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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Good advice, from a 36 year old middle aged man 3 years into a midlife crisis after a massive work-related burnout event.

A couple more pieces of advice from me:

* A midlife crisis has its own glacial pace. Be prepared to be upside down for a long time.

* Be prepared not to be the same person you were before. Be prepared to learn there is no turning back.

* If you're in a midlife crisis, your previous life was simply not good enough and reality has caught up to you. Go through the process, and you'll become a better person.

* Outsource your mental health during this phase to professionals. Not even your spouse might be able to accept what comes out of this reconfiguration of yours. You will probably need the help of someone that is not invested in your previous existence to hold you in this trying time.

3 years in, it's getting better, I miss part of my previous life, but I know who I am now, how I operate, and I won't compromise to fit someone else's mould anymore. In your childhood you had no say in how you were grown and pieced together. You had to carry whatever they had built for you until you broke down. Now is your chance to start over and do a better job at it.

Good luck!

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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?

It was being a little cheeky. And if a massive burnout whose first month was having daily panic attacks and 3 years to recover is garden variety, I am afraid to know what a serious one entails ;)

Depression was part of the baggage I was carrying around all my life. It's hard to say, given the state of things, but perhaps depression is one thing I was lucky to shed during this phase.

What exactly is a panic attack? Like your just watching TV and suddenly convinced you'll die? Or was it like at work, something woukd happen and you freak out?

I'll attempt an answer: it's your flight-or-flight response kicking in, without any obvious reason for it to do so. Oxygen intake goes up, muscles tense up, adrenaline production kicks in, but there's nothing for your body to "spend" these physiological changes on (like running for your life), so it just sloshes around causing panic attack symptoms (eg sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea, detachment, fear of dying).

I’ve been walking around thinking I’ve never had a panic attack before, but after reading this I think I’ve actually been having them all my life.

Can even include blackouts, muscle spasms, facial/full body paralysis and tingling/pins and needles, and even seizures....

Ask me how I know... /s

> without any obvious reason for it to do so

without any obvious RATIONAL reason for it to do so – sometimes there is an obvious something, or a sequence of somethings, that lead up to the attack, if you trace it back.

Like with a phobia where the fear not being based on rational reasoning doesn't make the reason for the fear reaction any less real.

It feels like when you're on a plane and it suddenly drops due to turbulence without warning. Only you could be anywhere doing anything.

And it just keeps going.

The good news is that you can learn to cope with and ultimately control and suppress panic attacks, as opposed to turbulence drops on an airplane.

The “I’m going to die” variety of panic attack is only one of many. Other people have them when driving on the highway, just stepping outside their door or meeting too many people at the same time.

There’s generally a more direct trigger than watching TV, but sure, see the wrong show, think the slightly wrong thought, notice that little bulge on the left side of your big toe when you’ve propped them up on the table. Take a few more cycles of things you worry about and you’re well and truly in the middle of a panic attack (which is as described in another comment).

The nasty part is that it’s hard to recognize as such when you’re in the middle of it.

> The nasty part is that it’s hard to recognize as such when you’re in the middle of it.

Oh yes. The first time it happened to me, I asked my wife to drive me to the hospital because I thought I was having a heart attack.

Turns out it wasn’t and the doc reassured me by saying me that half the heart attack suspicions they got in emergencies were in fact panic attacks. So it’s something as common as it is frightening.

It happened a second time but I finally managed to recognize what it was. This one was really random, I was effectively just watching TV ^^

In my twenties I had some years of severe panic attacks. It is funny, it completely dominated my life but I totally forgotten about it. Feel writing it off my chest, maybe it can help somebody.

For me they were hypochondria related. My vision would turn black, my heart would start racing and I got the feeling that ants where crawling from my heart to my arm. At these moments I was convinced I was dying of a heart attack or some artery was torn from my heart. Doctors would find nothing wrong with me, this increased my fear because it meant I couldn't receive any help. They attacks could last for hours, making me unable to sleep and mentally depleting me.

I have actually been close to death a couple of times for real. Once falling through the ice and once having a rare disease. These moments did not feel the same. Actually I was rather calm in these moments.

