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.
Ask me how I know... /s
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.
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 ^^
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It should perhaps better be described as a mid-life-expectancy crisis.
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 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.
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.
But 40 is when the warranty expires.
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'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?
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!"
For myself 30s was only when the life started to happen.
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.
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 or 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.
Youth is wasted on the young. It’s such a shame.
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.
I thought this was interesting.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geogra...
And this one:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like...
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
There is some truth to it but I also feel like it is a far too pessimistic take on the issue.
Friends and siblings though have been coming through like champs during these hard times.
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.
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).
That's a cult, so maybe some other kind.
If all else fails, M-x doctor. It's a thing.
Most people should not place themselves in the hands of mental health "professionals". There's a reason they used to call these people "shrinks". They are often not mentally well themselves. Think about the life your typical therapist is leading. Does that seem healthy?
What kind of life are they leading?
Plus - firefighters: stereotypically buff and desirable. You'll lose your house and your partner.
The right person to call is a poet. Not otherwise associated with fire, handles a lot of paper. They hate fire!
I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead
~ Mad, bad, & dangerous aka George Gordon, Lord Byron
Or medical advice! Only damaged people would chose those professions. They are surrounded by death and injury. Are they killers? Will they kill you? These are questions you should ask yourself if you notice a skin abnormality.
A divorced therapist is like a dentist with bad teeth or a tee-totaling drug-dealer. Can't trust any of 'em.
(BTW, what is bad about teetotaling for a drug dealer? "Don't get high on your own supply" has allegedly been a credo for them since basically forever)
People divorce cus they “fall out of love” and, since society today puts self-interest, especially if its related to sex, above all else, and the nuclear family is seen as worthless and “problematic”, people ignore any evidence against their politically correct sheepish opinions.
On your second question, drug dealers often start dealing to support their habit. Only in movies will you get that line. Y’all live such incredibly sheltered lives.
Stay together for the kids. Once they leave the nest, sleep with all the therapists you want. But to pretend like divorce is anything but cringe and pathetic is twice as cringe.
Unfortunately, since I can't view the article, I can only guess that they evaluated a large number of professions. Since the abstract focused on law enforcement, it seems unlikely that they adjusted their criteria for statistical significance for psychologists in consideration of the number of variables they evaluated.
In other words, "Jelly beans cause acne." https://xkcd.com/882/
https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-009-9057-8
The "media and communications equipment workers" category had a reported 0.00% divorce rate! It seems implausible that we should infer causality from this.
Divorce among physicians and other healthcare professionals in the United States https://sci-hub.st/10.1056/NEJM199703133361112
Medical Specialty and the Incidence of Divorce https://sci-hub.st/10.1056/NEJM199703133361112
Some callouts:
> Survey results from 2008 through 2013 included responses from more than 40,000 physicians; 200,000 other health professionals—dentists, pharmacists, nurses and health care executives; and more than 6 million other adults who reported currently being employed and ever being married. While 24 percent of physician respondents had ever been divorced, the probability of being divorced was 25 percent among dentists, 31 percent among health care executives and 33 percent among nurses. Only pharmacists, at 23 percent, were less likely than physicians to have been divorced. Lawyers had a 27 percent probability of being divorced, and *in all non-health-care occupations, the probability of ever being divorced was 35 percent.*
> A subsequent, larger study of 1118 medical graduates of Johns Hopkins University found cumulative rates of divorce of 29% *with rates higher among psychiatrists (50%)* and surgeons (33%) but was limited by its analysis of physicians from a single institution.
> The choice of specialty was significantly associated (P>0.001) with the risk of divorce (Fig. 1 and Table 2). The cumulative incidence of divorce was highest for *psychiatrists (50 percent)*, followed by surgeons (33 percent) and “other” physicians (31 percent). Among internists, pediatricians, and pathologists, the incidence of divorce was similar (22 to 24 per- cent).
> When we examined psychological variables, we found that physicians in the highest quartile for the anger scale had a higher risk of divorce than those scoring in the lower three quartiles. *Moreover, the cumulative incidence of divorce among the physicians with the highest anger scores was higher than that of any other subgroup, with the exception of those practicing psychiatry.*
Looking at the "Medical Specialty and the Incidence of Divorce" article, my first thought on reading "Scores on these [psychological characteristic] scales were grouped according to quartiles for analysis" is that the researchers aren't experts in statistical methods, or else are hiding something by bucketing arbitrarily. It's a widespread problem in life sciences. They don't explain (not by this point in the article, at least) why they chose quartiles. I'm skeptical of any analysis that reduces the fidelity of the data without explanation. It smells like p-hacking.
My second thought regarding their model is wondering why they didn't first build a model predicting divorce for the general population. I've heard (received wisdom) that financial stress is the primary cause. It seems unlikely that medical specialty is unrelated to household finances. Ignoring a likely confounding variable is sloppy. It makes the effort seem like a novelty article intended for amusement rather than serious research. It's in the "occasional notes" section of the periodical, which suggests less rigor.
