Anatomy of a mid-life crisis

Well, this is my first post. It’s another attempt to regularly write things for publication. I completely buy into the idea that doing so will help me think clearer thoughts and write more elegant lines. I have been believing this for a long time now. And yet, I never actually managed to start doing it. Not really, anyway. Or if, then not for very long. And on a site the layout of which I didn’t like. And then what would happen is that I’d spend time improving the layout until I’d get so exhausted that I needed to stop, and would abandon the project altogether.

Feeling the urge to write this morning, I again started thinking about setting a new blog first. Having learned at least something from my past experienced I realised that if I did – however quick I thought it would be this time – it would again take all my energy out of me and I’d end up either with a blog I liked but no more energy left to populate it, or – worse – with a blog I didn’t like and no content.

So, here we go, just writing a post without a blog to host it for now.

Within the course of a few days, maybe couple weeks, maybe a month, I’ve found myself solidly in a new period of my life. After years of intense striving, driven by innate curiosity and a love of learning, but also – less healthily – a strong sense of being behind, having and wanting to catch up, not being good enough, not knowing enough, not being competent enough, not earning enough, and just generally not having arrived yet in the place in life I expected myself to be at this stage, I find myself in a state of exhaustion. The only reason I did stop striving, I think, is because my body kept sending increasingly clear signals that I had to. That if I didn’t, I’d fall into a hole. I’d crash. These signals have crept up occasionally over the past months. Manifesting themselves just like the symptoms of overtraining: a lack of motivation, fatigue, lack of energy, and increasingly just an inability to study and work altogether, certainly in a deep and focused way. I kept ignoring it and kept hoping that it would go away, that all I needed was a long weekend without studying, a couple Sundays without work. Maybe a week off. But it turned out to not be enough. What I needed was a real break.

I’m grateful I came to see it early enough to avoid a full burnout. Or so I hope, anyway. Up until a few week weeks ago, I’d usually wake naturally and get up between 4 and 5am, go for a walk, meditate, wake and cuddle my wife, and then begin my 2-hour pre-work study session before starting work around 8am, work until about 4 or 5 pm, head to the gym, have supper with my wife at 7 and go to bed around 8.30. Now, I fall back asleep when I wake around 5am and usually get up around 7am, then either walk to a local coffee shop to read or the nearby gym for a light cardio session for about an hour, go home for breakfast, and start work around 9am.

It makes a world of difference. For one thing, I can really feel that the extra sleep does me good. But it’s really the absence of the sense that I must study to get better at my job at an above-normal rate that leads to a sense of relief. I still feel like I’m in a transition period – like just having stopped a hard HIIT session and catching my breath again. But already I can feel my whole system relax. I don’t quite know how long it will take to readjust and recover. To get to a place that feels neutral and normal. But the promise to myself is that I’ll allow myself as much time as is needed.

The main rule in the meantime is to force myself to not study outside of my work hours. This is not as easy as it sounds. I’ve been studying 6 days a week for so long now that doing so is just a habit. There are a number of impulses driving it: there are a lot of things I genuinely want to understand better because I find them satisfying and amazing – this includes lots of fundamental and advanced stats as well as programming –, but then there is this strong sense that I need to do this to have a bigger impact at work, get better at my job, get closer to the level of competence I wish I had, and simply a lack of ideas for what else to do during that time. I mean, after years of spending a lot of my free time studying, not studying creates quite the hole.

I think these are the three main drivers: genuine interest, fear of not being good enough, and a lack of alternative ideas.

The fear of not being good enough is ultimately driven, I think, by a sense that I’m not what I could be at this point and what I expected to be. There is what I think of as a global and local aspect to this. Globally, it’s the sense that if I had discovered earlier in my life that I loved intellectual pursuits, and had someone in my life that could lead the way and point me in the right direction, I might have ended up at university earlier in my life. While true, there are so many reasons for which what was couldn’t have been otherwise, that I don’t feel any kind of regret about my earlier life. While it’s possible that a motivating teacher or role model could have put me onto a different path, I’m not actually sure where that’s even true. I was so absorbed in sports, first football and then karate, that I don’t think I’d have been very open to it at this stage. Also, I did, in the past, have some regrets about all this and think I just got over it.

What’s still a bit harder to accept is the local aspect: the sense that had all my hard work since I started university been directed into a single direction – or at least a few complementary directions like statistics and programming – I’d by now have achieved a level of competence that would put me somewhere near the top of my profession. With that level of competence, the thinking goes, would not only come a satisfying sense of mastery, but also a position of responsibility and with high impact in a company of my own choosing and hence one working on a cause I believe in, working with colleagues I truly admire, can learn from, and who can be friends, and a salary that would allow me and M not having to worry about money. This is basically what I imagined my life to be like at this stage. The deal was this: I have to work hard to excel at work, but I will work hard and hence will excel and thrive.

Something similar was true for training: I’ve now been lifting weights with the primary goal of getting stronger and bigger since I stopped training for karate competitions when I was 22, which means I’ve been doing it for 15 years. Just like I know that 15 years of dedicated studying and hard work in one field of work could have propelled me to the top by now, so I know that coupling all my efforts in dieting and training with the right training programme could have helped me build the body I always dreamed of.

And here we come to the essence of this new phase in my life: the realisation that now, at the age of 37, married, about to have my first child, just having furnished my first flat together with M, I am neither at the stage in my career nor have the body I feel I deserve given all my efforts.

Realising this feels profound. Because up to this point, for the past few years, I’ve been struggling to attain both a level of professional competence and status and the body I always wanted. Doing so has helped me become both more competent and stronger. But the constant inner comparison to ideals that seemed out of reach was draining and a source of constant latent (and often overt) unhappiness. My dominant mindset was that I need to get where I want to get as fast as possible, and it turned into a marathon-length sprint. Realising that I have fallen short finally allows me to pause and catch a breath. Looking at reality clearly makes me sad; I’m ambitious, have worked hard for a long time, and yet have not achieved what I wanted. It’s sobering. I strove to be extraordinary: a man of exceptional character and wisdom, who’s exceptionally successful professionally and has a body that could land him a spot on the cover of a fitness magazine. Instead, I’ve ended up being pretty ordinary: I’m a good guy who’s well read, has a good job, and is pretty fit. I’m not well known for anything by anyone, I don’t stand out in a crowd.

Acknowledging all of that and truly letting it sink in is painful. It really is. I’ve been getting up as early as 4am and usually before 6am for many years now, have hours of any work day to extra studying, have followed a restrictive diet, and trained consistently and intensely. I’ve been doing all of this for about 15 years now. And while it got me far and helped me create a wonderful life in many ways, it didn’t get me what I wanted.

Acknowledging all of this and finally taking a break from striving is also a relief, however. My entire system feels like it can finally relax and start recovery after years of hard effort that was not sustainable – despite my telling myself otherwise at times. It helps my body and mind to recover, and it provides the headspace to reconsider my goal-driven and ambitious approach to life and ask myself some deep questions.

What is the value of setting ambitious goals for myself? What is it that I truly value in my life and why? What do I want my life to have been like when its over? What do I want to feel like day-today as I’m living it?