They attacks made such an impact on me that after a while I started being mortally afraid of having a panic attack. Thinking about it, thinking about my body, feeling the slightest discomfort in my body all these things would trigger another attack. Because of that I lost touch with my body. Worse thing was that I would sometimes wake up in the middle of an attack. This made me afraid of falling asleep. I would walk or cycle at night because I was too afraid to sleep. This made things much worse.

At one point I mentally saw the vicious circle I created for my self. I remember seeing it as one of those smoke circles some people make while smoking. I saw that my focus on this was what kept that circle alive. I saw that I simply had to stop identifying with it, step away from it. Almost magically the attacks have never returned.

Unfortunately it can have the same symptoms as a real heart attack or stroke. Tightness and pain in the chest. A feeling of dizziness. Visual things like not being able to focus or darkness around the edges. For me the most pronounced thing is a crawling sensation under the skin of my head and down my face and the weird feeling that something is sticking out the side of my head. And yea, the intrusive thought that you're going to die, which your brain seems to rationalize with a bunch of stupid reasons.

You can also hyperventilate and not really notice it in your breathing. That makes your hands curl up by themselves and then pins and needles. I only got that once, after that I learnt some breathing exercises.

Panic attack is very hard to describe, but has a unique symptom: the feeling of impending doom.

Everything about you is telling you something is very fucking wrong right now and you're about to perish. Your survival instinct kicks in, fight or flight, heart races, chest feels tight, tunnel vision, you sweat and hyperventilate. You basically are having the sensation of a heart attack or something equally catastrophic, but nothing is actually going on.

It is the most terrifying thing that can happen to you. The first 5 times are hell, then you learn that it tends to be relatively short lived, even if it feels like eternity. What I do is take my phone out and look at the time. Come hell or high water, in 20 minutes I will be fine. Relief often is sudden, but there's times you stay in a state of sub-panic for longer than that.

Truth be told, full blown panic attacks are, even for a very anxious person as I was, rare (and twice so unbearable I called emergency services), the vast majority I call anxiety attacks which are a little milder version of oh fuck I'm going to die now.

I think Panic Attack is overused just to mean someone is uncomfortable with a situation they're in or they're hyperventilating, but I think I had one several years ago but I'm open to being corrected.

I was driving from LA to OC every day which is probably 3+ hours of driving normally working for a client that was an absolute ass. I was working 9 "real" hours a day meaning I didn't even have time to click around on the internet like most jobs I've had since. I was having issues with my prostate hurting in my mid-20s (turns out it was a lifting belt for squats) and I had just moved to a new city.

After 9 months, I was about halfway home where my prostate started hurting again and I just got tunnel vision where I couldn't see ANYTHING. It looked like I could only see a pin of light in each of my eyes and my ears felt like they were under water. I was in the left lane and I couldn't see for shit so I just said a quick prayer and swerved 3 lanes over to the shoulder when I promptly passed out and came to about 5-10 minutes later. I found a new job a month later and said fuck it to driving that much ever again.

I should say that this has only happened once and that I'm very very happy and confident with my life 99% of the time. I've never experienced anything like this before or after and I assume it was a panic attack.

For people who are curious about my prostate problems, I went to several urologists and no one could find anything after several uncomfortable examinations. I decided to try to scientific method and finally removed my lifting belt from use for a few weeks and the pain has been gone since. I figured it was related to my pelvic floor muscles and how they bunched up during a really tight belt/squat session doing pretty heavy weights (365-405) pretty frequently.

I remember that a few years ago, after a few months during which I dabbled in street cocaine (which may not actually have been cocaine for all I know), I started to have occasional panic attacks. I then stopped doing that nasty stuff and would not do it again for many reasons, the danger of fentanyl being one of them, but I kept drinking alcohol regularly and continued to have occasional panic attacks. Even though I continued to drink alcohol, the panic attacks stopped happening when I started to take vitamin supplements daily: B1/thiamine, B complex, magnesium, calcium, niacin, and D. Most likely, panic attacks can also be caused by pure psychological factors, but I just want to leave this information here because it might help someone who is experiencing panic attacks. Of course, I am not a medical professional, so take this information for what it's worth, which might not be much.

