A big part of midlife is the feel of windows of opportunity closing. You don’t realize how much room a vague option was occupying in your head until it closes.
“I’ll never do X” gets locked in for more and more X.
Not because it becomes impossible but because rising expected effort exceeds falling expected reward — you care about it far less than you thought. You start accurately pricing how much you care about all sorts of things once you’ve accomplished a few things and are calibrated.
Like, at age 20 when I went on a 10-day high altitude hiking thing at ~13k feet I thought I might want to climb Everest
I could *possibly* kill myself training and still actually do it, it’s never too late yada yada yada, but…
Small change: I’m in 3x worse shape than at 20
Big change: I know I care 100x less
Windows of opportunity close not when you can no longer do X, but when you realize you don’t really *want* to do 90% of things you casually thought you might want to, when young
Specific options close faster than generalized desire to do undefined “stuff.” And meaningful new ones that are not warmed over Act 1 sophomore desires of 20y olds are few and far between. That sense of vacuum from general/specific purpose mismatch = midlife crisis
It’s a kinda interesting via negativa experience to clinically go down a list of things you once thought you wanted to do and cross them off with “doh wtf was I thinking, I clearly didn’t know myself at all when I put that on the list”
Not that I have an actual list but many do
A good proxy is selected books from your antilibrary some of which represent aspirations that never were
Books that have transitioned from “antilibrary” to “willneverreadary” are a pruning of life adjacent possible
All this feels like midlife crisis but only as long as resist it. Once you accept that an option has closed, it’s liberating. Realizing you don’t really care enough about X to want it is liberation from everything X represents in life’s greater phase space
Options have to close at the right time though
Closing out an option too early is almost certainly sour grapes, not self-knowledge, and you’ll not really be able to let go, and keep justifying it to yourself