Nobody Prepares You for the 30-something Life Crisis

It doesn’t happen overnight, but it hits you that way.

It develops slowly, creeping up on you one self-help book at a time. Another fine line where there used to be a smile. In the blink of an eye, there’s a stranger staring back at you in the mirror, asking, how did I get here?

The 30-something struggle is not talked enough to prepare you when it hits. On the outside, everyone around you seems content, even successful, with their life. Too ashamed to admit our struggles, we turn to desperate attempts to cope through hacking and optimizing flaws into our best selves. Cries for help are muddled by a never-ending pursuit of the cure with the perfect morning routine.

We become obsessed with productivity, achievement, and influence. We strive for success, yet feel unfulfilled. In the quest to have it all, we find ourselves missing the most important piece of the puzzle. Happiness.

Do we even know what it truly means to be happy?

Is all the habit-hacking, just the millennial attempt to treat symptoms while avoiding the root cause?

Is it the shame of admitting our life plan we relentlessly pursued in our twenties, just isn’t working out for us?

We tell ourselves once we get that promotion, bonus, or perceived success, then we can be happy. It will be worth our hard work, dedication, and sacrifice of a family life. Every late-night, missed holiday, broken relationship, and the risk of our health was not in vain because we made our dream happen.

But it never looks like what we thought. Maybe we accomplished what we set out to do, but are left with a deep feeling of lack. When we don’t make our dream happen, we’re left feeling lost. Not only did we fail, but we missed out on our chance to reach the milestones of our former peers.

The choice of passion over picket fences

When you spend your twenties chasing dreams, you don’t stop to think about the other defining moments of life. You tell yourself there is plenty of time. The nagging urgency to become somebody in the world trumps any vision of a hypothetical spouse, 2.5 kids, and a backyard in the suburbs.

You hustle hard to create the dream life. Until one day you wake up, 30-something, and begin to question if you did it all wrong. There was supposed to be more time. Now suddenly, you’re in a losing battle with your dwindling internal clock.

Once a world for your taking, now leaves you scrambling to catch up. The carefree nights of youth turn into self-help books, motivational podcasts, and a slew of routines. In hopes, that maybe you can turn back the clock and make up for wasted time.

In your twenties, you focus on what a great life could look like. The opportunities of the world are endless. The possibility of anything can happen, fill you with wild ambition and you become ruthless in making it.

But your thirties are about what life should be.

I should be married.

I should have kids.

I should make more money.

I should be more established in my career.

I should be happy.

But we’re not. We look back at friends who started families at 25 with envy. Sure, we may have disposable income, a place of our own, and relative success in our careers, but it feels like we’re the ones that got left behind.

The struggles we face in our thirties are not uncharted territory

Years ago, you set off to college, thinking you were ready to start a new semi-adult life. Filled with high expectations of no parents and no rules, miles away from the life you once knew.

In reality, you felt alone. Far from my family and friends, and the feeling of home, struggling to navigate an unfamiliar environment and find that place to belong.

While everyone around you seemed to have it figured out, you began to question everything you thought you knew about who you are and want to be. The pain of a lost sense of self is disguised in all-night beer pong and 3 am pizza. The fear of absolute loneliness forces you out of your comfort zone and search for new meaning and connections.

Eventually, you find that spot and build a new life to call your own. You never want to leave. Until graduation comes, and now you have to go out into an even bigger world and do it all again.

You enter your twenties high off the endorphins of expectations and eager to start your real adult life. A world where the stakes are higher and the rejections sting more than an F on an assignment. You don’t get the job, promotion, or the love interest you pursued with your best effort. The setbacks and failures start to accumulate more than friend requests and social events.

The YOLO of our twenties takes on a new meaning when we reach our thirties. Now, the reminder life is short stares back at you every time you look in the mirror. Sagging skin, slowing metabolism, and a sprinkling of grey hair become a rude awakening each morning. Saying, “Better hurry up, you don’t have much time left.”

The fear of missing out on any more markers of a supposed good life, makes you consider if it’s time to settle for a life that’s good enough. Give up on your dreams and stay in the wrong career or relationship for the status and stability. Give in to reality and accept a life you never planned.

We don’t get older and wiser; we get older and risk-averse. It might not be the life of our dreams, but it’s something we built, and starting fresh means risking it all.

It’s easy when you’re young to be wild and free. You have no obligations, reputation, or expectations to stand in your way. You haven’t faced a world of rejections and failures yet and the risk of starting over doesn’t come with hesitation.

“Sometimes knowing when to let go of a dream is just as important as knowing when to follow one.” — Jamie Kern Lima, Founder IT Cosmetics

But when there’s no cap and gown ceremony or diploma to declare an ending, it becomes harder and harder to close the chapter on a stage of life that no longer fits us. Instead of admitting the death of a dream, we dig in deeper, hoping that more effort will finally bring the reward.

All while the feeling that we should be further along in life, haunts our every day. With the expectation of success comes the reality of being lost. And each failure makes it harder to pick ourselves back up again.

Do we give up and give in?

Or can we take the spirit of our youth to turn the page into a new chapter of life? Take the setbacks as a step forward into a new dream.

Accept the lessons life has taught us and move forward to a new life with the same ambition of our younger self.

Use the failures as opportunities to find what really makes a life full of purpose and passion.

And the rejections as the world's way of saying there is something better waiting for us to discover.

Can we find trust in ourselves, to know the life of our dreams is still waiting for us, even if the world looks a little different now?

And have faith, that being lost is the only chance of truly finding ourselves.

This story was previously published here