#for example when I was a kid my friend's dad was a factory foreman with a GED

[random2908]

Here’s something I’ve told a few people in their mid-late 30s over the past few years. Including myself.

Now’s a great time to take stock:

In order to feel you’re living the life you want, or that you’re who you want to be, what do you want your life to look like at 40? What do you want to have done, what do you want to be doing, what do you want to have? Forget the past, forget missed opportunities--everyone makes bad decisions, everyone misses opportunities, everyone has doors closed, it’s the nature of living in a finite timeline. None of that actually matters to this thought exercise. All that matters is the future, and the present as it relates to the future: what direction are you going in? What direction do you want to be going in?

You don’t have to start from an empty sheet of paper with this thought exercise. Think of all the goals you had when you were younger, maybe in your teens or 20s. Some of those are not still going to be things you want. Some of those you might still want but other things have taken higher priority. But it’s a starting point. Fill out your mental list.

A relationship, or kids, or a house, or a specific career, or specific hobbies or skills, or whatever concrete thing that it is that you want. If what you want is to not be a nobody, well, that’s dumb; nearly everyone’s a nobody to the wider world, and nearly no one’s a nobody to the people close to them. If you pick something abstract like that you can’t ever reach it, because you’ll just keep moving your own goalposts until it becomes something literally impossible.

So make a list of concrete, actionable things that you want.

Circle the one that are most important to you, like, top 2.

Now start walking toward those things.

(When you’re comfortably headed toward those top 2 things that you want, if you still have spare energy you can start going farther down the list. Make your ideal life! But prioritize.)

Do you want more friends, more connections with people? Think of activities that you like--hiking, singing, painting, whatever. Find groups that do those things and become a regular in those groups. For example, instead of painting at home go to some shared studio space (sometimes community centers or community colleges or art institutes have these). Go at the same time every week, so you’re meeting the same people every week, because that’s what it takes to make a connection. Or get on the Sierra Club mailing list or the local county parks mailing list and go on all the hikes. Join a choir, volunteer at a charity, whatever. If you have nothing in particular, but there is a religion you like, start going to religious services, because this is the main reason why other people will be at religious services.  Whatever it is, it will take months--making friends is slow anywhere except a school environment--but it will happen. Don’t say no to invitations unless you really can’t make it, until you have enough of a social life that missing some bonding time with a new person won’t matter. Friendship is 95% just about showing up.

Are you single but want a relationship? Ask your friends to set you up. Set up an account in a dating app. (This is admittedly something I don’t know a ton about--I last went on a date when I was 27, and I last willingly went on a date when I was 23.)

Do you want kids? I know at least two people who have gone the artificial insemination route because they wanted kids so badly they were willing to be single parents. Or, alternatively, go through the process of finding a relationship first. Or, if you’re wealthy enough, some jurisdictions will let single people adopt, so you can look into that. If you really want kids, and you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t, your mid-30s are when you have to decide which you want more. (That’s what led to at least one of the artificial insemination decisions among my friends.) (Personally, I did want kids, but not badly enough to be a single mother, and not badly enough to try dating, so I crossed that off my list as non-viable. It’s ok to revise your priorities!)

(Some people--I guess a majority of people--can’t just endogenously produce their own children, so if you’re in that situation, not in a relationship, and you want kids, that’s admittedly going to be harder. You can look for more difficult, creative solutions like adoption, fostering, or even finding a surrogate. Or you can decide some things don’t work out sometimes, grieve a bit, and move on. You can be part of the village helping raise your friends’ kids, at least.)

What about career? Are you ok with your career? Do you want a different one? You know what, you can change careers! You can take night classes. You can just put yourself out there and apply to things you aren’t really qualified and try to learn on the job. I know several people who had huge career changes. My grandfather started an apprenticeship at age 40. A friend of mine, who had been a professional music composer and a science museum docent, decided in their mid-30s to go to grad school, and they’re now a biology professor. I went to trade school for a bit for machining/CNC, and half the students were over 30--some were over 50--looking for a career change. Or if the career’s ok but the job sucks--hit the bricks. I was in what could have been my forever-job last year--certainly my boss assumed I’d be there forever--but I decided I hated my boss and I just walked out. Got a new job doing basically the same thing (just different enough to not violate my non-compete), but out in California--thousands of miles closer to my family, with better weather, better amenities, and (adjusting for cost of living) the same pretty good pay--just two months later. My sister-in-law did the exact same thing last summer, and my brother did the exact same thing the previous year, modulo different locations.

Hobbies? That one’s easy, in principle: set aside some time every weekend and do the hobby you want to do, for at least a couple months.

Travel? There are so many opportunities for travel. If you can’t afford plane tickets--well, my family went on so many cool road trips when I was a kid.

Whatever it is that’s not going the way you want, you can make that change. You can put yourself on the path that you want.