I’d say in my social circle most people hit a crisis of self around 30 years old, and most were out of the funk 2-3 years following.

Most are doing well now as we hit 40, curios if is struck sooner for our generation.

> I’d say in my social circle most people hit a crisis of self around 30 years old

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_return

e: downvote all you want but people wouldn't have attempted to find meaning for something like this if they hadn't experienced it first

I think people are down voting because Astrology but yeah it just seems like the coming to terms with reality of adulthood. Midlife crisis is later.

That might be a "quarter-life crisis" not a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises are usually 45-50.

The American Psychological Association considers middle age to begin at 35.

That's great, but the crisis in question happened before 35. The psychology of quarter-life and mid-life crises is also very different.

This is similar to my experience (mid 30s now). I remember sitting at my desk at work, staring out of the window, thinking "wow..so this is it". Would've been about 28-29. I think a combination of things got me to that headspace: end of the education-career pipeline, having bought and settled into a house, and having no kids. I reached a point where I was no longer occupied with achieving "my" goals, and I was left to figure out what my life was going to be. I guess suddenly becoming aware of that responsibility isn't very pleasant; before, I was just on the rails society lays out. School, job, marriage, house, kids, career, etc. Easy.

I'm not much interested in the pedantic debate taking place elsewhere in here about what truly qualifies as an x-life crisis. To me, it's a point in your life where there's some anxiety associated with the direction of your life. I'm more interested in how people came to think about their lives in and after those moments.

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd was 28-29 when “he realised he was no longer preparing for anything in life, but was right in the middle of it” and was inspired to write the song Time for Dark Side of the Moon (the reader is encouraged to listen to it now). Each individual responds to this realization in their own way.

"No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."

Tame Impala's Currents is an album written around the same age with a similar theme in mind, and fittingly part of the new guard of psych rock/psychedelia.

I'm sorry to say I don't think it's struck yet! Not to say what you experienced wasn't real by any means, but I think it just sounds more like a different, but normal thing. The coming to terms with reality after your 20s. I think you'll see another round more characteristic of the mid-life crisis as you all enter your 50s.

If he lives in the US, it's pretty close. The life expectancy of a male in the US is 73.5 years.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/life-expectancy.htm

Middle age is generally not defined as 50% of your life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_age

Yes.

It should perhaps better be described as a mid-life-expectancy crisis.

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 deteriorated from my prime. I find myself clinging to stuff I already knew because they give me some sense of familiarity and safety in an increasingly alien world.

Social? I've stopped bothering to actively make new friends or otherwise socialize, I just can't be bothered anymore with all the hassle that human relations entail.

If I were to describe my current phase in life as the four seasons, I'm in autumn.

I was thinking about the learning part, as I’m investing a lot of part learning the phoenix/elixir ecosystem. On the one hand I feel it may be going slower than before, but I’m not sure if it’s because some mental decline or I just know a lot more now and every time I learn some new mechanism I run through a bunch of scenarios in my head from previous experience and have to integrate it with existing knowledge to make it stick.

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 hits hard. In my 20s I was athletic, smart, and ran like a gazelle. Between my general inactivity and irregular heartbeat in my late 30s, I could probably run a hundred yards before collapsing. It's sad, because I often have dreams of running fast without getting winded, to this day.

I get frustrated nearly daily at my mental decline. I was always a math wiz who could basically do up to precalc in my head. Today, I have trouble carrying numbers doing basic long multiplication. Worse, I have trouble finding the words I'm looking for when writing.

Autumn feels optimistic. I don't know what the future holds, and maybe I'm being dramatic, but it feels like Winter. I feel like my body and mind greatly betrayed me in my 30s.

I’m right there with you. I feel a bit paranoid because I can feel the decline in real time. It’s just little things, but they add up. The advice is, “this is just getting older.” Perhaps true, but I don’t like it.

> The life expectancy of a male in the US is 73.5 years.

But 40 is when the warranty expires.

I'm not the person you're responding to, but both my parents passed away in their mid-50s, and after my startup failed at 35 I hit something like a midlife crisis.

