Mid-life "what next?"

I am decidedly mid-life and I am still uncertain of what I am doing…what I want to be doing.  It feels so much more abstract than any of my education forecasted. It would be different if I had a degree in philosophy. There isn’t a predetermined path for learning how (and different ways) to think. Of course thinking skills apply, or at least they should apply, to any and all jobs; but a philosophy degree is not expected to chart a clear path from graduation to employment.

Journalism and public health, on the other hand, are pretty prescriptive in the working world. Only for me, they aren’t. 

Instead I’ve dabbled in things and had a multitude of amazing experiences that leave me, in this middle section of my living, wondering where I go next and how I maneuver it all into something that is at least partially profitable as well as meaningful. 

In 2014 my focus is on money. It feels strange to write it. Hell, it feels strange to even think it. Money has never been at the forefront of any working decision I’ve made. I never took a gig that couldn’t at least feed me, but I’ve never really considered how a gig would impact my ability to retire before the age of 90, or even if my job had great (or any) insurance. 

Free of monetary focus/constrictions I’ve been employed in ways that have allowed me to grow (sometimes the hard way) and learn, and experience a world that following a prescriptive path from graduation to retirement might have made more challenging. I acknowledge and appreciate that I can’t but a monetary value on that.

While waiting for my placement for Peace Corps I had a temp job at a big marine and offshore classification company. I started out stuffing envelopes for them and that morphed into taking over a mid-management position in their marketing department that had been vacated abruptly. They liked my work enough to offer me a pretty comfortable salary for a new graduate with only journalism internships on her resume.

My parents were ecstatic. They urged me to consider it. It was “an amazing opportunity.” And it was. It just wasn’t one that I wanted. I had a plan and working at a job I barely tolerated in the short-term didn’t factor into that plan.

And so I worked there until Peace Corps sent my invitation to serve in South Africa and then I hastily said farewell and packed my bags for my first step into the life I was choosing for myself. 

 

Post-Peace Corps I bounced around a bit, trying to reconcile what I’d done and learned in rural South Africa.  There was transition work that reacquainted me with living in America, and then school, and then back overseas. Even then, in my flurry of life changes, I was working plans- short-term though they were: transition and more specialized training.

Each step helped me to know what I didn’t want to do but none of it cemented what I did want to do…not in any way that I could harness and hurl myself into. 

Friends often assume that my decisions are arbitrary. They aren’t. The problem isn’t that I don’t plan, only that my plans aren’t macro. Held alone they have a purpose; a beginning, middle, and end. But laid out as a map for my life and it reads more as maze than directions. 

And what do I do with that now?

Given the opportunity to go back and “do over” I can’t imagine choosing differently. Everything I’ve done has made me- good or bad – into who and where I am. But still I am left in mid-life limbo, wondering not what will happen next but what should happen next. 

Living (and loving the living) in the bay area, where rents are rising even beyond their usual obscenity, I can’t ignore money anymore. I can’t live solely in the experience of things without regard to the expense of them.

And so this year I’m in search of reconciliation between those points: experiential living, conscientious living, authentic living, profitable living. I know it is possible in more than the abstract or anecdotes published in self-help books. I have friends living their versions of that reality (here and here and here… just a few of the easily showcased examples).

The question (and quest) for this year, then, is not “if” but “how”. How do I piece together my micro plans into a macro one. One that builds on what I’ve learned and allows me to think about retirement without panic. How do I weave travel, and food, and diversified duties, and a love of the Bay, social responsibility into my mid-life plan?