success. If you play the "and then what?" game on "what would you do if you had what you want?", you'll eventually realize all you want is happiness. Success isn't happiness. There are lots of successful, deeply unhappy people.
Focus on the happiness. You can make a thing. And you can absolutely not sell it. You can make a thing and not even tell anyone about it. If making a thing makes you happy, focus on that. The rest is a distraction, someone else telling you that making the thing isn't enough, that it has to be "successful" before it's "real".
Yes, happiness is easier when you're financially stable. That's not the same thing as the "success" that hustle porn tries to sell. Hustle porn needs you to remain dissatisfied so you keep buying the hustle porn. Do what it takes to be financially stable. It's good if you can make that be your source of happiness, too, but get ready to accept that you probably can't.
Just choose to be happy. How? You just do. You just decide, "I'm going to be happy." And then it happens. It's really fuggin' weird, but it works.
On a similar note, I find the "don't waste it on a car, use your imagination" dichotomy quite shallow. Do whatever that makes you happy. You can buy that car if you want, and do great things at the same time too if that's your thing. Or, maybe you're happy with your car, and your work too. You don't owe anyone to be that designated person. You may need to own that car in order to truly process whether you need it in your life or not, or to feel having control over one part of your life, and transfer that perspective to the other parts. Human psychology is quite complicated, and usually you're the most informed person about yourself.
If you buy the right car on the depreciation curve you won’t lose that much a lot of these crisis choices can be quite cheap if you don’t do them impulsively.
I don't know anything about this author until now, but by reading the one article and thinking a little critically and reading here, what he said was deceptive. A lot of advice is actually just toxic, because in it's generality, people always give assurances behind it. It might be fine for trivial things, but for shaping major themes in one's life, one really can't have a feeling of FOMO because they don't act on this generic advice.
I say this because I have spending years shaking this off. This is my mid-life crisis (that I decided had to start when I turned 40 :P ) What you say about success and happiness is relevant - even if "success" is an implicit measurement in places where hustle is a religion, it's best to ignore that stuff and do your thing ... or not. :)
Austin Kleon's books are not hustle porn to me. In fact, it comes across as the opposite. It feels like tips for being creative. Some of the advice is for unplugging, pursuing side projects, practicing procrastination -- things that do not sound like your typical "top 100 tips to succeed" tripe. The third book -- Show Your Work -- could be taken as hustle porn. But if you read it in context with the others, it doesn't seem that way. Just a way to get your work out there without being spammy. If it seems hustle porn, you might be missing the point.
Midlife crisis is about recognizing your mortality and limited time left, and looking at what you have done and finding it comes up short to what you hoped for your life.
The reality of how little time you have left is a key component, that death is stalking every decision and will likely curtail some plans.
Honest question. Is midlife crisis and/or burn out a problem that you face only when you can afford it?
I am a frist generation immigrant in the US. I do ok for myself and am at a vantage point of seeing my peers etc have these issues but I also can't forget that my parents worked much harder for much less, with similar, if not lot more stresses, and I don't think it was even an option for my mom/dad to have the luxury of burnout or on a midlife crisis, even therapy would have been an expense to think twice about. They worked Saturdays as well, had much worse commutes, longer hours and they barely even took vacations etc. as much as me and my peers now. They seem to have done ok for themselves and are reasonably happy, and fine in their older age now.
Are these just problems that one faces only after they have certain comforts in life and can afford to have such problems?
Short answer: it may certainly be the case that growing up in first-world countries more easily primes people for later midlife crises with their greater societal focus on wealth, status, fame, materialism, etc.
Longer answer: I don't think it's a matter of "affording" or "not affording" per se, but likely depends on your younger-self's expectations and life goals, which are completely free and up to you, you can desire and daydream about whatever you want (though environment and nature of upbringing will certainly have an influence); the "crises" comes from realizing that your expectations and hopes may very well never come to fruition, and whether or not you can deal with that. Maybe they were unrealistic or selfish expectations to begin with and you should let them go, maybe you actually made some serious life mistakes with big costs and have to accept that. Maybe you're still caught up in bad habits and have to reassess your values. Whether or not you can "afford" any of that is also up to you. So it likely depends on what exactly your earlier expectations and life goals were, and how important they were/are to your self-perception.
I think it depends on what you mean by "you can afford it".
At some level that's the nature of midlife crisis, identifying what it is you have and what you want, and what you can have.
