Pre-Mid-Life Crisis

The million dollar question

It’s getting to that time of year again. You know, the time of year when you think ahead and realise you haven’t planned anything for New Years. And by the time you’ve realised you haven’t planned anything, suddenly all your friends have their New Years plans sorted and their cars full. And they’re all going places.  So that didn’t happen to me. But it is that time of year and that is how I feel about my life at the moment.

I’ve just kind of had my head down all like, ‘meh, life is for later. It’s too far away to think about.’ Except now I’ve looked up and holy moley. Later is almost here. Far has become near. And all sorts of other great clichés you can come up with. 

What I am trying to say is that I am in the middle of an existential pre-mid-life crisis. Although, to be honest, I’m kind of hoping that my pre-mid-life crisis will just be a premature-mid-life crisis so that I don’t have to relive this all again in another 5 years time. Cos that just wouldn’t be fair. At all. Somehow I suspect that I will be reliving this in another 5 years, but I digress.

I will acknowledge, however, that having a life crisis is permission to become very self-absorbed. And that’s not all bad. I quite like being the center of my universe. At least for a while.

So, apart from becoming a headless goose with my existential crisis, I have taken a very practical approach to figuring out a solution to my problem. I’ve done what I do with all my unanswered questions (like literally, all my unanswered questions). I googled it. I'll admit... It's a bit of a sad day when you have to google 'what should I do with my life' but here we are... So, I love quizzes, but unfortunately the quizzes that I took to tell me what my ‘dream career’ is were all wrong,  so after about 3 of them, I flagged it. I decided it was about as helpful and generic as reading one’s horoscope, i.e. very unhelpful and exceedingly generic. But, something that is fun is the wtfshouldidowithmylife.com page that randomly generates an idea for you (see link at bottom of post)… Anyway, after some quizzes and a random generator, I read some blogs.

Luckily, I don't have this problem

I read this one blog today written by a guy, Sergio Diazgranados, (do you reckon he made that name up?) who, I quote,  ‘dropped out of school at 16 and followed his passion in music, personal development and natural health where he has fulfilled the roles of CEO, publisher, chief marketing officer and sales director.’

When I read that, I just thought, ‘well fuck; I can never be a success because I didn’t drop out of school when I was 16. My name is not granado (spanish for pomegranate – I googled it).  And anyway, his articles are too long and there was no way I was ever going to read his 5 steps to success.’

Pom-pomegranate

I have also watched youtube tutorials on what to do with my life. They do exist. For better or worse. The tutorial that I watched was presented by a guy named Leo (like, the lion who didn’t make the cut for The Lion King. He didn't talk about that failure in this tutorial) who had his first mid-life crisis aged 23, which means that my first mid-life crisis has surfaced too early and therefore, by default, makes me ineligible for having a real life-crisis.  Despite mine and Leo's differences, I managed to to suffer through to the end of my 15:33 minute tutorial on ‘What Should I Do With My Life – How To Find Your Passion For Life.’ And now that I have watched that tutorial I still don’t know what to do with my life or what my passion for life is. In hindsight, a bit of a waste of 15:33 minutes, but sometimes you just have to try these things out, you know what I mean?

He's no Mufasa, though.

Or Simba.

I’ve also talked to a probably stupid number of people. It’s one of those funny things though, I, without a doubt, listen to what I want to hear and not so much (at all) to what I don’t… I was talking to somebody about my life today and I physically found myself turning up the white noise when they started to say something that didn’t 120% align with my ideas. Small disclaimer though, most of the time, they had good advice for me, that aligned with my ideas, that I actually listened to. 

Me

And then to put the final feather in my cap for 'research stations visited', I watched a documentary. It was about the guy who coined the term, ‘follow your bliss,’ and he, having studied the world’s mythology, had determined that to follow your bliss, you must leave, have an adventure and return. Whatever that means for you, individually. And I found it inspiring. Which is cliché. But I’m all about clichés. So that’s fine.

So I have become determined to #followmybliss.

Whatever the hell that means.

#storyofmylife #onedirection #hashtag

But eh, meh, whatever. That’s tomorrows problem. 

'Where are we going?'

'I don't know. I thought you knew.'

'No, I don't know. Maybe he knows.'

'No. He definitely doesn't know.'

PAUSE

'Maybe no-one knows.'

PAUSE

'Oh well. I hope it's nice when we get there.'