Is 38/39 a little soon for me to have a midlife crisis?

Post Reply New Topic

I can relate. I went to college and have a job, but I’m still not happy, and I don’t know what I want to do.

It feels less like a mid-life crisis and more like a perpetual adolescence, though.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 16 Feb 2023, 8:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I live with my parents, too.

I don't know if my daughter will ever move out.
In theory it's great.
She's always welcome.
It's just that I didn't live totally alone for one day in my life.

Parents > School with Flatmates > Husband > Kids > Kids > Kids > Kids

I haven't even been totally alone for one day since prior to Covid in 2020.

It would be nice to have a quiet house and alone time. Being a hermit sounds great. It would be the ideal existence to me.

When I had my first stroke at age 46 I had to do a year of hospital rehab. Then when it ended the social worker was trying to force me into social clubs for stroke survivors at a local community hall. We could play cards and chat about strokes twice a week! I could take the wheelchair bus to get there! Wouldn't it be great?! I could even do the swim program and swim with strangers! I could sit on folding chairs and make friends by speaking and smiling!

I stared at her like she had five heads.

She was incredulous that I wanted to stay home by myself doing nothing. She couldn't believe I could fill my time without other people. My daughter was away staying with her bf most of the time. It was a dream come true for me to be home alone 24/7 not working, but the social worker was aghast.

I'd never been so happy to almost die in my life.

I could be home alone for years and not get bored. It’s a pity that I don’t have a rich relative to give me a hefty inheritance like in a Victorian novel.

When I first got shunned, I didn’t mind it, except with just a few people, because I didn’t want to talk to most of them anyway, so their treatment of me kind of backfired.

It was a relief.

Ah, but you never know. Just wait for Volume II.

My ex-wife had her midlife crisis at 40. Within 18 months of her leaving me, three of my good friends were left by their wives too, all of whom were forty-something. So I’d say 39 is perfectly appropriate for a midlife crisis.

I’m not sure if I’d be excited or terrified by the prospect. Volume I had evil villains, fainting, madness, and phantoms, so I doubt I’d get an inheritance without extreme heartache and danger.

You'll find your cousins, be invited to India as a missionary concubine, and marry a blind guy after his house burns down and his secret wife jumps from the balustrade.

It's all good.

Not too bad.

All in all, it seems less sensational than the first volume.

I have reunited with a cousin, but she isn’t learning German which is a pity. I have other cousins who are missionaries, but none of them are likely to propose.

Of course, I have many cousins - even ones I’ve never met, so you never know what the future may bring.

One of my cousins hit on me at my grandmother's funeral.
I hadn't seen him in years and he had no idea who I was.
I'd likely be sitting pretty right now if I'd accepted, because he's loaded.

I have cousins who are missionaries in Argentina.
Meh, I think I'll pass.

Maybe I'll run off with some psycho who tries to hang my dog.
He won't really love me, but he'll use me for the house.
I'll throw a knife at him and run through the moors to hide in London.

Mine was a bit more literal at that age, worst work years of my life.

Mix up 110+ hours per week for two months and 60-80 over the course of 4 years and having a Jungian breakdown along with all kinds of kundalini stuff along with that (made me feel like I was breaking reality!).

I think what helps bring down midlife crisis is that somewhere around 40 everyone freaks out, starts comparing themselves to everyone else and then we start eating the abuse from that (like we often ate other people's puberty by getting shoved into lockers). That's a big part of it, there's also the question of whether someone feels they could have done better that might be nagging at them, that's a possibility, but having the world get more narcissistic and self-absorbed at that age has a lot to do with it.

I feel like I had mine in my mid 20's.

That was when I first realized I'm all I'm ever going to be in life. Everyone I know my age was going to college, having careers getting married and having families, etc. And here I am, a basketcase who still lives at home with his mother who has to look out for him financially.

Plus seeing my mom who I depend on for so much growing older with her many health issues and realizing that one day she will be gone and I'm going to be left alone in a cruel merciless world that I'm unprepared for.... it was enough to really push me over the edge.

And since I have nobody else in my life i can really count on i'm always afraid I'm either going to be put back in another group home or end up homeless.

If those are not the traits of a midlife crisis I dont know what is. And I hate the fact that people always mock it as an exaggerated "man's problem" on TV. It's so much more serious than people think.

Yes, and I do think that in many cases, it's not that we can't work up to our potential, it's that we are very unclear about what our potential is and sometimes it isn't at all what we expect. If I had known that I was autistic 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have wound up teaching English in China. And I certainly wouldn't have been able to get a legitimate work visa to do it. (no regrets there, but it's a big burden to be the literal first and possibly only white person that those folks have ever seen and to be on best behavior pretty much constantly)

I do think that it probably is a bit easier if it's just autism, or just ADHD rather than having to find something that is OKish with multiple conditions. I was pretty much the entire pick up department at my store for a couple years, and the autism side of my head absolutely loved it. The social interactions were generally quite limited and repetitive, so I got the hang of it relatively quickly. And I could do most of the work for the entire department. But, the ADHD side got bored so when I was offered a cross promotion to assistant manager of a different department I accepted. Which became it's own thing that I won't get into.

The point is, that I never thought of pickup being something that I'd be good at even though logistics type jobs often times tap into things that autistic folks are more suited for. It was just a terrible job for ADHD apart from the time running around scrambling because I suddenly got flooded with stuff to do on short notice.

Something else I thought I should bring up on the topic:

I get that there are potentially multiple definitions for 'midlife crisis'. A commonly described one is the question of 'Did I get far enough or am I a loser?' and having that question chase someone in circles.

The version I'm personally more familiar with (ie. the version that happened to me) was the one where... terms being imperfect and often contested... my Freudian 'Id' had a panic where it realized that all the things that I was working hard for, punishing myself physically and psychologically to achieve ('temporarily' for someone else's benefit), weren't going to pay out. The promise of 'Do x, y, and z, work hard, be conscientious and you'll be rewarded with a wife, 2.2 kids, house with white picket fence' - even though I didn't even intellectually believe it at the time there was apparently a deeper part of me that was still holding out hope for that sort of thing and I got to live through the trauma and pain of that deeper, more childlike, part of me realizing that no - none of that was coming.

The Freudian Id stuff I won't get into because it's too personal but... lets just say a lot of it rhymed with the kind of internal crisis that tends to map on to kundalini awakenings, kundalini syndrome, etc. along with a lot of your checksums on your sexuality getting knocked out or thrown aside (trauma accelerated that for me) and just being afraid to go out for a while because you're not exactly sure what the process in question is turning you into.

Part of what brought this topic back to memory was watching Marianne Faithful's 'The Ballad of Lucy Jordan' where she's singing about a lady having a midlife crisis, possibly checking out early at the end, and Marianne's looking like she's just about licking her lips at the camera and then I thought about it a bit more.... ok..... now I get what she's on about, effectively the human biological version of kernel panic.