261–270 of 461 posts
Becoming a novelist is as cliche as trading in your car and wife for newer models. But as someone whose been dead-broke before, I'd pick bitter any say.
That sounds like a good mantra to motivate oneself.
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You are saying it like divorce is a bad thing.
IRL, divorce is devastating for everyone involved, especially the children. I believe therapists diagnose divorce and breakups in general so often because it eases their conscience a bit. You can see this same reasoning with abortion and such topics. A divorced therapist is like a dentist with bad teeth or a tee-totaling drug-dealer. Can't trust any of 'em.
(BTW, what is bad about teetotaling for a drug dealer? "Don't get high on your own supply" has allegedly been a credo for them since basically forever)
I hope I don’t have a midlife crisis. I would view that as somewhat of a failure. I had like 40+ years to figure out what I wanted my life to be like. Feeling the need to change course after so much time would be a little lame.
Having helped a couple of people going through that sort of phase, a pretty useful tool I found was to have them think about how much the world has changed in even just 20 years. So, given that, it isn't really that big of a deal that at 40 you might want to do something completely different from when you were 20, simply because your current life is almost entirely different to what it was 20 years ago.
We're long past the times when several generations of people would live and die doing the same thing without seeing any meaningful change in lifestyle and so it isn't that big of a deal if that also reflects in our own life choices.
This unfortunately falls into the same category in my mind as most advice: "you should ... X." My mind is sick of hearing the things I should do. I know I should be better and fitter and less wasteful but... I'm tired.
Don't. People and peers on the internet are selling the bullshit idea that they're doing a lot and you're just lazying around. It's fake news. They're selling you a mirage, not by malice, but because everyone else is doing it. You keep hearing of the Ken Thompsons and Oppenheimers and you barely have the mental fortitude to plumb 2 JS libraries in a work day. Stop pursuing the things you should do. Do less. Slave awa…
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I think it's again a modern secular assumption that your kids move out and there's some sort of deep emptiness. The traditional expectation is that your kids move out to be married and bless you with grandchildren, not to abandon you to rot.
I don't see how the kids "blessing" their parents with grandchildren matters much. My parents had a hard time adapting after I, as the youngest, also moved out and finally started being able to support myself, even though they had grandchildren from my eldest sibling to think about. In the end, for them the point still stands that their own kids are adults now, and while grandchildren are fun to take care of, they ar…
"Thinking about" probably won't do them much good. Seeing them on a regular basis, on the other hand, has great effects on many grandparents. Obviously, this requires that children don't move far away from parents, but many family-oriented parents stay close.
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Middle age is generally not defined as 50% of your life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_age
Speaking as a guy in his mid 30s referring to that article, yeah I'm middle aged. Physical? I can feel and am acutely aware I just can't do what I could 20 or even 10 years ago. No more all-nighters for me, my body just can't take it. No more high speed action games for me, my body just can't respond fast enough. Mental? My memory is noticably declining, and my ability to learn new things is significantly deteriorate…
I can no longer just learn the syntax for how the pubsub works, I have to stop and think how to build an architecture around it, how to create an abstraction for my use case, can it be integrated with Postgres triggers etc.
This unfortunately falls into the same category in my mind as most advice: "you should ... X." My mind is sick of hearing the things I should do. I know I should be better and fitter and less wasteful but... I'm tired.
Don't. People and peers on the internet are selling the bullshit idea that they're doing a lot and you're just lazying around. It's fake news. They're selling you a mirage, not by malice, but because everyone else is doing it. You keep hearing of the Ken Thompsons and Oppenheimers and you barely have the mental fortitude to plumb 2 JS libraries in a work day. Stop pursuing the things you should do. Do less. Slave awa…
I'm 42, don't have to work any more really and haven't been for some time now, and the innate creativity is not calling me at all. Perhaps I was always a bit dull, lol.
Anyway, people should be seriously prepared for the possibility that their dreams of pursuing projects "once have the time" were just an escape fantasy to help cope with suckiness of work. Lots of people who retire early return back to their previous line of work, because they can't really find meaning in anything, and structured and organized work within some company at least gives a little bit of it. The lesson from that is - don't burn your bridges.
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> 36 year old middle aged man You're not quite middle aged yet :). And 33 is way too early for a midlife crisis, surely? Maybe it's just garden variety burnout and/or depression?
I guess it depends on how people see their mortality. I know people who thought they'd die for sure before they hit 30. For myself 30s was only when the life started to happen.