Third-life crisis observations
I’ve been experiencing something like a third-life crisis lately that has me revisiting my goals and values.
I felt a weird kind of embarrassment about this at first.
Shouldn’t I have things figured out by now?
And then I asked a more helpful and fundamental set of questions: where is this ‘should’ coming from? In front of whom exactly am I feeling this embarrassment?
The feeling that I should a specific amount of clarity by some age is an arbitrary one. Progress is valuable but there is no steadfast rule here.
Regarding the question of who I feel embarrassed in front of: social media has a way of creating this asymmetric sense of reality where virtually everyone seems to have their lives better-sorted relative to ours.
So the answer to who is the caricature of a person who has everything figured out made possible by our highly curated news feeds.
This brings me back to a rather comforting and timeless set of conclusions:
- You can’t rush figuring out life.
- Much of the pressure felt during this process is self-imposed.
- Despite how it may seem at times, everyone is figuring out life.
The feeling that something is missing and the subsequent desire to revisit what’s important for your life is not a you-problem, much less a problem.
It’s human.
