I turn 39 in a week, and I might be hitting something like a mid-life crisis. Though I'm successful by many metrics, there's so much I wanted to do by this point in my life that I've been feeling like a failure. For instance, there's been this side project that I first got the idea for in 2014 and have been actively working on since 2017, and I still haven't released it yet because I keep going back to the drawing board and overthinking everything. I'm terrified that my body is slowing down and I won't have the energy to see it through.
Welcome to the club!
A lot of all this comes from the highly unrealistic expectations that we set for ourselves that make us incapable of appreciating how much we actually achieved and how much we already got.
Now, knowing that’s the source of the discomfort is great. Actually being able to live with it and let it go it’s totally a different story.
A lot of us at this age were brought up to believe we could be anything, do anything, achieve anything. The subtext of “pick one or two things and you may achieve modest success” was perhaps not sufficiently emphasised.
Add to this that the definition of “do well” has morphed from “be one of the better accomplished kids in your school” to be more like “be in the top 1% nationally” (or even globally) and there’s a serious impedance mismatch there.