If you believe mid 30s is middle-aged, then it becomes middle-aged - and unfortunately, for some that might be true.

Fortunately for me, this crisis led to a serious investment in my health and fitness, and though I obviously cannot predict my future, I'm far healthier now than anytime in my adult life. I fully agree with the sentiment to not waste a midlife crisis.

I’m 35 and I feel like I’m just getting properly started.

"Categorical age", if you'll allow me to coin a term for this phenomenon (infancy, childhood, adolescence, middle age, ... - your conception may vary) is more or less a qualification of our personal relationship to time and mortality. So while we might have broad consensus that a 5 year old is a child and a 70 year old is a senior, it's not determined by numerical age. Just a near 1 correlation.

After all, we never know our numerical middle age except in retrospect.

The term is not used so literally.

Yeah, I'm 49 and wondering if I shouldn't have a midlife crisis or something. Although reading the article, is it possible I had mine 12 years ago when I quit employment and became a freelancer? I've been a lot happier since, but it's really still the same career.

I've always wanted to create games, though. Whether computer, board or RPG. Should I quit my current freelancing and start doing that then?

I'm 43 now and became a freelancer at 38.

I always wanted to write sophisticated game books (think choose-your-own-adventure, but with real impact of your choices for a real story). I wrote a small one to learn about how I feel in the process.

And that would be my suggestion. Try the process for some time. Something between one month and half a year. See if you like it, if you get into it, if feel like you want to continue this. The question to answer is: does the daily process of creating games makes you happy and feels right?

Someone has no idea about the actual average lifespan of men....

> 33 is way too early for a midlife crisis, surely?

I don't think he knows about second midlife crisis, Pippin.

Where's that Simpsons meme when you need it?

"This midlife crisis is the worst!"

"Now now...this midlife crisis is the worst you've had, so far!"

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.

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?

Probably. Note: this is not a rational belief, just an emotion. I feel that for me, my useful lifespan ends at around 60, meaning I have less than half of that to look forward to (and all of that on a downward quality slope). Objectively, I understand that there are important roles for senior citizens, and I do enjoy the company and services provided by many of such people. Just that trying to imagine myself getting to that age fills me with despair.

No age is too early for a crisis. One model I have heard is that we need to reinvent ourselves every 7 to 10 years. I had one crisis of reinvention at 30. Now at 38 I am in another one.

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.

A midlife crisis implies, imo, that you haven’t reached the things you wanted to and are running out of time. Not that you aren’t moving forward per se.

yes, but practically speaking (and also from painful personal experience) this just seems like semantics. it boils down to the same issues. it's just that the person connects those feelings with age. but then again - no depressed person ever felt young - not even those who are objectively young. even at 20 i felt old. i knew i wasn't old in a general sense but i felt old relative to what ever i thought should have been at that age. same with midlife crisis. luckily i discovered that pattern and i'm getting better at dealing with it.

Burnout and depression can be connected to, but aren't the same thing as a mid-life crisis.

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.

Yep. Sounds like this was just a burnout :) The real midlife crisis will happen later :)

Wow, 3 years, that's a long way. Congratz on making it this far and good luck on the road still ahead.

39yo here, just stopped shy of a full burn-out & after a month with a lot of confusion, crying and panic decided to hand in my notice. That helped a lot, but I'm not really well yet ~3 months in. Mainly sleep is an issue. My body seems to enjoy triggering tiny panic attacks when I'm falling asleep, which makes falling a sleep complicated >_<

I've been struggeling with sleep and anger issues for many years now, but it had come to a point where I did not want to accept being angry anymore. Anger turned into crying and despair, but that is frankly progress. I got some help, it was not great, but it helped me understand a lot about myself. In the end, this gave me the courage to quit and think about life in a different way.

Now I just have to figure out where to go from here. Stick with what I know and do it better or do something different entirely. Not a clue how to figure that one out yet.

Anyway, thank you for sharing. It's good hearing from other people that went through similar things.

I'm 41 and in the same place. It's been 2 months since I quit and frankly the decision was a bit of relief. Thanks for sharing and hang in there.

