Reaching a certain age can conjure dark thoughts of failure: the job you worked for years to get but got passed over for...the former spouse who was wrong for you...the family you didn’t get to start. So you look for new directions...and the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones.

But taking up new projects obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, your satisfaction is deferred because your success has yet to come. The moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with the project subverts itself: you either fail at pursuing a goal or, in succeeding, you end its power to guide your life.

Each day, you have ~60,000 thoughts, and 95% of them are based in your subconscious...and are basically on repeat day after day...after day. Basic subtraction skills show us that just 5% of your daily thoughts are new and creative.

How can you know what you really want? This is the burning question of today...of entire decades of midlife, frankly.

And the knowing, or not knowing, exists on many levels and scales. It’s not always the existential questions...it can be about smaller things like “What do you want to do for dinner tonight?” Which definitely got harder to answer during the span of lockdown, am I right?

“I am someone who…” Ever catch yourself saying this? “I am someone who...loves animals...needs to have coffee first thing...needs to have my desk completely clean before I work...loves to manage the details of an event...freaks out at the thought of public speaking…”

Do you do this consciously? Or do you use it as a way of explaining your behaviors?

Throughout our lives, we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become. This takes on a bit more urgency as we enter into midlife, which--these days--is anywhere from 35 to 65 or 75 years old, depending on whom you ask.

How often do you look at someone else’s behavior and think: “Well if I were them, I’d do that differently”?

When we operate from a place of restriction, we’re telling ourselves we cannot or should not think, feel, do, or have something. And you know what our natural reaction to these types of restrictions is?

We say that we’re "tired" or “exhausted” because we have no other, easy words to describe how we are. Struggling in a sea of sleepless nights, rising coronavirus cases, and the never-ending political circus, "tired" or “exhausted” are the words that come to mind. We might simply be too tired to even describe what we’re feeling!