If you are happy with what you have despite all its costs, it's not really a crisis because you've identified that as such. Even if you're not entirely happy with it but you recognize that it is a net good for you and your family, there's no crisis either. If some things you identified as benefits before are now seen as serious costs — to family, children, morality, or integrity, among other things — but there's an easy and painless way to rectify things, there's also no crisis.
The problem — the crisis — is in recognizing or believing that what you once saw as good things are actually costly, but rectifying it is also fraught with large and probably unknown costs. Maybe you've realized the vocation you're in is actually rife with immorality and corruption, or maybe you've realized that your career has completely cost your children precious, limited time with a good family, or whatever, but you've gotten so far along that the costs and likelihood of changing careers are also great. That's the nature of the crisis.
At some level I think you could say it's a crisis of privilege but I don't think so. I think it comes anytime a set of life choices, over a long time and with many costs, leads one to a position of deep dissatisfaction and realization that there's limited time to right things. My sense is that doesn't really depend on socioeconomic status necessarily.
The other side of it is there are apparently studies showing similar mood changes over the course of life happen in completely other species, so there's an argument that it really has nothing to do with existential or sociological issues at all and is very biological. Based on my own experiences that seems hard to believe though; my guess is midlife crises can happen for many different reasons, and aren't limited to midlife.
This is true, but I find it's also difficult to really judge the worth of what I've done in life. My mind's default for judging is: "Was my work popular? Did it make good money?" And all my endeavors have certainly failed in those regards. But of course there are many things we do in daily life that can hardly be judged that way, and whose effects we cannot see.
That’s the cultural default. It is designed to make you the perfect economic actor: always grasping at something unattainable. The resulting void is conveniently matched with a dazzling array of products to use your hard earned money on.
The Qur’an uses the term al-dunya for life on this earth. The word dunya means “nearer” or “something less important or ordinary.” In multiple places, the Qur’an comments on the real nature of life on earth and warns us about its true disposition. It has been described as something of a transient nature, a place of transit, test and trials, and actions. It is also a place for learning, spiritual development and growth. What one achieves here is manifested during the next phase of existence which is a constant, higher and more permanent phase of existence:
And what is the life of this world other than play and amusement? (Qur’an, Surah al-Anʿam, 6:32)
And I created not the jinn and mankind except that they should worship Me (Qur'an, Surah al-Dhariyat - Verses 56)
age of forty has special significance in Islam. Regarding aging, Allah says in the Qur’an, “… until, when he reaches maturity and reaches forty years, he says, ’My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to work righteousness of which You will approve, and make righteous for me my offspring. Indeed, I have repented to You, and indeed, I am of the Muslims’” (Qur’an, 46:15).
Daily Seneca quote: "What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands."
One curious explanation of midlife crisis I've seen was that at the age of 33 the "spark of spirit" completes its connection with its earthly vessel, looks down and expresses its major disappointment with how little has been done. The more advanced, who haven't wasted time, this connection feels like sudden rush of wisdom and intuition.
This mentality is why I'm nomadding despite the constant threats of Return to Office. (I'm at Google.)
I spent a dozen years in San Francisco. I know what serves me there and what doesn't. I know that I find day-to-day life there low-key depressing. I know my friends there have largely moved away and/or moved on to the next chapters of their lives. I know it's way too hard to find a suitable romantic partner there.
Kowtowing to the RTO whims would be relegating myself to another year that's probably a lot like the other ones, with the hard parts getting harder with every year lost.
I don't know where my forever home is, but I owe it to myself to figure it out.
What would you say makes San Francisco particularly difficult to find a suitable romantic partner for you if you don’t mind answering? I am curious to hear what you think because I have also heard the same thing about SF and even about Austin, TX.
>> Higgs was saying that the artists he admires are people like David Lynch. People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.”
As someone who’s definitely nearing or within a MLC, I’m so fed up with this narrative. It’s pure and simple survival bias. Most of the people doing exactly this end up frustrated, poor, forgotten, incapable of recognizing their own narcissistic personality, and surrounded by scattered/broken/dysfunctional relationship.
A very tiny minority, despite all that, gets successful, and yet we build entire narrative universes around these few outliers and their survival bias.
Readit News
A couple more pieces of advice from me:
* A midlife crisis has its own glacial pace. Be prepared to be upside down for a long time.
* Be prepared not to be the same person you were before. Be prepared to learn there is no turning back.
* If you're in a midlife crisis, your previous life was simply not good enough and reality has caught up to you. Go through the process, and you'll become a better person.
* Outsource your mental health during this phase to professionals. Not even your spouse might be able to accept what comes out of this reconfiguration of yours. You will probably need the help of someone that is not invested in your previous existence to hold you in this trying time.
--
3 years in, it's getting better, I miss part of my previous life, but I know who I am now, how I operate, and I won't compromise to fit someone else's mould anymore. In your childhood you had no say in how you were grown and pieced together. You had to carry whatever they had built for you until you broke down. Now is your chance to start over and do a better job at it.
Good luck!
You're not quite middle aged yet :). And 33 is way too early for a midlife crisis, surely? Maybe it's just garden variety burnout and/or depression?
Depression was part of the baggage I was carrying around all my life. It's hard to say, given the state of things, but perhaps depression is one thing I was lucky to shed during this phase.
If you believe mid 30s is middle-aged, then it becomes middle-aged - and unfortunately, for some that might be true.
Fortunately for me, this crisis led to a serious investment in my health and fitness, and though I obviously cannot predict my future, I'm far healthier now than anytime in my adult life. I fully agree with the sentiment to not waste a midlife crisis.
I don't think he knows about second midlife crisis, Pippin.
Most are doing well now as we hit 40, curios if is struck sooner for our generation.
For myself 30s was only when the life started to happen.
I've always wanted to create games, though. Whether computer, board or RPG. Should I quit my current freelancing and start doing that then?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm
39yo here, just stopped shy of a full burn-out & after a month with a lot of confusion, crying and panic decided to hand in my notice. That helped a lot, but I'm not really well yet ~3 months in. Mainly sleep is an issue. My body seems to enjoy triggering tiny panic attacks when I'm falling asleep, which makes falling a sleep complicated >_<
I've been struggeling with sleep and anger issues for many years now, but it had come to a point where I did not want to accept being angry anymore. Anger turned into crying and despair, but that is frankly progress. I got some help, it was not great, but it helped me understand a lot about myself. In the end, this gave me the courage to quit and think about life in a different way.
Now I just have to figure out where to go from here. Stick with what I know and do it better or do something different entirely. Not a clue how to figure that one out yet.
Anyway, thank you for sharing. It's good hearing from other people that went through similar things.
Burnout isn't a mid-life crisis.
Changing your career doesn't necessarily mean you're having a mid-life crisis.
Changing your personal circumstances doesn't necessarily imply a midlife crisis.
Every definition I know of includes a sense of existential angst, a feeling of regret, of lost potential, of questioning identity, of a fear of mortality.
But simply realizing you're unhappy in your life or circumstances and want to change them isn't itself indicative of a mid-life crisis by any meaningful definition I'm aware of.
Dead Comment
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pablo-escobar-waiting
If all else fails, M-x doctor. It's a thing.
That's a cult, so maybe some other kind.
Dead Comment
We went with two small (8 and 5) kids (responding to those here saying it's not possible - it is!) and downsized from a busy city life to a quiet rural one.
Our intention was to stay a year. After two years we mentioned going back to the kids and they put their feet down - the most relaxed kids in the world decided they knew what was good for them: splashing about in rivers with sticks, fires on the beach, mud, a tiny school, more present parents, late nights lying on a hill looking at the stars. So we listened to them and stayed.
We're still in the country, by the sea, and our kids are now nearly grown up. We're having a blast. We're here for them. They're here for us. We'll never be rich but we're a great family unit.
If we hadn't had the guts to do a crazy thing (I give all credit to my wife for having the idea!) and decide pretty much off the cuff to follow our "crisis", we'd never have discovered our new life.
We've been very fortunate with our circumstances and I never forget that - but fundamental to all of this has been making the leap. Fear of the unknown can be countered by just doing it, knowing that crazy looking decisions can create amazing futures. Doing things is often better than curling up in fear and not doing them.
Right. I'm off for a surf :-)
(We kept our old jobs and are working mostly remotely. The commute is two hours each direction by train, but doing that once a week is fine by me.)
- What about friends and family? Are you further from or closer to family? Did you have friends nearby? Did your kids? What is your familial and social circle now, compared with then? - What about school?
We didn't have any friends at all down here when we first moved. The village was extremely welcoming, and in large part (as ever) the kids going to (a small and friendly) school massively helped to build some initial connections, many of which continue to this day.
We now have a really nice circle - people round these parts are very much not obsessed with work in the way we've found with other places we've lived, which is a bonus for us. Lots of variety in what people do with their leisure time, lots of home workers, and in general people seem more relaxed.
Massive downside about our particular part of the world is the terrible lack of diversity. We also miss bits of city culture and have to travel now to go get our culture / food / music - but we find we can sort of "top up" on a monthly basis and then run back to the sea feeling refreshed :-)
It's at the same time too small to be interesting (you need to drive an hour to get to Bristol), but too big for having those advantages you mention for Nothing-by-the-Sea.
-
I have been going through MLC since the beginning of pandemic - and I am trying to figure out what to do as I dont ever want to go back to the type of tech work I was doing (SF currently has the largest commercial real estate vacancy in the country, and I dont see that getting better - and for a decade I built out the tech in many of the large office spaces in SF and for many hospitals...
I cant go back to that.
I want to do something analog/creative and non-tech related.
I grew up in the scenario you describe with your kid - growing up as a latch-key-kid in Lake Tahoe in the 80s was AMAZING - just leaving the front door and walking off into the wilderness and stomping through streams, building tee-pees out of shaking aspens that we would chop down. Build booby traps (terribly)...
Kids need to grow up in the woods - not in the cities.
What beach, you must be on a foamie considering todays conditions?
Dead Comment
I had my own dramatic "mid-life crisis" a few years ago in my early 40's and have two teenage kids (pre-teen at the time).
We didn't hide anything from them, including the overall shape of the career issues, relationship issues, hopes and dreams, how we were handling regrets and commitments, and so on.
Of course we didn't involve them in all the nitty gritty (and what we shared, we do so with respect to their relative ages and levels of experience), but the idea that hiding what it means to be a complete, imperfect and yet aspirationally evolving human being from your kids is a major opportunity lost.
Now my kids know that just being successful doesn't mean you're happy, that everyone goes through changes of heart, that our goals and dreams evolve, and that this is a natural part of life.
I'm a huge fan of parental role modelling through action and reflective practice. Showing them how you go through your own life transitions helps them tremendously in theirs.
However, I also have a 3-year old I'm taking care of who drains me of all my excess time and energy. I can't do any of this stuff. I'm exhausted at the end of the day, and with my 1-2 hours at the end of night after my kid goes to bed, I'm certainly not writing the Great American Novel.
Maybe when he's older I'll have time for a midlife crisis.
If you're like me, yes. When I was 40, my daughter was 3, and I didn't have much time for worrying. Now both my kids are tweens and my direct day-to-day responsibilities as a parent have declined so much that I have plenty of time for a proper midlife crisis. It sucks more than I ever imagined, though I'm working through it and feeling a little better about the future.
Recommended reading: Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375...
Many many moons ago said mid life crisis was when the kids were starting to get older, 16-ish or older even. Mid life crisis meant you suddenly had more time on your hands than you remembered what to do with.
Now mid life crisis is a couple of years into having kids more often than not it seems. That seems like a way different situation. On the one side you have kids that want to do their thing anyway and on the other you have a totally dependent on you and the family toddler.
There is probably no right answer, but I guess the question is: "what decision can you live with?"
not going to help anyway. midlife crisis and other related mental problems can never be resolved by outward solutions. you can distract yourself for a while with exciting new hobbies (like getting a motorbike) but it will come back and even harder at that because then you will feel like it's even more hopeless as even this exciting change didn't really solve the underlying issue. but some people also just get used to being unhappy and that's about it for them.
If and only if you get back to the same levels of building up and dynamism of the college days , and you are still sad/depressed, you could claim that the thing is not outward related.
And compared to divorce, a midlife crisis has a lot more upsides.
And sometimes the ones from “not” get there without ever knowing what _needing to work_ means.
TLDR; we downsized from an our house in the burbs and our cars bought a vacation home/investment property in a resort in Florida where we live half the year and we nomad the other half flying across the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
Shortly after my birthday, my daughter, who had just started middle school, was hospitalized because she was suicidal.
What I believe has been a midlife crisis exploded with such tremendous force, I thought I was losing my mind. Thank goodness for good therapy, which I immediately sought.
This is the most profound reconfiguration I’ve ever experienced.
I’m excited for the person I’ll be at the other end of this, and how my life will feel, but I’ve learned there is no planning for any of this. There is no white-knuckling any of this.