38 yo male now starting to think I don’t know what a midlife crisis is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlife_crisis

"Studies indicate that some cultures may be more sensitive to this phenomenon than others; one study found that there is little evidence that people undergo midlife crises in Japanese and Indian cultures, raising the question of whether a mid-life crisis is mainly a cultural construct."

I thought this was interesting.

Japanese salarymen often undergo a crisis when they retire and suddenly find themselves with tons of time and nothing to do. Not exactly midlife, but it's of a similar vein.

That’s when they go into politics.

You might like this article about penis stealing witches:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geogra...

And this one:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like...

A midlife crisis is quitting your desk job to sell ice creams on the beach in the Caribbean. Getting to the point of doing it, not just thinking about it.

I thought it is dumping wife of 20 years for silly blonde and driving red convertible one bought with use of shark loan because “you need to have it because you always wanted it” even if you couldn’t afford it.

It's the same thing. But it doesn't have to be as destructive or ultimately short-lived as that. It might an opportunity to radically change some things you have taken for granted your entire life.

IMO the term is so diluted as to be meaningless.

Burnout isn't a mid-life crisis.

Changing your career doesn't necessarily mean you're having a mid-life crisis.

Changing your personal circumstances doesn't necessarily imply a midlife crisis.

Every definition I know of includes a sense of existential angst, a feeling of regret, of lost potential, of questioning identity, of a fear of mortality.

But simply realizing you're unhappy in your life or circumstances and want to change them isn't itself indicative of a mid-life crisis by any meaningful definition I'm aware of.

Yeah I think everything in your comment is pretty understandable and I probably wouldn’t trust someone who claims to have not experienced nearly all of those feelings to some extent.

Hadn’t heard that list of “symptoms” before but… I guess that means I am in a midlife crisis at 39.

I think it’s when those feelings completely break you that you’re in the crisis stage.

The lost potential is a key one I have seen. The idea that your youth is in the rear view mirror and that you didn't do all the things you thought you would do.

I was in my 40s and starting thinking more in terms of how much time I had left rather than what I wanted to do at some unspecified "later". I also had young kids and a depressed jobless wife, so I wasn't completely free to do what I wanted and felt trapped. Then my father died pretty young, from a cruel cancer, and that amplified it all.

> The idea that your youth is in the rear view mirror and that you didn't do all the things you thought you would do.

Youth is wasted on the young. It’s such a shame.

> Every definition I know of includes a sense of existential angst, a feeling of regret, of lost potential, of questioning identity, of a fear of mortality.

Oh, then that one started for me around 30. I've successfully managed to bottle up those thoughts for now, which is probably why I'm facing a mother of all burnouts right now.

It means you'll never be 18 or 23 or 30 or 35 again. The youth that you took for granted is gone forever and time will march with you until your death. Death may be maybe be 2 years from now or 40 years from now, fully knowing that you body will start failing. Even if you have 40 years, not all of them will be good years, especially the last ones. Once you are gone, that's it, all the time you spent improving yourself and building wealth will be for naught, at least for you.

So, not for naught? Seriously, we’re social creatures that live for others. You can have 40 good years serving the next generation, building wealth for them and sharing in their joys.

I’m sensing this strange notion in older generations where they absolutely refuse to let go and insist on keeping their youth and the spotlight to no or some avail. Technology is getting better and making people hold on for longer but I think it leads to your kind of statement that life ain’t that great unless we’re out there crushing it all the time.

I guess it fits nicely with the declining notion that having children isn’t worth it either.

>that life ain’t that great unless we’re out there crushing it all the time.

Where in the hell did you get that from? I wish I hadn't wasted 20+ years of my youth working so hard.

>I guess it fits nicely with the declining notion that having children isn’t worth it either.

Dunno where you got that from either. My kids are the best thing that happened to me. Are you projecting or something?

Seriously?

> all the time you spent improving yourself and building wealth will be for naught, at least for you

There’s meaning in that work if you accept that it’ll have lasting effects beyond you.

> It means you'll never be 18 or 23 or 30 or 35 again. The youth that you took for granted is gone forever and time will march with you until your death

Your youth was taken for granted if you don’t think it added up to you being able to provide for a family.

