alt Hacker NewsMan this is for real. I’m 46 and I tell my therapist and my friends that I’m not suicidal but like… can we wrap this shit up already? (A tasteless joke stolen from Tom Segura)
I have been meditating on WHY I feel this way. On paper things are pretty good. I’m married. I have a job that is safe for now. I have kids. Two dogs. A house. Two cars.
But I feel really lonely and unseen and like I am a disappointment to everybody including myself. Like it makes sense I’m unseen because I’m unexceptional.
So I’ve done some things that have helped a little including scheduling lunches with friends and coworkers, more frequent date nights (especially double date nights), working out (setting and achieving even small pointless goals like mile time, distance, weight lifted, etc really helps).
All of that and it feels like I’m bailing water out of a sinking ship. It is barely enough to stay afloat and heaven help me if I skip a day or make a mistake…
It is hard to imagine doing this for another 30 years…
I used to think Soma was one of the more disturbing ideas in Brave New World. These days, I understand the temptation a little better.
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As I’ve reached middle age I’ve realized that controlling my suffering keeps me grounded.
The suffering will come out no matter what everyday for me personally no matter how comfortable the day is.
For years now I force it out with intention every day. I push to a discomfort for an hour or more a day usually doing some aerobic activity.
When my body starts failing as I get older I’ll need to explore other options but this is where I am now.
Surprisingly my brain has been rewired over the years to look forward to this controlled suffering and counterintuitively it’s made all of life much more enjoyable.
It can be scary and hard to approach, but I would think you're not unexceptional or unimportant to your loved ones. Maybe you should talk to your wife about this at some point? It sounds like you're starting on this with date nights too which does seem good.
I hope you can find something that helps you feel like you're not just treading water, though.
You have kids. Got to live on for them.
I see you, and I feel the same way. You have articulated the dread of the monotonous sisyphean slog of being middle-aged.
I don't claim to have all the answers, I still feel that way sometimes, but I've mostly escaped it. What really helped was a lot of Dr. K (Healthy Gamer) videos and introspection. I think I can sum up in a few bullet points what really worked for me, although it was actually a years-long process to go through.
1. Recognizing just how many of my goals and beliefs were "unnatural," in the sense that they never really originated from within me. I never in my whole life cared about money or status, but I had internalized the message that I needed to stand out (which I actually hate to do), have some glorious career, etc etc. It was completely useless pressure because I was running as hard as I could in the completely wrong direction. When I actually pay attention to what I enjoy, it's a very short list: laughing with my wife, tackling small but meaningful challenges (I'm a physically awkward guy but I've felt proud learning some basic home repair skills), reading books, beer, and conversation. That's basically it. So now I make time for those things and tune out the noise of what I'm supposed to want.
2. I treat my job as a source of money and a place to potentially form relationships. I also consider it an opportunity to exercise craft and quality, but I recognize that's not the main reason I'm there—it's not why I was hired and it's not (solely) why I took the job. Giving work a smaller (but still meaningful!) place in my life solved a lot of emotional problems.
3. Recognizing that "permanent happiness" is not a very realistic goal for human beings, and it's easy to make yourself miserable trying to be happy. I referenced this in another HN comment, but I really like the book "The Happiness Trap." It essentially helps you stop trying to run so hard from feeling negative emotions, and being ok with having negative experiences and feelings reduces so much stress.
4. The last one was "productivity," which manifested in many insidious ways. The first was turning all of my free time into a resource for self-improvement. I actually enjoyed this earlier in life when I was building a skill that I found interesting, but it became my goal to just get "better," and that was more useless pressure. I also tried to fit in an impossible amount of tasks, and to come up with systems to manage it all. Accepting my own limitations and the fact that there will always be more than it is possible to do really helped take another big category of stress away. "Four Thousand Weeks" is a great book.
All of this is not to say it's easy, or that I'm 100% fine all the time now. I still get depressed, overwhelmed and so on at times. But overall my quality of life is way up, I enjoy my days a lot of the time, I can function, I feel my life moving in a good direction. Mostly it was a journey of subtraction rather than addition. For a long time I didn't realize how many things I could just put down.
You're married with a family. You're quite fortunate. I hope you learn to appreciate that.