I do think the claims of mid-life crisis are probably accurate. But having thought about it a lot more, there’s also something else going on. I’ve always had strong ups and downs emotionally in my life, sort of like this:
You may be completely unsurprised to hear that my first year college dorm nickname was “Rain Man”. In my defense, the movie had also just come out. But yeah, big ups, big downs. That’s kinda me.
Something happens when you have kids, or at least something happened to me. I tried to describe it a while back and I think what I said then is still accurate:
As an adult, you may think you’ve roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You’ve loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.
In other words, children open this supermassive black hole of feeling in you (or at least, in me). Where that was the kinda fairly broad up and down emotional range of things I already felt, now it’s more like this:
The feelings I have for my kids are so much more intense than any romantic or family love I’ve ever felt. It’s fucking terrifying. Not that I don’t love my wife, I absolutely do, but the whole romantic range of feeling seems awfully quaint to me now relative to the new normal my kids showed me. So @vesper that’s another answer to your question.
You can’t really go back once this happens, either. It’s like using the internet on broadband. You can’t return to dial-up without realizing, wow, this is a whole lot slower. This is way less strong, less intense of a feeling. Not that it’s wrong, or invalid in any way, but it kinda stops mattering to you in the context of this other enormous thing dwarfing the horizon.
Once that emotional door was opened in me, once that range was widened so dramatically, everything else in my life kinda sloooowly starts creeping in there over the years, and like in the SNL cowbell skit, “really exploring the space”. This is … not fun. For example. A month or so ago I was driving to the datacenter to do some routine maintenance stuff, which is maybe an hour drive. At least half the time on that drive I was completely bawling my eyes out, just crying like sieve about … I literally don’t even know. I have no idea. I couldn’t even tell you. I just felt so hard and I could not stop. It’s like the normal emotional backstops you have on the high and low range are effectively gone.
If I trace the themes in the original post back to their source, it really did begin when I had kids. I now have feels of a depth that I kinda don’t … want to have at some level? It’s the emotional equivalent of suddenly deciding to take up freestyle BASE jumping. Except you didn’t really want to be a BASE jumper, someone pushed you off the edge and said GL;HF so that’s your new hobby now. I mean, unless you’d rather not be here at all.
And nobody wants that, right?