Blog 80 - Midlife Crisis!

Blog 80 - Midlife Crisis!

October 2025

I’m pretty sure I’m having a Mid-Life Crisis. Except, instead of buying a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle or running off to the Himalayas to find myself, I’m having a long, hard look at my career and realizing that the only thing holding my professional life together is repetition. This isn’t a complaint, not really. It’s an observation, delivered from the sticky, lukewarm pool of professional stagnation where I currently reside.
Twenty Years of Terrific, Then Suddenly… Toxic
I have been doing this job, this specific, highly specialized, increasingly soul-crushing job—for the better part of two decades. It was terrific. It was challenging. I was valuable. I ensured the safety of a multi-million-pound business, and I knew where all the bodies were buried (metaphorically, mostly).
But somewhere between the introduction of the umpteenth new company motto and the fifth restructuring, the switch has flipped. The interest is gone. The spark is extinguished. I am the flickering bulb in the break room that everyone keeps ignoring until it finally gives up the ghost entirely, plunging us into comfortable darkness.
The problem is, when you’ve been doing something this long, you become the benchmark. You are the historical record. But in the modern workplace—and I say this with all the gentle affection I can muster—history is apparently an impediment. I feel like I’m drowning in a pool of ever younger, unbelievably inexperienced fetuses’ (and yes, I know that sounds horrible, but in terms of organizational maturity, it feels accurate). These are people who think email is an outdated communication system and who view the concept of a filing cabinet as a quaint antique.
When I offer advice rooted in 15 years of seeing exactly how this exact mistake played out last time, my experience is no longer revered; it’s considered clutter. It’s burdensome context. My long service, which used to merit a nice watch and a stiff handshake, is now something to be mocked—a sign that perhaps I didn't ‘pivot’ hard enough or fit in with the new thinking ‘click’.
Perhaps the greatest source of my current professional condition is the creeping, suffocating acceptance of mediocrity. I remember when standards mattered. When good work was the expectation, not the happy accident. Now, the official work ethos—whispered, but palpable—is "It'll Do." Let me try and explain; A document that’s 75% complete but delivered ahead of schedule now trumps a fully polished, 100% accurate document that took an extra afternoon. In today’s world speed is the standard by which all things are measured. Efficiency is the god. And actual quality? That’s just a nice-to-have bonus for the weekend.
The result is that every day, I feel like I am fighting a low-grade war against shoddiness. I watch fully grown adults make fundamental errors that I haven't made since my first year on the job, and when I try to gently correct them, I’m told I’m being "resistant to change" or "overly negative."
This dynamic creates a terrifying realization: I am now beholden to the whims of well-meaning, ambitious idiots. My survival, my mortgage, and my access to decent broadband depend entirely on remaining gainfully employed by people who, quite frankly, couldn't find their way out of a paper bag if the bag wasn't digitally optimized and supported by a robust cloud infrastructure.
And because I have little to no disposable income (the mortgage is too damn high, and my salary has been static for so long it’s practically a geological feature), I must keep showing up. I am trapped by my own comfortable, beige prison cell.
Now, if I am honest here, the job isn’t at all bad. This is where the true conflict lies and the reason why I haven’t dramatically slammed the door and walked off into the sunset. The benefits are legendary. The vacation time is frankly excessive, and the hours are so well-established and predictable that the job essentially runs itself, leaving me with enormous chunks of free, valuable time.
This free time, this glorious, corporate gift of wasted hours, is where my sanity currently resides. It allows me to indulge in my one true passion: writing.
When I’m not navigating the treacherous waters of managerial incompetence, I’m here, crafting worlds, honing sentences, and generally avoiding all the people I work with. Writing is my escape hatch, my therapy, my little boat on the sea of corporate quicksand.
Unfortunately, this passion operates in a vacuum. It isn't supported by glowing reviews, a decent agent, or even a single friend who takes it seriously. It is a quiet, highly private obsession. I suffer from the classic writer’s ailment: profound self-doubt. I seriously doubt that I am any good at it anyway. Every time I finish a piece, I look at it, squint, decide it reads like the ramblings of a particularly stressed badger, and quietly tuck it away in a file that has yet to see the light of day.
And here we arrive at the central, uncomfortable truth of this entire mid-life crisis. The part I must admit to, standing naked and vulnerable before the keyboard.
It’s not the fetuses. It’s not the falling standards. It’s not even the soul-numbing nature of the work I do. Those things are annoying, certainly, but they are just the backdrop, the atmosphere. The real problem, the reason I haven't swapped out my cynical, salaried existence for the glorious, terrifying uncertainty of a full-time writing career, is this:
I am too lazy to do anything about it.
There, I said it. I have acknowledged the problem, identified the escape route (my writing), and analyzed the financial constraints. Yet, the sheer effort required to make the transition from the comfort of a salaried position to start the networking, the self-promotion, with the financial risk, the terrifying requirement of being seen—is simply too much effort when compared to the comfortable, predictable rhythm of my current life.
I hate my job, but I love the fact that my job is easy. I am essentially trading my professional integrity and my ultimate happiness for a guaranteed paycheck and a load of weeks paid vacation. I am choosing the path of least resistance: the path paved with resentment, but also, crucially, with cash assurance.
My Mid-Life-Crisis isn't manifesting as a sudden burst of reckless behavior; it's manifesting as a profound, crippling inertia. I am stuck in the rut of the known, the comfortable, the predictable. I have the time to write, but I use that time to think about writing, which is significantly less effort. I have passion, but I lack energy.
So, here I sit, still employed, still rolling my eyes at the latest corporate buzzword, railing against the "It'll Do" culture, and wondering if perhaps buying a leather jacket and a Harley-Davidson isn't such a bad idea after all.
Or maybe I’ll just write a 1000-word blog post about it and then go back to ignoring my email. That’ll do.
Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be less lazy. (But probably not.)