Is this just what happens in your mid-30s? Lately I feel like the difficulties, disappointments, and struggles of life have slowly accumulated over time and created this constant weight that I carry around. Everything feels harder than it should. I don’t feel much excitement or anticipation toward the future anymore. I feel like I have been expending effort for a very long time without ever feeling replenished. The strange thing is that on paper my life looks fine. I make around $110k, although I live in a very high cost-of-living area where that doesn’t stretch as far as people assume. I’m not unhealthy. I’m not socially awkward. I have hobbies. I have interests. From the outside, I probably look like someone who should be doing okay. But internally I feel exhausted and disconnected from my own life. I don’t feel much excitement about dating anymore. The whole process feels incredibly repetitive: meeting someone, trying to say the right things, going on dates, building hope, getting attached, and eventually getting hurt. I enjoy the warmth, companionship, affection, and closeness that come from a relationship, but after enough painful experiences it has become difficult to believe those things are actually attainable for me. I still crave sex but I don’t crave sex with anyone. I don’t want to be around anyone. The idea of investing years of energy into someone and eventually losing them feels overwhelming. I feel similarly about other parts of life. The gym feels like repeatedly moving weights around with no deeper meaning. My job after seven years feels like the same cycle repeating itself. Even travel, something people often recommend when they feel stuck, doesn’t excite me the way it seems like it should. I imagine going somewhere beautiful, enjoying it temporarily, and then returning to the same life afterward. I was very excited about traveling in my 20s but I could never afford it, now that I can afford it my heart isn’t in it. The thing I want most is freedom. I want financial independence. I want my own place. I want the ability to decide how I spend my days instead of waking up every morning and going to a job that drains me. I know this sounds like depression, but I have experienced depression before, especially during my 20s, and this feels different. This feels like exhaustion from years of effort without enough moments that made the effort feel worthwhile. It feels like demoralization. Like the connection between effort and reward has weakened. Like I spent years believing that if I just worked hard enough, eventually life would open up, and I would finally reach the point where things felt easier. That point never really came. My 20s were mostly spent trying to build a foundation. I was trying to graduate, find stable work, become financially secure, and create a future for myself. It took me much longer than expected to finish school. After graduating, a difficult economy left me unemployed for years. I never got that big boy job until I was almost 30, and I was making very little money back then, by that time most men were making double my wage. A lot of my energy went toward simply trying to survive and find stability. During that time, I wasn’t building many memories. I wasn’t taking many risks. I wasn’t traveling, building a strong friend group, exploring relationships, or experimenting with life. I was always preparing for the next stage where I would finally be able to start living. Then I finally reached a point where I had some stability, and the world had become much more expensive. Housing, everything around me, and the cost of building a life all felt further away than I expected. A lot of people build memories in their 20s while they are broke. They travel, form friendships, date, experiment, and create stories. I spent that time trying to build the foundation that would allow me to do those things later. The foundation came later than I hoped, and I feel like I lost a period of life that I can never get back. That is where a lot of the regret comes from. I look back and feel like so much of my life was spent forcing myself through things I didn’t want to do because I believed there would eventually be some payoff. There would be some moment where I could finally relax and enjoy what I built. I feel like I have been swimming toward shore for years, expecting to eventually arrive somewhere, and now I’m exhausted because I’m unsure whether the shore I imagined actually exists. The confusing part is that I still want things. I still want financial independence. I want my own home. I want close friendships. I want companionship, love, warmth, and a sense of belonging. Those desires are still there. What has weakened is my belief that they are realistically attainable. Recently I have thought about going back to school and changing careers. A part of me wants to completely reinvent my life. The motivation isn’t coming from ambition or curiosity as much as wanting freedom from a life and way of life and a job I have grown to hate. I want a different life. I want to feel like I have some control over my own direction again. My body has also started to feel different. I have a chronic pain issue that has gradually become more difficult to manage, and that has added another layer of exhaustion and fatigue. I also have experienced insomnia and sleeping difficulties all my life, and adhd, and depression, it‘s all so tiresome, it takes a lot of energy from my life. I don’t know exactly what I’m asking. Maybe I’m wondering if other people have gone through this period where life starts feeling less exciting and more like a series of obligations. Has anyone else experienced this feeling of losing vitality? Of reaching your 30s and realizing you spent years working toward a future that doesn’t feel the way you imagined it would? Did you eventually find your way out of it? Did something change your perspective, or did you have to make major changes in your life to feel alive again? submitted by /u/TrackAgitated3326
Originally posted by u/TrackAgitated3326 on r/AskMen
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