Tom's Diary

Hopefully my   mid-life crisis   will end soon. I need to get off this rock upon which I’ve been stuck since the summer of 2001, when I decided that I required big changes to restore my happiness. Up till then, I’d been trying for so long to fit well into my corporate life. But when things there went bad, I began rethinking my choice to work so hard for someone else.

As a software engineer in my twenties and thirties, I planned to work the same job with the same company for the rest of my working life. I liked the security, and the pay wasn’t bad either. People admired me for holding a position like that for so long, and yet still managing to get the occasional promotions and raises besides. I basked in their respect and enjoyed the kinds of people that I found in the middle-class, social circles that my job enabled me to enter. I liked the occasional travel assignment, where I’d visit Las Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and other big places that before I got that job, I only knew of through news stories on the radio. I savored the new experiences and enjoyed the new relationships. The job was not all bad by any means.

However, when the going at work got real tough in the late 90s, corporate life became much less attractive, and this is when I believe my mid-life crisis began, at thirty-nine years of age. I wondered if I really wanted to spend the rest of my career in the sort of cut-throat, thankless job that mine had become. Some four years later, I was able to answer that question with a resounding   no,   and so, I resigned the position in early 2003.

But though I had come to know that I didn’t want to work for a boss or a team anymore, I hadn’t yet determined that I truly wanted to work alone, as I would if I started my own business. Today, some four years later, I’m still unsure as to whether to really strike out on my own, or retreat back into the corporate world of work for the rest of my monetarily productive days, or just to stay at home and fill my leisure time with good books, movies, and conversation. This difficult choice among others defines my mid-life crisis such as it is.

But I’ve read that to end this mid-life crisis successfully, I must realize my limitations, really know that they are true limitations based on experience, and fully accept them, rather than continuing the decades-long struggle to change them. Up till now, I assumed that I could change anything about myself I wanted. That’s what we of my generation were taught as kids; that we can be and do anything we want. Right? Well, I took that naive lesson to heart. So, anytime a woman, a coworker, a friend, or even an enemy disapproved of my ways, then once I accepted that what they were saying was true, I’d add it to my list of self-improvements to work on.

Now you might be able to imagine what happened very soon. Even before I hit my 30s, my wish-list of self-improvements had grown so long that I would never be able to do it all, not even in five lifetimes. I realized this in 2000 sometime, while my mid-life crisis was still ramping up. This challenged my belief that I could be superman and eliminate all my imperfections if I just tried hard enough, and long enough.

I came to understand after hundreds of hours of introspection that we change what we can. But to avoid depression in middle age, we should learn to humbly and happily accept what we can’t. Yes, many hardships we can beat, though often we don’t, because the effort to do so is just not worth it. While I’ll never give up my life-long mission to find my dream girl, I knew I had to stop some other pursuits and refocus my energies on my real aspirations. Fitting into corporate America was one pursuit that simply had to go because, put simply, it was keeping me from my love quest.

I seek self-insight, and the DJ business that I started soon after resigning from software engineering, gave me some of that. It showed that I won’t be happy on an Altoona DJ’s low income for long; as an engineer, I made over three times what I get now. So I wonder if I can adjust once again to being poor. I’ve done this once already back in 1983, when I lost the electronics technician job. I hope I can do it again.

Thus, we have another question that raised those levels of uncertainty and concern about my future, that so often characterize the classic mid-life crisis. That is: What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

I’ve been having these nightmares lately as I continue hunting for an exit from this mid-life crisis; their message seeming to be that I should be accomplishing more than I am. No doubt, this is because I’m not getting much approval for underutilizing my potential, as I have been for nearly a year. I miss the approval I got at work. Yes, I crave approval, and whenever I could no longer get it consistently at work (beginning at the end of 2000), that’s when I lost my corporate way. I lost motivation and excitement to work there, and through the hard times as a computer programmer, I understand now that I work so much better when bosses and coworkers like what I’m doing.

This does not make me psychologically weak. After all, most everyone needs frequent approval. But I’ve found neither the consistently potent and lasting approval of a loving woman, nor the approval that coworkers offer because they respect me. Once things started going south at work, once my job ratings slipped, I became depressed. The less they liked me, the more depressed I got. This is normal though. It’s hard to get along well in a hostile environment, where few respect us. So if I would return to work, an abundance of approval is one of the first things I’ll look for.

But I wish not to be a slave either. Among my needs is a general sense that people agree with and affirm my views. I don’t like arguing much with naysayers. Yet the decision to make remains: Will I return to work for someone, put my heart into starting my own business, or spend the rest of my life in leisure? I won’t be able to declare that my mid-life crisis has ended without a definite answer to this question. Stay tuned. 

Tom Hesley

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