I’m relearning how to connect to myself and how to shape a life around that connection.
It’s not easy. It’s not close to done. It’s exciting. Terrifying.
To the author’s point: I’m not wasting this opportunity. That doesn’t mean I’m writing books or or doing things to keep busy. For me, wasting this opportunity would be ignoring the incredible self-reflection, forgoing the reconnection with self, and powering through the burnout and discomfort to keep on with plans I laid for reasons I’m not sure I fully understand anymore.
There is a peace I’m sensing, and I can’t wait until I’m fully aligned with it.
For those of you experiencing similar, I wish you the best. I think our best years are ahead of us.
Also - give a call to some therapists. You can choose some arbitrary screening criteria that make you comfortable - like if you only want to talk to men because you're a man and worry about that, or if you want to find an lgbtq-oriented therapist, those types of things can be filtered. There are even faith-adjacent therapists - but I personally would be uncomfortable with that - but they exist!
Once you have a list after filtering down of 3-5 therapists, call each for a consult. During the consult, if you don't like the therapist, cross them out. After calling 3-5 you can choose the one that your gut tells you. If you can't commit even then, then flip a coin on them to be honest. If your gut tells you to go with two different ones, choose one at random and try it out.
Finally one other thing that I found surprising was even if someone marks cognitive behavioral therapy on their listing (A lot of them do!) - they may not use it in a 'tool-based' fashion. Meaning, you won't get a lot of homework.
If you are someone who needs take home work to be able to function, this could be a question you ask during your calls.
Here is an example of how it could go:
You have the criteria: 1. Must be LGBTQ positive 2. Must accept my insurance 3. Must be skills-based oriented around processing emotions
With these three, if I cannot find the information on their page, I can ask them during the consultation call something like:
1. If you don't accept insurance, can you do a super-bill so I can file a claim with my insurance? 2. Do you do skills-based learning as part of your practice They may say "no, but I do X, Y, Z" in response
Anyway, I'm not editing this down but hopefully that helps a little.
When I met professionals for an initial consultation, I paid close attention to my comfort with each and how I felt about sharing the deepest details of what has been one of the hardest periods of my life.
Through those recommendations, I found someone with whom I felt comfortable and chose to move forward.
Like many things in life, I recommend just taking a first step; in this case, an initial consultation. Follow your gut, if you can. Don't feel good about it? Don't move forward.
As someone looking to replicate your success, I'd love to know some of your learnings
With your newfound awareness, they almost certainly are.
Signed as one who is about 15 years down the path you have realized...
* Taking long walks on trails, without my phone or podcasts.
* Tending my little garden.
* Meditating. Not some prescribed formula, but something I sort of "fell into." However, some common meditative tools have proved very useful: body scans and breath work.
* Being deeply curious about myself. Why did/do I want X? Do the reasons feel right? Why did Y make me angry/sad/happy?
* Practicing acceptance and letting go of things that don't serve me.
The tricky part is that I don't believe any of this would work for someone else if they just tried to go through the motions of it.
I do believe, though, that being deeply curious about yourself is the way to start in figuring out what you need to connect.
Question your motives. Question your emotional responses. Dig until you understand. Dig harder when half your brain is screaming at you in pain to _stop_ digging.
But it's probably not. Hustle porn makes its bank on you thinking you're going to be the one to beat the odds. You're probably not. You buy the books and t-shirts and the prints and the seminars and you fill the coffers of someone else's success.
You probably don't even really want success. If you play the "and then what?" game on "what would you do if you had what you want?", you'll eventually realize all you want is happiness. Success isn't happiness. There are lots of successful, deeply unhappy people.
Focus on the happiness. You can make a thing. And you can absolutely not sell it. You can make a thing and not even tell anyone about it. If making a thing makes you happy, focus on that. The rest is a distraction, someone else telling you that making the thing isn't enough, that it has to be "successful" before it's "real".
Yes, happiness is easier when you're financially stable. That's not the same thing as the "success" that hustle porn tries to sell. Hustle porn needs you to remain dissatisfied so you keep buying the hustle porn. Do what it takes to be financially stable. It's good if you can make that be your source of happiness, too, but get ready to accept that you probably can't.
Just choose to be happy. How? You just do. You just decide, "I'm going to be happy." And then it happens. It's really fuggin' weird, but it works.
