Struggling for purpose in a modern world

The loss of direction

For many people, hitting 40 or 50 was supposed to signal that they had reached the peak of their lives and their ambitions. Sadly, for many nowadays, it feels more like standing at the summit of a mountain, surrounded by thick fog and without a compass. As you climbed, the view grew more beautiful, and you yearned to reach the top to look back on your life in all its beauty. Now it’s grey, cold, and you can’t see the path down anymore.

Welcome to midlife in a crazy, changing world that’s moving along at breakneck speeds, and the map you were given in your 20s doesn’t seem to work on the new terrain.

When you’re a resilience life coach like I am, who is focusing on helping people bridge the gap between personal growth and a volatile global landscape, you start to see patterns. People aren’t just lost, they’re experiencing a fundamental disconnection between who they are and where they are in the world. This has always been the case with previous generations, the difference here being the rate of change that is gaining even more pace. People who have been hit in the past could look at the playbook and plot a new way forward. Now the playbook or map is thirty years out of date.

It happened to me

I know this is true because it happened to me. Everyone’s definition of success is different depending on many external factors, and I was no different because I was schooled and raised in a system that was grooming me for a “one degree, one career” consumer life. We were all educated to believe in the standardised life checklist . I hated school, so I didn’t do well, which put me on a path away from a prescribed normal life. I found alternate ways to master my life, but still, when I hit mid-forties, I felt I was losing ambition, purpose and drive. Something had changed within me, but I just couldn’t seem to get back on the old track.

I spent three years studying self-help books, articles and looking at all manner of courses to finally come to the conclusion that the checklist life was broken. It had changed and was continuing to change at such a rate that even people with thirty years of being adults couldn’t find a way through the chaos.

This old roadmap that had worked for a generation or two is, as people like me in my 40s and 50s are finding out, no longer a workable roadmap for your life. It worked before, but is now an outdated path.

After three years, I came up with a number of areas I needed to review regularly to navigate the chaos fast approaching. These five areas of focus became the key aspects of my coaching programme, tried and tested to help you build the resilience needed to live in a changing world.

“Civilisation begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos” – Will Durrant

The first major pain point that every midlifer experiences is loss of purpose. Here are the major issues causing this loss in midlife today, how they actually feel, and how to build a resilient way forward.

The collapse of the scripted purpose

For decades, many of us ran on autopilot in our lives. We followed the script we learned from our parents and institutions: to chase a good education, a long-term career, to partner up and have a family, and to get a mortgage and buy a house. These were the key markers of success in our society. If you didn’t strive for or achieve them, you were a failure. Then, around age 45, this map became out of sync with the world. What are our children supposed to do if machines do most things at zero cost? Most people I speak to worry about this more than anything else. They also start to question their own place in the world. Job = Purpose. So what now for humanity?

• The feeling: A hollowed-out sense of “Is this all there is?” It’s a quiet crisis where you’ve achieved the goals, but the elation and satisfaction have evaporated. The thrill of striving and achieving is gone in a world where you don’t know where to turn to next, or what you’re supposed to be doing going forward. Your life has become constricting and uncomfortable, like comfortable clothing that you’ve had for a while that is now two sizes too small.
• The resilience solution: A bit of reframing is needed here. Stop thinking of this as a midlife crisis and instead think of it as a midlife edit or a reinvention.  It’s time to move from those extrinsic goals (what society wants) to intrinsic values (what your soul requires). Resilience here means auditing your life and deciding which “default settings” no longer serve the person you’re becoming. Tear up the old playbook and design your own.

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” – Carl Jung

Macro-anxiety and a polycrisis fatigue

You’ve spent 20 years watching the world through the lens of career, money and maybe politics. You were told by the media that our environment, energy sector, and the economy are shifting and declining in ways that feel threatening to our lives. Most people instinctively feel this like some low-level hum of dread in the pit of their stomach. You’re programmed by repetition and evolution to feel the constant need to fit into society, or face the risk and embarrassment of being excluded or worse, mocked for being wrong.

• The feeling: You are overwhelmed and feel powerless to change anything on the planet. It’s like trying to build a sandcastle on the beach while the tide comes in faster than you can build. It’s the panic of sensing that the world is not only broken, but that your life doesn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things.
• The Resilience Solution: Agency through Localisation. Take control of your life (agency) by starting in your own home and your local community. Forget about trying to control and change global issues that will have very little effect on your daily lives. Purpose is always found in agency. Focus on what you can control, such as developing your existing skills and learning new ones. Get involved in your local community and help it to grow and strengthen. You’ll find purpose in the bridge between global awareness and local action.

The “sandwich generation” squeeze

Understand that many others like yourself in midlife are caught between the needs of ever-ageing parents and the demands of adult (or nearly adult) children. You’re the structural foundation holding up two floors of a house, and you’re starting to feel pressure as the cracks appear more and more.