They do little to address the question of causality. They muse that, "One explanation is the longer work hours required in some specialties," but never bothered to analyze the hours worked.
My conclusion: That article is literally a joke, published to give the community something to laugh about over beers after the conference.
----
If I were to perform the analysis, I'd first build a model of causes of divorce for the general population. Some candidate variables: household income, household income as a ratio to each person's childhood household income, cost of living where the household lives, frequency of attending religious services, number of children, number of hours worked per week, age when married, etc.
I'm skeptical of psychological characteristic surveys, so I'd spend some time considering alternatives, but I'd want to include some measure of characteristics that might drive the choice of a medical specialty which might also be correlated with divorce. We want to isolate the choice of specialty as the cause as separate from confounders that cause both the choice and divorce.
If medical specialty holds up as a factor after controlling for everything else, then I'd investigate further.
Again, I hate the arbitrary bucketing. There's no benefit to creating age buckets, as if there's some magical change that happens at 40, 50, and 60. I did have an atypically large birthday party, compared to other years, but I don't think that had a dramatic effect on my likelihood to divorce. Maybe some people have such spectacularly intense decade-related birthday parties that it increases divorce incidence for those years? Income doesn't benefit from bucketing, either. Having $199k annual income isn't much different from $201k annual income.
They do a decent job of controlling for confounders. Considering, among other things, that "if the annual rate of divorce was identical across occupations but physicians marry later in life, then at any given time physicians would be less likely to report ever having divorced compared with people in other occupations, simply because they were at risk for less time."
However, their inclusions of state and year fixed effects could have been more considered. These are proxies for other things, like cultural characteristics and neighborhood income levels. I'd like to see some discussion of why they chose to use state and year proxies instead of searching for more specific explanatory variables. Especially state, because some kind of urbanization measure might be more helpful. However, because state medical licensing regulation might affect the choice of occupation, the use of that variable is easily defensible.
Ugh! Bucketing again! Hours worked should be a continuous variable. Inexcusable, unless they feared misreporting. Perhaps they saw some banding at 40, 45, and 50 hours, so they figured it's not really a continuous variable anyway. Again, that needs explanation. Any rationale for bucketing should be thoroughly discussed.
Finally, the effects. First, with this population size, I'd be surprised if these weren't "statistically significant". I'm looking more for practical significance. Check out the estimates for dentists. Dentists appear to have lower incidence of divorce, based on the last year, yet higher prevalence of divorce. Strange. That means that dentists in past years had a higher annual incidence, but the rate has been declining, or declining relative to physicians. Has the practice of dentistry, relative to general medicine, changed that much over those years? This suggests spurious results, at least for the physician vs dentist comparison.
Hispanics were more likely to divorce? Bogus. I'll chalk it up to sampling weirdness. The CI includes 1 anyway, so they're saying it doesn't matter. They should put some asterisks in to highlight the variables we should pay attention to. It looks like they're including Black and Hispanic just to explain what Other means, because Other is the only significant one.
Wow! Income is irrelevant. Weird again. Maybe bucketing at work, turning 1 continuous variable into 4 binary variables, diluting the impact. It should have been log(dollars).
If you work more than 60 hours, you're more likely to get divorced. Makes sense. Again, log(hours) would have been better, though maybe a threshold at 40 hours would have been useful.
I enjoyed the article, but if I were the journal editor, I'd have returned it with some suggestions for improvement rather than publishing it.
Anyway, I hope my commentary was interesting/useful. This article doesn't say anything about psychology, so we've gone off on a bit of a tangent.
To return to the topic under discussion, it sounds like you are saying, "there may or may not be a correlation between psychiatry and divorce, but these particular studies can't provide the answer." I assure you I am not basing my opinions about psychiatrists on these studies. Rather, I expect that properly constructed studies that meet your standards would bear out what I know from my own experience and encounters with people in the profession. Others in the thread provided anecdotal data that supports my own. And, I'm not making my judgment based solely on experience. My experience confirms an intellectual analysis based on the history of the profession. Those are my priors and probabilities. I would not be surprised if the data backed me up but I would be surprised if the data refuted my suppositions (and would question the study). It seems that my sort of reasoning doesn't have much place in your toolbox. Is that not the case?
I appreciate your reply and explanation. However, I think we'll probably be speaking at cross-purposes because your description of the kind of variables you would choose for your own model strike me as (necessarily) limited and reflective of the data requirements of your preferred methods (McNamara fallacy?). (I don't actually believe you live your life via models generally, but maybe you do.)