I say this because I have spending years shaking this off. This is my mid-life crisis (that I decided had to start when I turned 40 :P ) What you say about success and happiness is relevant - even if "success" is an implicit measurement in places where hustle is a religion, it's best to ignore that stuff and do your thing ... or not. :)
The reality of how little time you have left is a key component, that death is stalking every decision and will likely curtail some plans.
I am a frist generation immigrant in the US. I do ok for myself and am at a vantage point of seeing my peers etc have these issues but I also can't forget that my parents worked much harder for much less, with similar, if not lot more stresses, and I don't think it was even an option for my mom/dad to have the luxury of burnout or on a midlife crisis, even therapy would have been an expense to think twice about. They worked Saturdays as well, had much worse commutes, longer hours and they barely even took vacations etc. as much as me and my peers now. They seem to have done ok for themselves and are reasonably happy, and fine in their older age now.
Are these just problems that one faces only after they have certain comforts in life and can afford to have such problems?
Longer answer: I don't think it's a matter of "affording" or "not affording" per se, but likely depends on your younger-self's expectations and life goals, which are completely free and up to you, you can desire and daydream about whatever you want (though environment and nature of upbringing will certainly have an influence); the "crises" comes from realizing that your expectations and hopes may very well never come to fruition, and whether or not you can deal with that. Maybe they were unrealistic or selfish expectations to begin with and you should let them go, maybe you actually made some serious life mistakes with big costs and have to accept that. Maybe you're still caught up in bad habits and have to reassess your values. Whether or not you can "afford" any of that is also up to you. So it likely depends on what exactly your earlier expectations and life goals were, and how important they were/are to your self-perception.
At some level that's the nature of midlife crisis, identifying what it is you have and what you want, and what you can have.
If you are happy with what you have despite all its costs, it's not really a crisis because you've identified that as such. Even if you're not entirely happy with it but you recognize that it is a net good for you and your family, there's no crisis either. If some things you identified as benefits before are now seen as serious costs — to family, children, morality, or integrity, among other things — but there's an easy and painless way to rectify things, there's also no crisis.
The problem — the crisis — is in recognizing or believing that what you once saw as good things are actually costly, but rectifying it is also fraught with large and probably unknown costs. Maybe you've realized the vocation you're in is actually rife with immorality and corruption, or maybe you've realized that your career has completely cost your children precious, limited time with a good family, or whatever, but you've gotten so far along that the costs and likelihood of changing careers are also great. That's the nature of the crisis.
At some level I think you could say it's a crisis of privilege but I don't think so. I think it comes anytime a set of life choices, over a long time and with many costs, leads one to a position of deep dissatisfaction and realization that there's limited time to right things. My sense is that doesn't really depend on socioeconomic status necessarily.
The other side of it is there are apparently studies showing similar mood changes over the course of life happen in completely other species, so there's an argument that it really has nothing to do with existential or sociological issues at all and is very biological. Based on my own experiences that seems hard to believe though; my guess is midlife crises can happen for many different reasons, and aren't limited to midlife.
Yes. See Maslow’s Hierarchy.
You’re being played.
And what is the life of this world other than play and amusement? (Qur’an, Surah al-Anʿam, 6:32)
And I created not the jinn and mankind except that they should worship Me (Qur'an, Surah al-Dhariyat - Verses 56)
age of forty has special significance in Islam. Regarding aging, Allah says in the Qur’an, “… until, when he reaches maturity and reaches forty years, he says, ’My Lord, enable me to be grateful for Your favor which You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to work righteousness of which You will approve, and make righteous for me my offspring. Indeed, I have repented to You, and indeed, I am of the Muslims’” (Qur’an, 46:15).
I spent a dozen years in San Francisco. I know what serves me there and what doesn't. I know that I find day-to-day life there low-key depressing. I know my friends there have largely moved away and/or moved on to the next chapters of their lives. I know it's way too hard to find a suitable romantic partner there.
Kowtowing to the RTO whims would be relegating myself to another year that's probably a lot like the other ones, with the hard parts getting harder with every year lost.
I don't know where my forever home is, but I owe it to myself to figure it out.
As someone who’s definitely nearing or within a MLC, I’m so fed up with this narrative. It’s pure and simple survival bias. Most of the people doing exactly this end up frustrated, poor, forgotten, incapable of recognizing their own narcissistic personality, and surrounded by scattered/broken/dysfunctional relationship. A very tiny minority, despite all that, gets successful, and yet we build entire narrative universes around these few outliers and their survival bias.