I’m just trying to find meaning in the mundane, not trying to preach. This view that being alive and healthy and able to raise a family isn’t enough is always disheartening.

Anyways, that’s my interpretatio. Or projection.

>There’s meaning in that work if you accept that it’ll have lasting effects beyond you.

Read what I said, "it will all be for naught, at least for you." Meaning all that time spent learning things and gaining knowledge and wealth won't matter for you because you'll be 6 feet under. It's along the lines of Jobs' quote, "you'll be the richest man in the cemetery." He was 56 when he died, how many years until you are 56? Probably not as many as you'd like.

>I’m just trying to find meaning in the mundane, not trying to preach. This view that being alive and healthy and able to raise a family isn’t enough is always disheartening.

I dunno where you got that from what I said. It's enough, it's great, it will be all over real soon because of the march of time. It's all for naught because we'll be worm food.

You completely misinterpreted what I said, you pretty much came up with the opposite.

Funnily enough this is a sentiment Ted Kaczynski pushed in his manifesto. That technology has replaced the drive for power in individuals to support themselves, because it has become so easy, so people try to find other means to fill the power principal. This can be social causes or political ones, or in your example, trying to hold onto youth for as long as possible. To be in denial of the reality of themselves.

There is some truth to it but I also feel like it is a far too pessimistic take on the issue.

I’ve got parents on both sides that are too busy going on cruises and vacations and only call us for the good times, so yea I can be pessimistic these days.

Friends and siblings though have been coming through like champs during these hard times.

>Seriously, we’re social creatures that live for others. You can have 40 good years serving the next generation, building wealth for them and sharing in their joys.

Speak for yourself; I sincerely have no interest in deliberately serving humanity. We're by far the dumbest and most conceited lifeform on this planet, and even ignoring that I find serious interactions with humans to be an utter hellscape of drama and problems I can and will do without.

When I'm gone, that's it. My blood ends with me. I refuse to leave a legacy behind. If there's anything left, whoever is there to witness can pick it all apart as they please. I don't care because I'm dead, after all.

> building wealth for them

Maybe not the best idea if you mean material wealth beyond staving off being poor. I know its all good intentions, but it more often ends up in spoiled entitled brats than it doesn't. People simply need a bit of struggle to stay humble and nice human beings, not too much but sweeping the road ahead of kids too well is one of the worst things a parent can do.

But its true this is US forum, so in that case one needs to build massive wealth just to send kids to university or have safety net for any kind of bigger health issues in family.

I agree though with kids being great for such a crisis, they give more purpose in life than anything else, give depth to otherwise often rather shallow life. Its like a computer game, playing on easiest difficulty (no kids) will make you progress faster and easier, but that doesn't translate well into overall worthiness of experience. Plus seeing your little ones play, having fun at 100% or grokking new stuff is such a nice heartwarming experience that it could melt a glacier or two, good luck getting such a kick elsewhere (and I do quite a bit of extreme sports so can compare a bit).

It's what people say they suffer when they made bad decisions for decades and figured out they missed the good part(s), happens a lot to people who sacrifice everything to climb the corporate ladder or focus too much on work or other artificial goals. Not everyone goes through it

How close to Breaking Bad has it gotten?

On a scale from Walter White to Willy Wonka, how WW are you?

Less like Breaking Bad and more that like meme of Pablo Escobar waiting in a melancholic mood.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pablo-escobar-waiting

I have had a couple sabbaticals, and that is me around day 12.

Pryce and his new yellow Hummer

Happiness was painting flames on my family saloon car all along.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Literally as if I'm reading about my own life. Being the same age doesn't help :) Well put.

May I ask for further advice on your fourth bullet point about “outsourcing your mental health”? I understand you might need to shop around like you maybe go to a cognitive-behavioral therapist, or psychoanalyst, or buy a Transcendental Meditation (TM) course.

>or buy a Transcendental Meditation (TM) course.

That's a cult, so maybe some other kind.

Talk therapy with a psychotherapist. The ones that listen and don't do much talking, not the ones that prescribe (which are called psychiatrists).

If all else fails, M-x doctor. It's a thing.

Thank you so much for sharing. This makes a lot of sense right now.

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