Reply to Specific midlife crisis issue: playing "what if" with your life?

Forum Index » Eldercare

Reply to "Specific midlife crisis issue: playing "what if" with your life?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That’s not an age thing so much as a mindset thing. It’s common to think that the grass is always greener.

For me, it comes back to self acceptance. I accept that I’ve done the best I can with what I have and others haven’t had to live my life, so comparing myself to them is a purposeless activity.[/quote]

For me it's an age thing. When I was 25 or even 35, I didn't think "what if I did this for living" or "what if I lived in that city" or "what if I had another kid." I contemplated those things as real options because they were.

By 45, many avenues in life are closed off to you. I think for women, in particular, the end of your fertility is such a firm closure on an era of life where you are making choices about the kind of life you will live. In some ways this is reassuring. But it's also scary. There's no going back.

Oh sure, you could move to another city or go back to school for a new degree or find a new spouse. But these changes cost more the older you are. I have always been someone who embraced the challenge of a new city or a new job, but the older I get, the more obstacles there are. And being a parent changes the math on everything. The degree to which my options are prescribed by how they would impact my children is dramatic.

So midlife "grass is greener" is different in quality than what you might experience when you are younger. It's less about envying what someone else has and more about realizing you are far less free in your choices than you once were, and that can make it harder to make a big change even when it's clearly what is needed. Very different in quality than the way people might envy friend's lives in earlier stages of life.[/quote]

I just don’t look at the world the way that you do. I never did, even in my 20s. I always understood that my options were limited.

Mortality seems more tangible, yes, but I never believed I would live forever.

It’s more a gradual change but that’s probably because I’ve always been relatively pragmatic.

People are different no matter how old they are.[/quote]

Then why comment? This thread is in the Midlife Concerns forum, and is explicitly about the "what if" feelings that sometimes accompany midlife malaise. You are trying to make it about something else (being jealous of friends) but it's about a specific midlife experience.

If you don't have that experience, great. But then your "insight" isn't very helpful. You are just patting yourself on the back for not having this issue. Who cares? It's like weighing in on a thread about back pain to inform someone "Oh I don't experience back pain like that. I've found my overall fitness is such that my back is really never an issue." It's just supremely unhelpful.[/quote]

+100000 to this. 
i NEVER understand people who comment that they DONT share the poster's feelings. How is that helpful??????[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics