Tell HN: Turned 44 today and I'm lost

Seems like you need to find some higher meaning in your life.

Ultimately at some point do you live for yourself or do you live for someone/something else?

King Solomon was the richest wisest man alive and yet in Ecclesiastes he seems to despair and says everything is meaningless.

Do you have kids, and if not, have you considered it?

In a similar situation as yours. Not a magic pill, but I found a couple reads very useful:

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, by William B. Irvine

The subtle art of not giving a f*ck, by Mark Manson (the book is a lot more interesting than the title suggests)

Drop the therapy and start lifting weights. I'm not kidding.

If the problem is that you feel things are gonna be a slow decline from here, then fight it. Make that your new goal, even if you know it to be a losing battle. It will focus your mind on demonstrable milestones like hitting new deadlift personal best.

Even if you do something else, at the very least recognize that you've gotten to the point where you don't need to focus on the "work" and "money" part of life; as such treat this as an opportunity to focus on something new. After all, we only have a limited time on this earth to experience the things you want to do. This crisis is your mind's way of saying "I haven't done something I wished I had done." It isn't bad, it's just cognitive dissonance. Find the root of that dissonance and do that which would resolve the problems keeping you from finding fulfillment. This process will be emotionally painful but also cathartic.

Best of luck; know that every man has it within them to pull through this and come out the other end happy and fulfilled. So long as you are willing to question everything about why you are the way you currently are, you will eventually seek out the truths you need to proceed.

Finding something new to strive for is not a bad idea, but it should be orthogonal to your past interests. Something you have to come in at a relative beginner level. Of course you're never going to be as good at it as people who've been doing it for 20 years plus, but that's OK. Think more in terms of self-development rather than winning a competition with others. I've had some limited success in regaining a positive outlook by diving into programming and networking at a similar age over the past few years, coming from a background of academic benchtop lab researcher who never wrote a line of code (maybe an Excel macro) before.

For a chuckle about the inevitable decline as we age, see this quote from Trainspotting:

https://www.quotes.net/mquote/1200371