I seem to be infected with some idiopathic melancholy torpor recently. I guess that is a very verbose way of saying that I haven't been in the best of moods and for no reason. I will chalk this up to nothing more than the ebb and flow of Midlife Malaise; likely just a local minima that will be gotten over quickly, or certainly no later than vacation which isn't too far off.
I'm not sure that hindsight brings clarity, or if it just brings a new wrong perspective, but I tried to think back on which years were overall good and which were overall bad. That kind of binary categorization is impossible, so I created an arbitrary scale to do this.
I started it in high school - as the floor for how bad things could be. There are many situations that could be worse than high school, but it still represents some kind of sub-basement for mental well-being.
There is a lot of noise in any given year, with some highs and some lows, but college was definitely a high point - potentially even artificially so. Constantly on the steep side of the learning curve. Always busy - trying to work and go to school full-time. A lot of interesting friendships, even if some of them were short-lived and/or alcohol fueled. No public shaming due to wearing the wrong shoes. Even college-poverty wasn't too bad since there was a group catharsis in not having any money.
Graduation brought a somewhat painful job search, and eventual employment in a vocation relevant to my degree. While this should have been even better than college, I was hired into a really, really bad situation. "Oh, what have I gotten myself into."
I wasn't sure full employment could have gotten worse while still drawing a paycheck, but it did. At this point, the fish started to finally see the water he was swimming in...
A change to a new job brought renewed hope that college wasn't wasted and was almost certainly worth the time, energy and money that went into it.
Things progressed along until the onset of Midlife Malaise. Is this really it? Thankfully, this drop in mental well-being isn't continuously permanant.
But this exercise does bring up an interesting point. When talking about the midlife crisis, experts usually show a "U-Curve" with a minimum for life satisfaction somewhere around the late 40's to early 50's. This may be right in aggregate, but for any one individual, there is a lot of noise - with life positives along with the negatives. I suppose some of these can even happen simultaneously. The low in the "U" may actually represent the depth and frequency of the low points in the noise.
More malaise can bring things down when it lasts beyond a certain amount of time. The new house has overall been an improvement but was somewhat offset by the painful selling of the old house. I sometimes wonder if I'm destined to live next to noisy people, or if everywhere just has noisy people?
I'm not sure if I'll still think this when I look back in a few years, but the last couple years have been fine. Not great, but not bad either.
Still, adult life can get pretty monotonous.
While I would like to believe that life's dizzying highs and crushing lows appear to be smoothing out as I get older, it is probably dangerous to think that. Involuntarily losing my job or being put in prison would probably be a new crushing low. A financial windfall or falling ass-backwards into a perfect job could be a new dizzying high. Outside of something like that, it does appear that life's highs and lows are smoothing out as I get older - and maybe that is where the midlife malaise begins to taper off. Maybe.
Instead of going to the work social outing at the brew-pub, I sat forlornly at my desk and kept busy. It isn't that my workload is so heinous that I couldn't afford the time to go, I just didn't want to, and I'm approaching a place in my life where that sometimes takes precedence. Far too often, I have ended up trapped at these types of work functions talking with someone I really did not want to talk to or talking about a subject I really don't have any interest in talking about - sometimes both. The conversations that I may want to have are nearly impossible with the threat of management around every corner; standing around without anything relevant to say is a near certainty.
The situation can also be very similar to the grocery store where I run into a casual acquaintance. After the requisite banal pleasantries, we both return to picking out onions and mangos, inspecting them intently to avoid eye contact again - only to run into this same person in the potato chip aisle. And the frozen food aisle... When it happens the third time, I almost want to confront the situation and scream, "Look, one of us is going to have to finish grocery shopping another day because this continued interaction is just getting terrible for both of us." Throw in enough brew-pub alcohol to be annoying, without enough for sufficient social lubrication and these things can just get painful.
While my life has no shortage of awkward interactions, I just don't see the need to purposefully put myself in those situations. Yes, I'd rather just stay at work.
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