Mid-Life Crisis: No Such Thing. #AdviceNobodyWantsToHear #TechLead

I think I'm having a midlife crisis I
lost my wife my son my family I lost my job a good career over at Facebook and you know it's like one moment I was attending my kids birthday party working my nine-to-five job and then the next day everything vanished as if none of it even happened it was two years of dating four years of marriage raising a kid changing all those diapers transitioning from Google to Facebook and all of that just vanished and now it feels like I have been running in the wrong direction this whole time and all of your carefully laid out plans for life just don't seem to make sense anymore there's a sense of restlessness emptiness making stupid little YouTube videos for stupid little people reading stupid little comments and who knows maybe everybody they're just pots right maybe nobody's watching this video except you and all those other views that we're getting maybe they're just those outsource pots that I paid for and I find myself questioning what am I even doing here we seem to be struggling all of our lives trying to reach a state where we can just sleep in all day and that seems to be the dream where you don't even have to get up you don't have to go work you don't have to do anything and you can just sit back and relax and that's pretty much what I have now I can just sleep in all day and it really doesn't matter if I wake up or not every day I have enough funds to sustain myself and yet there's an emptiness to it it doesn't feel fulfilling at best I'm a divorced dad at worst I'm a husband youtuber [Music] it's like a double sometimes we wonder how I keep from going under at one moment in that video he says quote it feels like I have been running in the wrong direction this whole time the reason for the crisis whether it be midlife quarter life or at any other time crisis gonna arise any stage and any age of your life the reason why it's a crisis is that we construe meaning in our lives our sense of leading a meaningful life is not relative to the past it's not relative to our own desires it's not relative to our own motivations it's relative to our idea of the future our notions about the future that we assert here and now we live with the future and the future gives us a sense of meaning and purpose and the efforts we're making the work we're doing here and now in a profound way that's easy to lose sight of especially if you have the same job for many years or you work towards the same goals for many years and then suddenly if you're separated from that vision of the future the the end to which those efforts were heading then you've got a crisis doesn't matter if you're 20 years old doesn't matter if you're 50 years old as a manager 80 years old alright the meaning of the the efforts we make here and now is measured against an imaginary future outcome and that's what we feel and experience as the meaning of our lives right or wrong and you can't be wrong again and again and again why did I work so hard to learn Chinese because I had certain definite goals in mind certain definite outcomes I was pursuing I was cut off from those goals it's a crisis I realize now that my reasons for learning Chinese were wrong as he says it feels like I have been running in the wrong door action this whole time right like as if you're trying to dig your way try to dig a tunnel and then you find out this tunnel doesn't lead where you thought it was gonna lead it never can lead where you want to lead doesn't matter how hard you dig doesn't matter how hard you work you are just digging your own grave you thought you were done digging a tunnel that leads somewhere and you're just digging a tunnel that that leads down and you know in my case I feel like I'm almost an expert on this topic because I've been through this kind of crisis again and again and again before I worked hard to teach myself Chinese I worked hard to teach myself Cambodian right wasn't a hobby wasn't for fun that was that was part of the meaning of my life right that was part of the pursuit of a meaningful life for me and was connected to research at humanitarian work and the study of history all kinds of other things and as soon as I'm cut off from the vision of the future the viable future that the destination the tunnel was digging doors as soon as it becomes clear that all this hard work I did on learning cambodian is for nothing that there is the destinations not going to be there then i then i've got a crisis right doesn't matter if i'm young old or what-have-you now again for me personally tragically these are not the only examples i could mention i studied korean a Jib way as languages first nations languages indigenous languages in canada with definite outcomes definite future in mind and all these for me are really linked to trying to make the world a better place they're not just linked to a career in the sense of earning money and then when it becomes clear that future is impossible all the hard work I did in those languages for nothing and goes back this goes back the first Asian language I learned was Korean I was a very young man when I started studying Korean with a very definite idea of humanitarian work and politics and why I wanted to study Korean and when I figured out I figured out pretty quickly in that case there was no future of the kind I was looking for with Korean again even that was the kind of tragedy that this side of my life I mean look a lot of you watching this video you're gonna be expecting me to talk about my divorce and my ex-wife guess what max wife's a horrible human being it's no big deal people fall in love with the wrong person all the time when I talk about my ex ex-wife in person or on the internet most of the time what I want to do is emphasize the positive elements because the negative is so obvious and I