391–400 of 461 posts
Funny how people never seem to ask the folks who turned out penniless whether it was a good strategy
My midlife crisis at 40 was more like a midlife epiphany. We moved from a perfectly good and totally beautiful city (Bath, UK) into the arse end of nowhere in Devon to live in a shack in the woods with no running water and to be near the sea. We went with two small (8 and 5) kids (responding to those here saying it's not possible - it is!) and downsized from a busy city life to a quiet rural one. Our intention was to…
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I have been going through MLC since the beginning of pandemic - and I am trying to figure out what to do as I dont ever want to go back to the type of tech work I was doing (SF currently has the largest commercial real estate vacancy in the country, and I dont see that getting better - and for a decade I built out the tech in many of the large office spaces in SF and for many hospitals...
I cant go back to that.
I want to do something analog/creative and non-tech related.
I grew up in the scenario you describe with your kid - growing up as a latch-key-kid in Lake Tahoe in the 80s was AMAZING - just leaving the front door and walking off into the wilderness and stomping through streams, building tee-pees out of shaking aspens that we would chop down. Build booby traps (terribly)...
Kids need to grow up in the woods - not in the cities.
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Funny. For me it's when it ended. And while expected lifespan is some 80+ these days, I can't help but see expected useful life span to top out at 60-ish...
I expect you will probably redefine useful by the time you hit 60, or is it actually your belief that senior citizens are useless?
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> I'd planned professionally at about 30 and then realized it wasn't what I wanted and had no idea what to do next. Oddly enough, I think this is what keeps me from being ambitious in a professional sense. I just feel like, based on everything I read, hear, and see, that we are all just donkeys chasing the metaphorical carrot tied to a stick. I swear, it's like the hedonistic treadmill is turned up a few notches too…
I "made it" (financially set for life) in the past two years after selling my company at 33. I was chasing something like it since I was maybe 15, tired of having grown up poor and wanting better for my family and myself. I'm still not happy but at least I know I'd rather have money and be sad than also being worried about money on top of that. I definitely need to get back some semblance of meaning in my life, but a…
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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…
> 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. "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, bu…
> Penniless certainly beats bitter. That sounds like a good mantra to motivate oneself.
My midlife crisis at 40 was more like a midlife epiphany. We moved from a perfectly good and totally beautiful city (Bath, UK) into the arse end of nowhere in Devon to live in a shack in the woods with no running water and to be near the sea. We went with two small (8 and 5) kids (responding to those here saying it's not possible - it is!) and downsized from a busy city life to a quiet rural one. Our intention was to…
It's at the same time too small to be interesting (you need to drive an hour to get to Bristol), but too big for having those advantages you mention for Nothing-by-the-Sea.
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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?
isn't a midlife crisis is just a label for burnout / depression at the end of the day? everybody who is depressed feels like life is stuck and going nowhere.
I would distinguish a mid-life crisis (or in the positive case, mid-life inspiration) by the realisation that you don't have infinite time left to do everything you dream to do.
In your 20s, it's easy to think that your entire life is still ahead of you, and you will have time for everything. It doesn't matter if you spend a few years in a mediocre relationship, a career that won't work out in the long run, on a terrible startup idea, and so on.
Somewhere in your 30s you realise that you do need to get started on what you really dream to do, or you might never have the chance to. Whether it's a crisis or inspiration depends on how far off your previous life was from it.
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> Which among those are unfulfilling, unenjoyable, unhealthy? I was thinking of the one where we go to jobs for 40+ hours a week that are not fulfilling, we don't get to spend much time with our families, we don't get time to sleep and exercise enough... and we have to do it for essentially our entire lives in the hopes we'll get a few years to be put out to pasture
Sure is pretty unfulfilling to be not independently wealthy
I have found it extremely fulfilling to work for my own needs - building houses, hunting my own food, growing my own vegetables. Doing so takes 20-30 hours per week, and the rest of the time I get to spend with my friends and family.
Obviously it's not for everyone, but I'm saying that people get into a mid life "crisis" because they realize what they've been doing isn't making them happy deep down.
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Yes I wouldn't be surprised at all. It's easy to see how much lower suicide rates are for example in so called "third world" countries that have been war torn, due to no small part by Western colonialism, compared to "advanced first world" countries, which are generally highly secular and have higher standards of living. Believing in God plays a major role in maintaining mental sanity, particularly in the faces of ch…
> It's easy to see how much lower suicide rates are for example in so called "third world" countries How good/trustworthy is the data on suicides in those countries? Highly religious countries are not keen on showing and sharing unfavourable data.
Sources are World Health Organization (Suicide Rates 2019) and World Health Statistics (World Health Organization)