Have You Reached Peak Life Dissatisfaction?

I have a bunch of mates I’ve hung onto since my teenage years. We have a big Whatsapp group where we check in regularly and never miss an opportunity to mock each other senselessly.

Last month it was one of the boys’ (they will always be boys to me; never men) 45th. My friend opened the congratulations with a ‘Happy Birthday! How are you!? How does it feel to be 45!?’

The reply was as fast as it was depressing.

“Bored, discontent, unfulfilled. Always wondering if there is any excitement and true joy left to be had in life; or whether I’ll spend my days on this hamster wheel just clinging on, half asleep.”

He was joking, of course. Kind of… This was from a very happily married man, with a gorgeous, successful wife, healthy thriving children and a career which bores him to tears but brings home some pretty lucrative bacon.

It wasn’t long before lots of the group chimed in in solidarity. They too were bored, unfulfilled, wondering where all the thrill had gone from life. Why did everything feel so mundane? So turgid? Again, they were joking… kind of.

I sat quietly, reading the message and felt that weird mix of sad and smug I often feel when I encounter this topic with friends (which I do with alarming regularity).

I wasn’t at all surprised at what I was reading; and it was something that resonated with me, because three and a half years ago I was feeling pretty much the same. I had reached peak life dissatisfaction. Let’s call it PLD, because I’m going to repeat that phrase at least 97 times before the end of this article. It’s what I see in so many of my friends in their forties. They’re not desperately unhappy, as I progressed on to being. But they feel they’re sleepwalking through life, whilst at the same time being rushed off their feet and stressed to high heaven. It’s not a fun place to be.

It’s also, thankfully, a pretty normal place to be. Research shws that contentedness follows a U-shape curve; we are generally happiest in our youth, with a dip in mid-life, and then a recovery as we reach our old-age. One study showed that the peak of our discontentedness with life occurs at the age of 47. I’m not quite there yet, and neither are most of my friends. Anecdotally I’ve noticed PLD setting in in the early forties with my peers and colleagues.

I’m wildly generalisng here of course, but in the main, we spend our twenties frantically building a career, which in so many cases (mine included) turns out not to be something we want to do for the rest of our lives. We spend our thirties conforming to what we definitely feel we should be doing… getting a nice big crippling mortgage, marrying or at the least co-habiting, getting a dog or having a couple of kids. Tick tick tick.

We are busy with a capital B.

Then our forties arrive. Lots of us struggle with it. Time is ticking and we can hear it increasingly loudly.

We’re halfway through our time on this wonderful planet. And we still haven’t achieved half the things we wish we had. We still haven’t visited the countries we planned to have visited by now. We are still somehow, always, a little bit skint at the end of the month, despite working like crazy. We fall into comfy routines of Netflix (with no chill) and takeaways and watch in despair as our waistlines expand over the months and years. We look in the mirror and note that the wrinkles are getting deeper and the under-eye circles are darkening by the day. We haven’t felt a surge of ‘got-to-have-you-right-this-second’ passion coursing through our veins (and tingling our down-below bits) for a decade.We look at our partners and though they’re often perfectly nice; we can’t stand to hear them chew. And we wonder, if we met them now; with our fully-developed pre-frontal cortex… would we really have hitched our wagon, our entire existence to theirs?

Now before I go on; I want to make clear I’m not an advocate of divorce. I am not an advocate for quitting a career which pays your mortgage and gives security to your family. Neither am I an advocate for renting your house out, putting your kids up for adoption and going travelling around Southeast Asia. Because I changed my life in my forties by calling time on my marriage; people come to me for advice. And they always seem to think I’m going to advise everyone to chuck in the towel and start a new relationship or a new career or to make whatever other life-altering change it is they’re fantasising about.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. In the main I listen, and I come to the conclusion with them, that our forties will invariably involve a level of PLD. That ‘can’t have it all’ adage is sad but oh so true. But that’s not always a bad thing. For most of us, the contentedness and safety of our daily existence is enough. We find surety in those routines and the mundaneity feels protective, rather than smothering.

I usually explain it this way…

There’s a difference between Peak Life Dissatisfaction and what Glennon Doyle, author of the simply awe-inspiring book Untamed, calls, ‘The Knowing’.

She describes the knowing as a deep intuitive sense, right down in your gut, nudging you towards what you know to be true. Now, yes, if you’re an old sceptic like me, that may all sound a little bit ‘woo’ for your liking. But believe me, I had the knowing. And once I knew, I absolutely had to act. I had a sudden urgency to live a different life, to free myself, as hard and as painful as I knew it was going to be. A lifetime of being risk-averse and cautious was thrown to the wind, and it felt like I had no choice but to follow my gut.