remember saying to my mom a couple months ago you know you never asked me why I fell in love with this woman you never asked me what was good about this relationship what was good about her there were good things but you know you figure out at a certain point the person I married is not the person I thought she was then you want to get divorced and I'm really glad I dumped her and eventually legally will get divorced the legal paperwork has been in slow motion a hundred percent at her choosing and her urging her strategy her strategy has been to refuse to let me get divorced to refuse to comply with the legal processes so we're paying a huge amount of money's being spent on lawyers and it goes on and on but regardless the divorce and even the separation from my own daughter it's not really a crisis in quite this same way by contrast a video I did a couple of months ago called University tuition the problem isn't the price is the value that video actually for me really explains the crisis of my life and it's not just a midlife crisis it was already a crisis when I was 20 years old and 25 years old and 30 and 30 but it's been a crisis again and again and again and it's a crisis of pursuing something in education whether the myriad university degrees of pursued the myriad areas of academic study have pursued and then realizing oh as I say you're digging a tunnel you're not digging a tunnel to somewhere you're digging a tunnel to nowhere you're digging your own grave and the harder you dig the more effort you make the more harm you're doing to yourself I would say that right now about me and Chinese though this studying Chinese isn't just a waste of my time it's destroying and discarding any possible positive future I could have that's a really crushing I mean emotionally and intellectually it's a really crushing realization to come to where you realize the things have been pursuing the things I've been striving for the things I've put hours and hours of hard work into it's not just they don't lead to a positive outcome but when you look at it in terms of opportunity costs when you look at your life when you realize what you could be doing at that time what you should be doing with your time now you realize that you've been harming yourself by making what you thought have it's positive efforts because that that objective you're working to it isn't there the tunnel the tunnel leads straight down for me my first experience this kind was when I was 11 years old when I had just turned 11 1989 follow the Berlin Wall up to that point like age 8 9 10 the future I saw and this wasn't just from my parents but what I saw on the news what I saw on newspapers you know at that end you literally see the news you don't really watch the news you look at newspapers you're clean read newspaper you know you see headlines you have a vague sense of what's going on politically in the world my view of life on Earth and the future life I'd have as an adult was world war 3 was a war between Russia and in the United States and my parents were both communists they were communist extremists so I imagined I would be fighting on the Russian side whereas most of my classmates in school would be fighting on the American side it's unbeliev I mean it shaped my childhood at least as profoundly as growing up Christian would shave someone else's childhood growing up you know a Catholic or some kind of mainstream form of Christianity maybe not as extreme and influence as growing up in a cult but a different cults for different folks what can I tell you and 1989 happens and then all of a sudden you're told that future isn't coming the nuclear bombs that you imagined could drop at any time you know like like the like the start of a rates you know the the starter pistol going Marilla did anytime nuclear bombs could start falling and then World War three was here and we were off it was a new era a new era that I saw again on newspapers and TV TV news but that you also had to imagine as a child watching cartoons that depicted we're watching action movies you know cartoons that showed the future people fighting wearing spacesuits and I remember asking my parents you know like well you can't breathe the air when it's radioactive so what are people going to be wearing facemasks like these spacesuits I see on cartoons is that how we're gonna be fighting this well what's what's gonna happen my idea of what my education was leading to and what I was preparing for up till 1989 the fall of the Berlin Wall War was World War 3 was this Cold War nightmare that I grew up with the nightmare that to me was normal nightmare that defined the future I was getting ready for and then one day that was gone there is no such thing as a midlife crisis and I think it's sort of tragic the way we trivialize people sorrow and people struggle with this term oh you know Tom he's having a midlife crisis look is it a crisis or not I think people have a crisis at any age at age 11 age 38 50 whatever it may be when they realize as this guy has just said it feels like I've been running in the wrong direction the whole time when you realize that your goals aren't just unattainable that this isn't the destination you're working towards and you suddenly have to re-evaluate all of the work all the effort you've made in the past and what it is you're doing right now and the crisis is you know if you don't change it's gonna be a disaster it's gonna be worse and worse the crisis is you have to act you have to do something different you have to be somebody different you have to become a different person doing a different thing or else and you don't know what you're supposed to do you don't know who you're supposed to be and why because you had a clear vision of the future you had some set of assumptions about the future that now just now you know to be false then at that [Music]