Midlife... "noncontentness"

For as long as I can remember, people have made jokes about the classic midlife crisis. In psychology, it seems to be controversial about whether or not it actually exists, because sometimes people just do wacky stuff because of some other reason. It's not because they are a certain age and aware of their mortality, which is the definition most settle on. But real or not, there's no debating that some of us go through a period of time where we feel like we just can't be... content. I decided some years ago that being "happy" was not the same as being "content." The former implies some kind of constant euphoria, which is not a sustainable human condition. The latter, however, describes a state where you can stop and look around, and things are more OK than not. It's the contentment that I'm after.

A friend of mine texted me today about this very subject. Much of his "noncontentness" is rooted in some professional chaos, and he's moved to a different state and tried to find some way to decouple his career from his identity. I can deeply relate to this, but it's a hard thing to do. And while we both understand that our feelings are not at all rational, they're very hard to change. We keep looking for the thing that we pass that allows us to be content, and we don't know what it is.

We don't think the stereotypical behaviors are a risk, you know, the hookers and blow and Porsches. Actually, we're both very satisfied in our marriages. (We both may have punched above our weight class, we concede.) The actual behaviors are more about a general malaise and difficulty engaging with stuff. I don't want to confuse that with depression, because I know what that is. When I was depressed, I didn't feel joy, or really any deep emotion. Bupropion has largely fixed that. I just can't be at ease. It always feels like there's something that I'm trying to outrun or fix, which makes it awfully hard to be in the moment.

It isn't death itself, because I understand how relatively unimportant I am in the grand scheme of the universe. It has been around for billions of years, and will be around for billions more. But what I do between now and my end does matter, which is illogical if I understand my place in history. We humans are so desperate to find meaning. And even if we conclude that there ultimately is no meaning, my naive self believes that our time is best spent trying to make things a little better anyway, even if it's just for our offspring (or anyone who outlasts us).

But wisdom suggests that while individuals can make good decisions, groups of people do not. We still have war and famine, when we don't have to. So this brings you back around to what it is that each of us needs to feel content, and the impact that time has on that pursuit. Almost counterintuitively, I think that routine is the enemy of feeling content, and I say that as someone who routinely feels like retracting into my own little bubble. But I know that my most content times were moving to Seattle and Orlando, when I was in Europe, when I'm on a cruise, when I was making things... anything that feels different, even if it's uncomfortable. (Sounds like getting a tattoo.)

What definitely feels better is to hear from someone saying they're going through something similar. I wish people were more open about this sort of thing.