When you get to--well, whatever age, but my case 40--you don’t have to have everything you want. A year ago, when I was handing out this advice, I was confident that I did have everything that I’d decided to prioritize, and at 40 I’d have no regrets. And then I uprooted my whole life in the past several months; I’m about to turn 40 and I don’t still have some of the things I want. But you know what? It’s because I course-corrected. I fixed some things (mainly my work life), and gave up others (mainly, the community I’d built up in Michigan) in the process--but I’m on a better course now. (And just because my old friends aren’t nearby to be community to me anymore doesn’t mean I’ve lost them as friends. It’s not like I’m alone in this world.) I can build new community while not having an abusive boss. At 40, I won’t yet have everything I want, but I’m on the path I want. I’m still actively interrogating my needs as a fully-realized person and turning toward the direction I need to go to meet them, so I still don’t have regrets.

And really, I think that’s what’s important. Not where you are, who you are, what you have right now, but whether you’re headed in the direction you want. And if the answer is no, well, now’s always a great time act on that.

(I’m not saying any of this is easy. Changing your life, if your life isn’t what you want it to be, isn’t easy. I’m just saying, this is a way to do it that’s served me fairly well through my 30s.)

The age thing's a little relevant too. I'm approaching my mid 30's and I just feel adrift, and lost. Nothing in my life's really worked out, I made bad decisions, I missed opportunities, I lost potential. I don't want to live another 40 or so years like this and then die a nobody. I know the "gifted kid" thing is a meme now but everyone thought I had so much potential, including me. And that just makes me feel even worse than if I'd been a loser from the start.

It gets... better? Sort of?

Take everything you have heard about "your potential" and throw it in the trash.

"Potential" is a myth we tell to small children to encourage them to study and work on projects. "Potential" is a way of giving kids a direction and a reason to focus on their interests. Small children have no context for understanding what they could be doing a year, five years, twenty years from now - they just know what they can do right now, and that it doesn't include "build a whole car" or "paint beautiful sunsets" or "write a book" or "be Mayor of Can Town" or "overthrow the Dark Lord and put his minions in wizard-prison" or whatever.

So we tell them: You have potential, which means, You share some personality traits and innate talents with people who have done these things. It gives kids something to aim for. "You have a lot of potential" means "you share a lot of traits with people who are famous for doing these things."

At no point does anyone tell you how many not-famous not-rich just-muddling-by people also have those traits. At no point does anyone say, "You have a terrific singing voice and perfect pitch so you could be a famous musician OR... you could be like Mrs Thomson who plays piano and leads the church choir in a tiny church with 37 weekly attendees and gets paid a $40/week stipend for it, and she also works 5 days a week in the chicken-packing plant."

By the time you are an adult, that is no longer meaningful. You know how to assess your skills, and what kinds of skills you might like to develop, and which of them you'd be good at. (And by "good at," I mean, "good enough to enjoy practicing them and get results that make you happy." I assure you that I am a mediocre cook at best, but I have the level of cooking skills I want, and I know I could develop more if I cared to.)

It's also easy to get intimidated by the people around you, who've developed expertise in areas you have not, especially in areas that you'd like to have more skill.

I promise you that you have expertise in areas other people want. (Because. Here you are, in your 30s, talking to strangers on the internet, and trying to figure out what to do next with your life. THOSE ARE SKILLS. Really. Even the "try to figure out" part; there are people who feel absolutely stuck in life and have no idea why, don't even know how to realize they want something to be different. And I'm betting you have other skills that aren't apparent in an anonymous ask.)

Ignore your "potential" and focus on what do you want to do?

Maybe throw a few thoughts towards "what kind of world do I want to live in, and what would I do if I were living in that world?" but don't put a lot of energy into fantasies about "if we had clean energy and robust anti-capitalist legislation and UBI and..." (I mean. Spend all the time you want on those. But those aren't part of sorting out "what do I do with my life now?") So: if you want to live in a world where neighbors welcome each other to the community with a casserole, then go talk to your neighbors, even if you feel awkward about it. If you want to live in a world with active, thriving libraries, go borrow some books from your local library. If you want to live in a world where you own your digital purchases, learn how to strip the DRM from ebooks. And so on.

If you're running into self-worth issues, consider who the Republican party is running for office, and remind yourself that you are not worse than them, and if they "deserve" money and power and fame, you at least deserve to be comfortable. (Whether they "deserve" what they have or not, they have it, so you might as well decide you deserve some friends and some entertainments and a job you don't hate.)

If you're running into "but all that seems like a lot of effort and I don't know if I have the energy" - pick something smaller as a first goal. Don't write the novel; write one scene that's stuck in your head, one bit of dialogue that makes you want to tell the story around it. Put it in a private file just for you. Start a collection of story fragments.

tl;dr umm...

We're all just muddling along. Really. We're stuck in a capitalist hellscape together. Find something you care about and let yourself be obsessed with it. Give yourself permission to be bad at it. Give yourself permission to just do the 5% you enjoy.

Don't count your achievements by starting with a list of things you haven't done.