My opinion is there is no room in such models for all the many things that are part of the rich fabric of psychological experience, without which all you get is a kind of significant/not-significant binary according to available imperfect data. I mean, yes, it preserves the null hypothesis, but it feels sterile to me to attribute so much to randomness when the model itself is so obviously curated to work with available data. Or even to hidden variables that will require further study, at some point, in the future, maybe... Not to mention the cases where the null hypothesis was subsequently rejected (smoking, ulcers,...). Yes, Maybe you believe these variables are the principal components of the theoretical complete data? The don't appear orthogonal to me.
Meanwhile, life has to be lived and if you've encountered "types" of people in the world but won't allow yourself to acknowledge their existence unless one can build a rigorous predictive model to verify the existence of those types and to be sure they are not noise or sample bias or whatever, then you are enjoying a life that I would find almost barren. There are so many locked doors in this way of seeing the world. You have problems with datasets, which you have to decide whether to trust. Will you apply statistics or heuristics to those problems? Absent trustworthy data will you just decide to defer judgment? It's a form of not trusting oneself as well, which I reject on principle, and of making oneself unbiased to the point of being inconsequential. In other words, a form of nihilism (perhaps nullism is the appropriate term).
You seem to be suggesting I'm philosophically a Frequentist. Somewhat true, but I am, like basically everyone, a Bayesian when it comes to practical decisions. Also, I have no fear of logical deduction when statistical inference is infeasible.
Nullism is a good term. I'm of the opinion that most things are random and that humans' imaginations frequently mislead us. Absent better evidence, I'm unlikely to believe any link between psychiatry and divorce.
Therapy is a scam and no doctor can explain how or why anti-depressants work (also why they have people "try" many before finding the "right one for you").
But people are too cool for friends and family now and hearing hard truths so they pay someone to be told they matter and how to run their lives.
I have seen different approaches to therapy being done to different friends and only one friend got better - this tells me it can work for some, but the odds are you're getting a grifter. In this case their therapist told them they didn't need anti-depressants (shocker) and after ~15 sessions said they were fine and didn't need help anymore. Everyone else is medicated and still going every month, presumably til they die.
2) Although I get the idea that people need friends and family, it's easy to forget that people with severe issues do not look like they have them. And taking care of eating disorder/personality disorder/*PTSD/whatever else treated through therapy, not medication patient is a lot of work to which most people are not equipped, and which drains a lot, to the point of resentment (if they can't run away) or just ghosting. Also, it's not that people do not hear "harsh truths" - it's more about not being able to comprehend them, due to broken thought patterns.
I honestly believe that a small amount of people are better off being medicated, keyword being very small (<0.1%). Those that would be a danger to themselves or others in a real way. So I concede some ground.
But I refuse to believe that a society with a significant % of people on anti-depressants is a way to live. Look at my country's statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020727/antidepressants-...
Most of my friends on them are just bummed out about their life but not enough to change their situation. Perhaps CBT is the answer, my big issue is that the majority of therapists over-prescribes, and that makes me lose trust in the whole thing.
It's like trying to see the good parts of cryptocurrencies, you need to ignore a lot of shit and in the end you wonder if its worth it.
Let me shed some light: there are psychotherapists, that are not doctor, and can't prescribe anything. Then there's psychiatrists, which are medical doctors, and might approach your depression with the pill du jour. SSRIs just cure the symptom, not the actual bloody problem one has.
You don't need a pill, nor a doctor unless it's an actual curable condition (bipolar, ADHD, etc.). You need someone to talk to.
Source: 3 years of talk therapy.
We also don't know the mechanism behind how anaesthesia works, this doesn't mean anaesthetists are grifters.
Mental health issues are not easily distinguished, "depression" is a cluster of conditions which probably have different treatment responses but all present alike. It's not unusual that some people will respond to SSRIs, others will need beta blockers and a third group will need talk therapy.
My family did a few group therapy sessions when my dad died, and it wasn't anything like you suggested.
At no point did the therapist suggest there was anything wrong with us or suggest medication. She just listened and helped us deal with the new situation.
Was it absolutely necessary to talk to a therapist? No it wasn't.
Did it make the situation easier to deal with? Yes it did.
I might be the only person on earth that got something out of therapy, and I blame being and staying depressed my entire adult life because I listened to idiots like you. And trust me, I'm restraining myself here. We have a mental health crisis, a broken support system, male suicide at a all-time high, and your opinion is still mainstream. Shut up and listen.
--
Advice for the people struggling: don't be afraid to fire your therapist. Going to therapy should feel like having someone to dump your crap and feel they've listened to you with no judgment whatsoever. You should feel you talked to a better, non-opinionated version of your $favorite-relative. If that's not the case, get another one.
AFAIU there's a lot of approaches to therapy. What worked for me was having a person that listen attentively for 99% of the time. In 3 years they have never told me what to do, nor prescribed their vision of the world.
While you are certainly entitled to your opinion, almost every single word of what you said is wrong.
Readers beware.
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.
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 now. Now is your chance to start over and do a better job at it.
Good luck!