Most of the friends I talk to don’t have the knowing. They have the ennui and the exhaustion, yes. They may have reached their very own PLD. But they don’t have the burning, the nagging voice telling them they’re genuinely living the wrong life.

PLD may well result in some midlife-crisis lite style moments. New sports car, searching up your childhood flame on Facebook, running an ultramarathon… hell, you might even get a fringe cut in. But you’ll come back down the other side of the mountain, hopefully with your marriage and career in tact. Maybe you’ll have made some tweaks, and things felt more bearable. Happier even. And that’s not boring, that can be really beautiful. There is beauty in sticking with something which is too worthwhile to discard.

The knowing is different. I firmly believe a lifetime of regret awaits you, should you drown out that voice.

In the past few years I’ve read so many books (and listened to many a podcast) on navigating divorce, on rebuilding in mid-life, on trusting your own instincts, on raising children. I’ve gotten to know myself, my attributes and my flaws in all their gory glory.

Despite all those books, the best two quotes I’ve found to inspire me were found on good old Instagram. They were so impactful to me that I have them framed and hung in my house where I can see them every day. I hope if you feel you’ve reached PLD, or indeed if you have the knowing, that they will help you.

The first quote is from the poem, ‘Snow’, by Carol Ann Duffy and reading this for the first time felt like someone who loved me very much was shaking me by shoulders.

‘What will you do now with the gift of your left life?’

It’s stark and beautiful and reminded me that this life is indeed a gift, not something to be taken for granted, and certainly not something to be dwindled away in unhappiness. Every birthday, every trip around the sun is a gift not all of us are lucky enough to receive. It’s a gift not to be wasted in a loveless marriage or in a job which sucks the joy out of you or in a town which makes you feel trapped. What are you actually going to do with the days you have left?

The second quote, I can’t credit unfortunately, but again it spoke volumes to me.

‘The way your life feels is so much more important than how it looks.’

It’s so obvious isn’t it? But so easy to forget, whilst we’re on the hamster wheel of life. We lose sight of what’s important in our pursuit of the big detached house, the promotion at work, the four-wheel drive car and the fancy schmancy holidays we share on our social media. I absolutely fell for that myself for a while. Right into the striving, comparison trap… the one which steals all your joy and makes you feel lacking. Believing that having a big kitchen isand and bifold doors was really what mattered at that stage of my life.

I can tell you, my life used to look pretty damn good. Big house in a very nice area, two new cars on the drive, holidays abroad a few times a year. I worked freelance teaching Pilates and my writing was really taking off and finally paying me a wage. I had lots of friends, great extended family and three lovely kids.

But for too long my life didn’t feel the way I felt my one, precious life should feel, and this nagging voice asking me, ‘is this it?’ would not shut up. It whispered in my ear while I was brushing my teeth. Screamed at me as I drove to work. Harassed me as I hoovered.

I know from the outside now that my life doesn’t look anywhere near as good, as successful as it did. I have more responsibility, less money. I work way more hours and I have way less time for myself. But the way my life feels now is incomparable. My money (or lack of it) is my own. My decisions (right or wrong) are my own. I have a fella who makes my knees tremble like they did when I first saw Mark Owen in 1992. That in itself feels a bit miraculous at the ages of 43. I thought those days were long, long gone.

I’ve noticed that people who I’ve talked to who are experiencing PLD or have the knowing, are all held back, trapped, by the same thing.

They don’t want to be selfish. They don’t want to change their children’s quality of life or disappoint their parents by leaving a loveless marriage, or by going back to university in order to chase the career they desperately crave, or by selling up and escaping the city for the seaside.

On this note I always come back to the decision I made and how my children factored into that. It took me many years to allow myself to think this; but it was absolutely true and I still stand by it: What are we teaching our children by staying in any kind of situation where we feel desperately bored/uninspired/unhappy? That self-sacrifice is something to be applauded. That putting aside our own happiness for the sake of others’ is always the right thing to do. That our needs aren’t important. That martyrdom is the way forward. That our one precious life isn’t that precious after all.

They deserve a better example than that. Teach your children, if you have them, to choose joy. Teach them their happiness matters and that sometimes they’ll have to take risks to achieve it.

That way by the time they’re 47 and experiencing their contentedness dip (by which time we’ll be old and ecstatic hurray!) they’ll be able to tell the difference between a standard case of PLD and a not-to-be-ignored case of the knowing.

For those of you reading this aware you are desperately trying to bury your knowing and stick your head in the sand; I’ll leave you with the words of the queen of life reinvention, Glennon Doyle, on how to live more bravely…

“You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you. And if they are not and you dare to admit they are not, you must decide if you have the guts, the right — perhaps even the duty — to burn to the ground that which is not true and beautiful enough and get started building what is.” — Glennon Doyle