A repeating pattern in my life, maybe it's like this for a lot of people who do steady / deliberate self-inquiry, is that every few years I'll start feel like I'm picking up inklings of a new puzzle that I need to be able to put together either to make up lost milestones or at least be a 'more valid' adult. Those disparate pieces will feel like they're coming together, my own subconscious will prod me in ways that suggest that I'm in serious danger if I can't put it together right now even if it's a 5% completed 'inkling' of a puzzle, but I'm stuck admitting that I just don't have enough pieces yet and so I feel compelled to just focus on that feeling hoping it sets up... best words I can come up with for it... a well of gravity that brings other pieces into place and starts giving me the completed critical map or maps that I'm missing (with that said - you can probably see why I like probing these super-abstract terrains with my mind, it's saved my life enough times that I have no reason not to keep working from that place).
I remember the last big map was workplace Machiavellianism, life being 'cheap' not in the legal sense but in very much in the social sense, and that intimation came right before about four steady years of work-related trauma, both vocational and social. Yes, I'd had that experience in my early 20's but somehow I'd been convinced that it was a failure of character, that real adults aren't like that, so it was back through the gaslighting and green paint-slapper until I figured out that no, those are all lies, it's a permanent 'womb to tomb' aspect of being human that probably doesn't stop at any age.
If I'm noticing anything, at least for my experience of it as a guy, is that no one will give you a map. In fact it seems like any wheel you can't invent entirely on your own, or any map that you didn't have the epigenetic instincts toward from the start or parents of the right social class to have prepped you for it deliberately, is a failed litmus test and it just means you're in a lower caste than someone who had that map. This is where my own abilities to pull insight feel like they're pushed to their relative limits - ie. intimations of maps that I need to have my life function better. My best guess is they'll always be ten or fifteen years too late (even if better late than never), simply because this is the consequence of having your start throttled and having to DIY from first principles, but still - IMHO it's not really a choice to not put the effort in and let things go slack. Life is dangerous, and the people too predatory, not to keep moving and not to keep leveling up in whatever ways I can.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin