The demographic and cultural roots of the midlife crisis

Oh yeah, there’s no excuse for that.

> Maybe it does not matter what you achieve, boxes you check, friends or relationships you make along the way. At the end if you are an unhappy person it will not be enough, and if you are naturally content it will all seem ok.

Honestly, COIVD made me confront and explore that very subject incredibly deeply--month's long trains of thought about past experiences--, despite previously being in therapy and generally considering myself quite introspective; it also coincided with learning about how many founders in startups have many commonly found mental health issues (anxiety is almost always there) that lend themselves to enduring startup culture's grind.

That anxiety and restlessness is fuel that gets you to keep pushing to the next milestone when everything else is failing all around and its an incredible source, but the question then becomes: at what cost? For me being unhappy was just the cost of admission to apply my skill set to an immense complex problem; seeing incredibly sad things like currency collapses and Society's wrecked by hyper-inflation fucking sucks but it became my norm, what came after in that journey was an even higher cost altogether.

Failing to address that critical psychological factor is why I think burnout is also so common, you lose sight of the what and why you did something, which often starts as simple as thinking it was simply 'cool and interesting' thing to do with one's limited time and not simply testing how many times can you can endure going beyond your mental and psychological limits before it completely adversely affects your health in a way you that you may never actually recover from.

Which I think is something that is never discussed in founder/startup culture until after someone like Tony Hsieh dies and most just scratch their heads and try to figure out 'why?'

I can't say I'm completely over this either, as I think some ambition still lingers depending on the project ideas, but I've been forced to have to make sure I don't take on 'too much' and solely focus on one path now after being too many burnouts from doing 2-3 at any given time, but also realizing the value of the skill set you've gained as a result of your experiences. And having confidence in that instead of being obsessed with keeping up with every new update and knowing you can bring yourself up to date as needed.

I've also started to take advice from the cautionary tales that I previously ignored or that I simply didn't feel apply to me. Everyone is susceptible to these consequences and the only waste of time is to not at least consider how it could occur to you and try to learn from their mistake(s) to avoid repeating the same.

TBH I think the straw man here is taking that sentence literally, which I can’t imagine any sane person doing. The sentiment itself is idiomatic at this point.

That sounds like a somewhat torturous and navel-gazing way of seeing things, although I have definitely felt a form of what you describe here so please don't take it as a personal attack. In my case, it was correlated with a lack of stimulus and worthwhile things to do in my life at the time.

I don't remember being this misunderstood in recent times, so let me clarify before moving on (and I don't think dismissive comments like the one I am answering to provide much benefit to the conversation).

"You're saying this to indicate that anyone who disagrees with you is an outlier" - Not at all. People who disagree with me have a different view on the issue, different experiences. That there is variation is inevitable in every complex, non-deterministic process (like status-seeking behavior, feeling at ease with oneself). On the contrary, complex, but deterministic (like how many hands one has), have very little variation.

"Giving up on sport/fitness and normalised obesity is a uniquely modern phenomenon, and almost uniquely American." - I disagree. And I am not American, although I have been living in the US for years; I am from one the countries who are considered "healthy". We need to distinguish differences between cohorts (over time) and differences within cohorts over time, but I don't want to make this too long (interesting pub here that supports what I had written: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17461391.2019.1...). Up to the 80s, adult sports for hobby basically did not exist outside of the wealthy and the (yes, in this case) outliers. There are data and anecdotes, let me use the latter here. Among my grandparents' social circle (the vast majority not being among us any more), there is not a single one who did any sports after they were 18-20. So we might not even see a drop in activity, because the activity never started. In my parents', there were a few here and there, some who played tennis (well off people), some runners, some playing golf, the boxer, the judo guy (for women, outside of maybe some dancing, zero sports I remember about). When I started training with weights in the early 90s, gyms for adults were far and few in between. Now, in 2020, there are more gyms and activities for adults than ever and participation in adult sports activities has never been higher (see publication above). Apart from the sick and the exception, when I look at photos of my parents and grandparents' friends (social media, old weddings), they are all fatter than they were in their 20s. In my home country, up to the 70s, calories were simply not abundant and/or not convenient (if you need to start from raw potatoes to have french fries, you are in for the long haul).

"Giving up on sex and competition is not something you can really accuse the Boomer generation of." - I have no idea where this is coming from, surely not from me. But if you ask, across every generation, the distribution of sex-seeking and status-seeking behavior shifts (and it is surprising I have to write this) with the age in the direction of less sex and less competition (related to Boomers, one hypothesis is that the variance increases with age. It might be, it should be tested). Now, if you ask me to make a prediction (which will be proven right or wrong, we'll see), for millenials the shift with age will be slower, more will use TRT, more will have kids later in life, more will feel healthy and competitive (not competitive at the neighborhood meeting) later in life. And yes, we read about the horny boomers, but rest assured they were much more interested in sex when they were in their 20s. Hormones are powerful! Then, if you and your social circles had different experiences and you are all having more sex at 50 than at 20 and you are more competitive in sports now that in high school, I am fine with it.