Where Is Next From Here in Life Is A Circle, Or A Torus

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there was a man who did the best he could to keep up with life and then one day just… broke.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that long ago. Certainly not that far away; didn’t even leave the planet. But the feeling broken part is definitely true.

I never really felt “old” as I passed my twenties and moved deeper into my thirties. College never seemed all that far away, even as years moved. Some part of me still felt “new” to my job despite the years passing. I’d hear people complain of old people things, like their knee hurting them or needing to take antacids before eating anything more than a pack of crackers, but would just shrug as I’ve never really needed anything before and still felt pretty good.

But then one day I just felt done. Not done with life; actually, the opposite, really. Suddenly I was feeling “off” and seeing a doctor, realized I had a bit of a health scare. Not really a huge one, thankfully easily treatable especially with lifestyle changes, but enough of a sense of mortality crept in, finally evicting the last vestiges of the teenage assumption of immortality. And when that feeling really hits you, when you realize just how much time has crept by and how what remains dwindles, it really jolts you into reality and makes you both appreciate and ignore. Suddenly, maybe I don’t have time to do everything; what gets prioritized, and what gets dropped?

What does my career mean? Is my job even useful to anyone, really? Doing technical work was fulfilling to my curiosity, seemed important enough, and I only ever got higher ratings from managers. So why was it that it increasingly felt empty? Why was it that when I got positive feedback I actually felt worse? I can understand it somewhat. There’s some level of guilt at play here. If folks feel I am doing good work, and I am good at doing the work, then maybe I’m broken to be sitting here wondering about it. But increasingly the work feels pointless in a world of so many unknowns, climate change and so much more. Maybe with my time left, especially while in relatively good health, I should be doing something else.

Maybe we all should be.

I don’t think I’m alone. David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs I think made it very clear most people feel that way. Our jobs are mostly “bullshit”. Adult daycare, in a sense, perpetuated by capitalism focused on extracting profits out of us so the wealthy never have to work, and keeping us under control by telling us we’re “bad” if we’re not constantly working and keeping busy like good little puritan workers.

Guilt then hits me about how stuck most of us feel. If anything, I am lucky enough to be in a situation most people aren’t.

I quit my job with no backup plan. Just told them I’m not coming back to the office. Don’t care anymore. I’m over it. I have some funds to get through. I’m fairly confident with my skills I could find another job. But do I even want to? Not really. Not unless I really felt the job was doing good for me, my family, the community. If not? Then I am really struggling to find a reason to care.

To be clear, I’m also not sitting around at home “doing nothing”. I’m cooking healthier meals for myself for the first time in ages; tofu is both nutritious and far cheaper for a budget, turns out. I’m exercising more. I’m actually starting to feel some level of creative spark come back for the first time in years. When I was a teenager, I had ideas. Not claiming particularly earth-shattering ideas; I’m sure we all have ideas. What I mean is that I had curiosity, creativity, a drive to try new things, learn new things, and could imagine myself doing things I had never done before. At some point, things started to feel hopeless; what I had now was probably the best it would ever be. Where did the hope go? The creativity? Do jobs just suck that out of us? Maybe jobs are more of a symptom of a larger cultural problem; a culture that demands work without meaning. A death cult that thinks nothing of wasting life away, or people dying early of preventable things like lack of healthy food and exercise, or pandemic viruses.

I yearn for some creativity again. I don’t want to be rich; never did. I wanted to be happy. And despite my best efforts, it went off the rails somewhere. Realizing how much time has gone by and how much I may have left, I hate to let any of the rest of it be squandered. This doesn’t mean I have to stay busy; in fact, making the best use of time probably consists of more leisure, just enjoying people, nature, and even quiet silence with my own thoughts. This post counts. This post feels more important than many things I’ve done the last few years.

I’ve never been very good at making friends either. Always a bit of an introvert and a bit of a loner. Don’t exactly aspire to become an extrovert either. But I do miss having more people around, at least sometimes, to talk to, to check in on, to share a meal with, to laugh with. Nothing fancy. I’ve had friends pass away already, and the rest have drifted apart, as this society seems to like to wall us off from each other around our nuclear families. I don’t want to relive teenage antics, not asking anyone my age to do that. But I do wonder how we’re so exhausted and suddenly feel so weird to just hang out anymore. I don’t care that you’re married or have kids; why can’t we still be friends and hang out? I’m married myself, but don’t feel like she’s always gotta be the third wheel; we can each have our own friends. Hell, I’ve always felt like the idea of choosing one monogamous partner was silly; if I care about more than one person, why isn’t that enough? I mean, there are real time constraints; but at least in terms of love, that’s an infinite resource. Maybe caring about more people is more important, more fun, more of living a life than what we’ve been sold, to stop caring about anyone else in your life to choose just one. I never really did accept it, and nowadays I feel almost hostile about it. I’m a grown adult now, can’t I define together with my partners what that means? Maybe it means platonic friends, maybe it means friends with benefits, maybe it means a naughty hookup, maybe it means a long-term lover; isn’t it up to us to decide, as long as everyone is consensual and everything is in the open? Spouse and I have had many conversations over the last few years where we opened up about this, and we’ve both led to the idea that we care about each other, and yet we’re also interested in meeting new people and seeing if that leads to new relationships of one kind or another. Is it desperation to seek some non-monogamous new situation to hold together a marriage that doesn’t make sense anymore? Or is it perhaps us for the first time trying to really define who we are, on our own terms, outside of social norms and cultural expectations?

Honestly, it’s a bit unclear to me. Health and mortality, anxiety and fear. But also first fleeting glimpses of hope and optimism in a while.

I’m sure it’s some level of depression but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable depression.

The best I can say is: maybe this is what a mid-life crisis actually looks like. The Boomers taught us it’s about buying sports cars and picking up hot young chicks. That’s far more materialistic and superficial than I see it today. Boomers also considered themselves middle age at 50+, when statistically midlife is somewhere around 35-40. It took me some time to accept that, because it feels so weird to not think of myself as “youth” or “recently out of college”, but I am middle-aged now. Half a life lived; half a life to go, if I’m lucky. Which I won’t be if I have to go back to living like I used to. It wasn’t healthy.

I want to live a life worth living. No more pointless labor; no need for material things beyond food, water, shelter, medicine. Okay, maybe some reasonable electronic device with internet access, and things like books. While these are entertainment, they also connect us to other humans, if we allow it and use them properly, so I think they count as basic needs too in a sense. We all need to build more connections. If anything comes to me now, it’s that personal technical accomplishments aren’t very meaningful if it’s not done for community, for people you care about, and people you can celebrate with. And that takes time, a non-renewable resource this society takes for granted, with all of the time we’re expected to waste on bullshit jobs, government bureaucracy, and more.

So I start this “book” to try to chronicle my adventures in mid-life crisis, as I try to rebuild myself and my relationships.

A bit apprehensive, but also a bit excited, for the first time in a very long time. In a way, this crisis makes me feel more like a teenager again, with a sense of mystery. I sorta have an idea of what I need to do, what I want out of life, but it’s different from earlier stages in life. I’m not used to thinking like this, and not entirely sure what to do, and that adds a bit of a thrill, a spark of creativity, a twinge of anticipation. It will be different. I will be different. But who says life has to continue the same forever? That would get boring pretty quickly.