My Mid-Life Crisis

My Mid-Life Crisis

A year or so after I reached the “ripe old” age of 40 I began to freak-out a little. I still didn't know what I wanted to do for career. I had been putting off that decision since high school and that was over 20 years ago. For the life of me I just never had been able to figure it out and hence, I kept putting it off.

As a male growing up in the 50's and 60's there was always an expectation that I needed to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I only wanted to be a grown-up me. I have never been much of a planner and frankly, having to make a decision about something that would define the rest of my life was intimidating and a bit overwhelming. The message I was getting was I had to learn how to do something that would result in me getting a job where I could earn enough money to not only support myself but also take care of a wife and a family. My view of the working world was pretty limited and I failed to see anything that fit me, certainly nothing that looked interesting. I didn't understand what most jobs entailed. As a young boy I would sometimes hear some of the men in my neighborhood speak of their jobs. It sounded rather boring at best and much of their comments were negative. I couldn't really figure out what exactly they did. I asked my father what he did in his job. He was an engineer for AT&T. He talked about designing central offices for telephone lines, or something. It didn't make a lot of sense to me. As I got into my last couple high school years all I could think of was I wanted to do something I liked and I wanted it to be rewarding, which for me meant something that helped people. When asked the best I could come up with was I wanted to work with people but I had no clue what that was or even meant. Looking back from here, it seems curious that I put so much emphasis on working with people given that I am an introvert and find it draining being around people all the time. No wonder Kris has trouble understanding me sometimes....

I was always a bit of a dreamer. I wanted to do something I loved and be part of something that made a positive difference in the world. Something that helped mankind. On the love side, I loved baseball and music. Baseball seemed to be rather self-centered after all it was just a game. I didn't see how it did much about helping the world at large. Also there was the problem that I was at best just a slightly above average baseball player. I saw music as important but I didn't really have any talent in that area. They were both clearly out.

I went off to college still directionless and feeling even more pressure to decide. Lacking focus or direction I dropped out. I then got threatened by the draft and ended up joining the Air Force. After all that I was 5 years older, but no closer to any sort of career decision. After getting out of the Air Force I went back to school. I earned an AA degree from Hudson Valley in Troy, New York. I decided to transfer to the University of Oregon largely because I wanted to live in Oregon. However, I finally had a plan. While going to Hudson Valley I had a work study job where I worked as a counselor at a Boys Club in Troy. I liked working with all the kids, especially kids under 15. I was good with them. This experience caused me to think I should become a teacher. So I headed off to Oregon with plans to get a degree in education. While there I got a work study job where I worked as a teacher's aid in an elementary school. I worked in a blended class of 5^th and 6^th graders. I liked it. I got along well with the kids as well as the teacher. So far so good. I found there was a fair amount of politics within the staff and the administration. I suspect this is the case in most schools. The problem was I got somewhat caught up in it. I objected to some of the principal's decisions and policies and it wasn't long before we were butting heads. I was still relatively young and found it hard to keep my opinions to myself. Once the school year was over I realized that I probably would not last long in the teaching profession. In less than a single school year I had managed to find myself in a major battle with the school's administration. Of course now I realize I would have adjusted, but at that point I failed to understand that. I dropped the teaching idea but now I was back to square one

In school I started taking courses all over the map. I took a bunch of philosophy but what do I do with that? I took some political science, psychology, sociology economics, math, accounting, even a course on building houses and a biology class focused on farm crops. At some point I realized I was light on science credits. So I signed up for a Computer Science class. I'd been told a few times that I'd be good at it and so I figured it would be an easy, as in not needing too much effort, grade. I was in fact, good at it but it wasn't quite as easy as I had hoped. I was one of a hand-full of top students in a class of over 100. I enjoyed the class so I kept signing up for more. I turned 27 and was still in school. I still didn't have any idea about what I wanted to be but I did know I wanted to be done with school. I looked at all the different classes I had taken and tried to fit them into some kind of a degree. The only two areas where I had enough credits to qualify as a major were Philosophy and Computer Science. At least Computer Science was something that would to lead to a job so I chose that and graduated the next June. With still no clue as to a career I figured I'd just get a job in computers until I figured it out. At least I could make enough money to live on while I hoped for an “eureka” moment. I headed to California and found a job in a hi-tech firm. I enjoyed the work. It paid well but I questioned how what I was doing was making the world a better place. I still wanted to be a part of something that had a positive effect on the world or helped people. I wanted to feel like my work was making a difference in someone's life. When you get down to it, all computer programs really do is take information from one place, organize it or modify it, maybe count it, and move to another place. In that sense it's hardly different than when I was working on an assembly line in a big bakery where I was picking up freshly baked donuts and putting them in a box.

Now it's like 14 years later. I'm in my early 40's and time is running out. I still have no idea what it is I want to do. Only now I have a good paying job, a mortgage payment, and a wife with plans to start a family. I began to mildly “freak-out”. (I don't know, can one freak-out mildly?) The pressure was on. I had to find whatever it is I want to do for real, right now! I bought some books, the “What Color Is Your Parachute?” type. I started going to seminars and even get rich sales pitches on things like real estate. Zippo! Kris was supportive but I'm sure a bit worried about me. She said I was having a mid-life crisis. Maybe but I was not looking a buying a little sports car and I already had a pretty young girlfriend, Kris (she is 12 years younger than me). I sat myself down attempting to define just what a job that would achieve what I was looking for would look like. I thought about all my jobs what I liked and what I didn't. I asked myself what made me feel worthwhile and what didn't. I came to the conclusion that in some sense all jobs are pretty much the same. My problem has been that I viewed my job as my work tasks, designing and writing computer programs. But my work was really more than that. I worked with people all the time. What I really needed to do was adjust my focus. I needed to realize that my real job was being in service to those I was working with and programming for. That didn't mean I was going to put any less of an effort on the actual programming but I could derive value from helping/working with others. That is, I could do the same job, but view it through the lens of helping and serving others. I could derive fulfillment more from my people relationships than from the systems I was developing. So, it turned out I didn't need a different job, I just needed to see the opportunity to do what I always wanted to with the job I had. It had always been right in front of me. It was kinda like one of those pictures that just look like a bunch of colored dots but after you look at it for awhile or look away and then look back you see there's a boat, a bird, or something in the picture. I finally saw through the dots.....

From that point forward the way I approached my job changed. I probably didn't do anything much different but I saw my job differently and I felt differently about it. My search was finally over. I stopped freaking out and, for better or worse, Kris got her old levelheaded (or is that hardheaded) husband back.