i actually monologued about it to . something like:
"the thing is i think ive been approaching work and meetings and schedules and corporate life like im too cool for it. (pause) which. I am"
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and nevertheless here i am living in a boring suburban house with a yard and owning a car and having a wife and a baby and actually paying attention to work and busting my ass every day
and it feels good actually
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I spent some time turning this over as i drove to the store to get dinner for my wife and it was productive.
two points
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1. there are several major periods in a person's life. some of them are biologically linked, others not. they are not of fixed duration. most are common but some are not.
examples from my life include infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, whatever im in now
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the demands of life and desires of the heart are very different across these phases. a schoolboy wants very different things, and needs to be a different sort of person, than a breadwinner
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2. letting ones desires and identity transition to accommodate the demands of a new phase is disorienting and possibly the most challenging part of a person's life, and stumbling may be the source of many hard lives.
I am imagining two main classes of failure modes here
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the first failure mode is the obvious one of not letting oneself change. i had been stumbling about with this one without knowing it for a while by keeping work (which does actually matter) at arms length from what I imagined my life to be about
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a very good depiction of a similar case is in _Juno_; if you've seen it you know the character I'm talking about
(I don't think I was anywhere near as bad as that one)
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consider also Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused; Linus and his security blanket
these are extreme cases
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the second failure mode is swerving so hard into the new phase that one fails to integrate it with their past lives
this is subtler and I don't have any clean examples from fiction but I suspect its nevertheless a real problem
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Replying to @eigenrobot
you either die a cool kid or live long enough to see yourself become a normie
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Replying to
i have done this! i also don't have any clean examples from fiction off the top of my head