> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ask me how I know... /s
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.
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.
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 ^^
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.
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.
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.
After all, we never know our numerical middle age except in retrospect.
I don't think he knows about second midlife crisis, Pippin.
"This midlife crisis is the worst!"
"Now now...this midlife crisis is the worst you've had, so far!"
Most are doing well now as we hit 40, curios if is struck sooner for our generation.
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.
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.
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 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.
For myself 30s was only when the life started to happen.
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 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?
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 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 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.
It should perhaps better be described as a mid-life-expectancy crisis.
But 40 is when the warranty expires.