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.
The lost potential is a key one I have seen. The idea that your youth is in the rear view mirror and that you didn't do all the things you thought you would do.
I was in my 40s and starting thinking more in terms of how much time I had left rather than what I wanted to do at some unspecified "later". I also had young kids and a depressed jobless wife, so I wasn't completely free to do what I wanted and felt trapped. Then my father died pretty young, from a cruel cancer, and that amplified it all.
Yeah I think everything in your comment is pretty understandable and I probably wouldn’t trust someone who claims to have not experienced nearly all of those feelings to some extent.
> 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.
Oh, then that one started for me around 30. I've successfully managed to bottle up those thoughts for now, which is probably why I'm facing a mother of all burnouts right now.
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.