We have all heard about the dreaded mid-life crisis. When you think of a mid-life crisis, you may think of gray haired men driving convertibles and leaving their wives and families for younger, more exciting prospects. However, this is just the cliche, pop-culture depiction that most people associate with a mid-life crisis. In reality, it can manifest itself in many ways and can occur at many ages.
Basically, a mid-life crisis can best be characterized by general depression and an overwhelming feeling of dissatisfaction with the state of you life. You may laugh and think “If that is the definition, then I have been in a mid-life crisis for most of my life”. It’s true, a mid-life crisis is nothing special. It is the same depression and dissatisfaction that we all feel. The only difference is that is has been neatly packaged and marketed by pop-culture to represent some special phase or point in ones life. It’s almost as if people want to keep it that way so they have something to look forward to – a special reserved time slot to abandon responsibility and protest the lives they have made.
So, let’s throw away the mid-life crisis term and just talk about what is real – life sucks and it wears you down. Let me restate that – life can suck if you make the wrong decisions. Actually, life can suck even if you make all the right decisions. The point is, people find themselves in this terminal state of dissatisfaction for a few primary reasons:
- Fear of taking chances - The system is designed to discourage you from taking chances. From the time we are born we are taught to be risk-adverse. The safe option may make us feel warm and comfortable, but it may also lead to a life of terminal boredom and regret. If you read the biographies of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, or a million other super successful people, you will discover that their success and ultra satisfying lives owe nothing to the safe option. Risk and taking chances are always the underlying theme. That being said, risk is best in small, calculated doses.
- Complacency – Number two in the list, but maybe it should be number one. How many people do you know who want more out of life? They want a better job, a more satisfying relationship, or more adventure. Whatever the desire, most people just accept what life gives them and grow used to being dissatisfied. A lot of people say that this is the only way to make it through the daily grind – just accept it all and you will be happier on a day-today basis. This may be true, but in the long run, the cumulative effect of these weeks, months, and years of complacency can add up to the explosion of dissatisfaction we know as the mid-life crisis.
- Following the rules – Another thing we are taught from childhood. Color in-between the lines, go to school, get a good job in corporate America, get married, have kids, and so on. When playing Scrabble the rules are definitive. In life, there are a lot more shades of gray. Sometime the rules serve as the guide rails that lead us into a pit of unhappy days and disastrous lives. Remember when you were a kid? At that point in your life you had more rules than at any other time. Your actions were restricted, you could not do what you wanted when you wanted, but your mind was still free. More free than it probably is today. At that point your mind was unhindered – ready to explore and discover what was truly amazing. However, as the years go on, adults and our society slowly strip away ones dreams and transform you into a good, sociably compliant bot. Now as adults, we look back on our childhood dreams as the silly notions of an inexperienced and unaware soul. In reality though, it was at that point when your thoughts were most acute. The mind of a child is clean and emotions are in their purest form. If we were all what we wanted to be when we grow up, there would be way too many firemen, but the world would be a happier place.
Stay tuned for the continuation of this article where we will detail the moves you can make today to avoid the mid-life slump.
