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Job, career, or calling: How do you think about your work? What role do family and friends play in your life? Like it or not, our sense of purpose and goals are ever-changing. Here are some common challenges and dangers as you move through your life.
20s
This stage involves starting out, exploring, learning, dating, and possibly marriage. Finding your place in the world. Learning how to be an adult with everything that comes with it—paying bills, buying cars, dating, maybe becoming a parent.
Challenges: How to get a foothold on the job ladder; how to find a partner; how to break away from parents and become more your own person; and how to create the start of a lifestyle that helps you discover who you are and what you need.
Dangers: Struggling to leave home, date, or find satisfying work, often due to anxiety, depression, or self-criticism.
30s
After exploring and building in your 20s, you finally settle down, but now your first adult crisis begins. The marriage reaches the seven-year mark, and you start feeling restless or unfulfilled. You look back on your childhood, and resentments toward your parents surface; you might even distance yourself or cut ties temporarily. The job is okay but not satisfying, and you’re beginning to feel trapped by your obligations to support a family.
Challenges: Pay attention to the seven-year itch and work on upgrading your intimate relationship. Run your own life, rather than your life running you. Deconstruct your childhood while realizing your parents did the best they could.
Dangers: You don’t upgrade your relationship; instead, you push it to the back burner and focus on being parents or on work. Your lifestyle controls you, fueling your feelings of exhaustion and being trapped. You have a difficult time shaking off your resentments, and you cut off your parents.
40s and 50s
A midlife crisis hits when you realize you probably only have 20 good years left. It’s time to make a move—accept that job in Chicago so you can become a VP. If not now, then when? With the kids leaving home, the parallel lives you’re living in your relationship catch up to you. You see that you’ve left too much of yourself behind. Tired of your watered-down, trapped life, divorce seems like a real possibility.
Challenges: To be bold, to be honest, to listen to your gut and what your life is telling you you need.
Dangers: Your fear stops you. You sweep your problems and passions under the rug. You settle and coast or white-knuckle it toward retirement.
60s and beyond
You’ve remarried, are alone, or have settled into a stale, boring relationship because it feels too late to start over. You may still be working, but it’s more about keeping busy than advancing your career. And if you’re retired, you need to create a new identity.
Challenges: Rather than treading water or simply killing time, continue to grow and find a sense of purpose.
Dangers: You look back on your life and are filled with regret for not acting on opportunities, for accommodating others too much, for not fulfilling those early dreams. You slide into a low-level but chronic state of depression.
So, what’s the lesson of this story? How can we overcome challenges and steer clear of dangers? Here are some suggestions:
Follow your passions and dreams as much as you are able.
For some, recognizing their passions and dreams can be the first obstacle because they are so anxious and externally focused, or they dismiss them immediately as unrealistic. If this is true for you, the antidote is acting on the smallest wisps of preference or excitement. It’s about moving out of your head and into your heart and gut.
But even if you find you can’t do what you ideally want, don’t give up on your dreams. Instead, identify the core—the essence of the dream—that shows you what you need to bring into your life. Don’t confuse means and ends, but instead explore other ways to fulfill that need.
Periodically step back and take stock of your life.
It’s too easy to let your life run on autopilot, where you do what you do because you do it. Instead, step back and look at the big picture: How well does your life represent you? How well does your work fulfill your talents and creativity? How well do your intimate relationships provide what you need? Ask the hard questions, be honest with yourself, and if you don’t like the answers, develop a plan of action.
Assume your life is working for you.
Don’t be a victim who views life as constantly dumping on you, where you never get a break, or where the other shoe always drops. Within problems lie lessons to learn, and by seeing them as challenges and opportunities rather than obstacles, they can guide you toward becoming more authentically yourself. It’s about attitude and assumptions, about the story you create and tell yourself, which eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you think about, you become.
Have the courage to change the story.