• The feeling: There is never enough time in the day to help everyone, and you feel the utter exhaustion. You stress over the utter erasure of your “self” as you have to straddle three generations. Some weeks, all you feel like is a free service provider rather than a human being. Your own purpose in life has been sacrificed at the altar of everyone else’s needs, so you’ve started to feel more lost. People like you soon start to feel invisible to the world
• The resilience solution: Radical boundaries. You’ve probably been on a flight and been through the safety briefing about oxygen masks on a plane. If you don’t put yours on first, you’ll be useless to help your loved ones or friends sitting near you. Think of it as sustainable compassion, where you’re learning to say no, so that when you say yes, it actually has more value and can be more helpful to others.

The digital displacement

The rise of AI and the rapid shift in the professional landscape will suddenly render your 20 years of experience obsolete. If we are to believe how disruptive AI will be to our economic model and business world, and there is no reason to think it won’t, corporate ladders and career paths will flatten, rendering all that experience you’ve built up as redundant. For men and women who’ve derived their purpose from being “the expert,” this can be a soul-crushing blow. Your CV is becoming obsolete as knowledge becomes cheaper with AI models and agents that can access all human knowledge in seconds.

You’re also a person who probably worked or had a business before the internet and Google. You’ve revelled in both the analogue and early digital worlds, but this has all changed with the attention economy and its algorithms. Again, I’ll mention it here, the playbook you used to achieve this is broken, and you’re struggling to find a role in the world for yourself going forward.

• The feeling: Irrelevance. It’s that fear of being “put out to pasture” while you still believe you’re in your prime. It feels like speaking a language no one uses anymore, especially in a digitally dominated workplace. You sit there, looking at your phone or laptop, with digital fatigue from constantly being online and being available to everyone who is no longer grateful for your help or contributions.
• The resilience solution: Adaptive learning. Education and learning in midlife is now your secret sauce. You can easily learn anything you want (use AI to research how to do this). Fill your life with several new skills. Just remember that AI can’t replicate 20 years of your human intuition, compassion, and macro-understanding of how humans interact. Your purpose now could be to be the interpreter. AI resilience will mean pivoting from being an employee to being a strategist, mentor or entrepreneur. Quick tip. Upload your full life CV, that is, your work experience and knowledge, and your personal achievements and bucket lists into AI, and ask it to help future-proof your life. It won’t be without its errors, but it may help to kickstart new interests and skills.

The Physical Betrayal

Midlife brings a surprising hormonal shift to humanity, with menopause for women and decreasing testosterone for men. These aren’t just physical changes to people’s bodies but are also psychological ones that alter how we see our place (purpose) in the world. They alter your energy levels in various ways, slowly impeding your drive, ambition, and purpose.

Nostalgia is a great way to remember the old days with fondness. That incredible song, a great road trip with someone special, those days of going around town on your bikes as kids, with no one caring where you were. Those days of absolute freedom. Nostalgia can also alter your mental state when you start comparing yourself with your younger self, mentally or physically. You mourn the person you are no longer, especially since you have no clue who you’re supposed to become.

A feeling of loss arises from not staying that person, rather than from seeing that you will only reach your full potential by the age of 80. It’s time to leave that young sprite back in those days and start building your next phase, which is to be as-strong-as-fuck in your old age as you can. Getting stronger physically has a major positive impact on your mental health. You, of course, already know that from all the cliched quotes about the body and mind.

• The feeling: A loss of vitality and a feeling of “fading out.” It’s like all the colour is being drained from the film you’ve been watching. You feel less visible, less capable, and less you.
• The resilience dissolution: Physiological toughness. This later phase of your life is the perfect time to treat your body like a high-performance vehicle that needs a higher-grade of fuel. You have to train differently and know that building a strong foundation in midlife will help with mobility and strength (quality of life) in your seventies and eighties. It’s a choice for your future self between walking around the place and being independent or being bedbound and tended to by healthcare workers. Purpose will be found in mastering this new version of yourself and helping you grow. It’s about weight training, movement, nutrition, and sleep that all act as a form of rebellion against “fading away.”

“Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – Dylan Thomas

Takeaway

Building a resilient life for yourself is not about bouncing back to reclaim your youth when you were 30. That person is long gone. Modern midlife is about bouncing forward into a version of yourself that is tougher, wiser, and more adaptable. But it’s key to remember that you have to create and mould that person into the better version of you.

Actionable Steps:

• The life audit: Identify one default setting or belief that you’re following just because you think you should. Anything that can be put under the umbrella of “keeping up with the Joneses”.  Delete it this week.
• Narrow the lens: If the world feels too chaotic and scary, focus your energy on one local project where you can see a direct result of your effort. Research Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport wrote a book about this) and remove the need to constantly be online, or contactable. Delete the fucking notification pings on your phone or watch. It’s part of saying no.
• Identify the gap: Research the “Wheel of Life” coaching tool. It’s available all over the web. Where are you stuck in your life? Is it fear of the future, or something weighing you down from the past? Take action to remedy it or cut it out of your life.

The world is changing faster than we really comprehend. We don’t see it because so much of how we’ve been trained by institutions, media and politicians is to stay in our lane. Follow the path to success, so you can retire and rest.  They hide and obfuscate what is happening out there to keep you calm and manageable. Thankfully, this is changing as people wake up to the fact that the rat race, American dream, or career ladder, to name a few terms for it, were control mechanisms. They have no plans for you when you feel out of touch or without purpose in a world that is changing so much. All they have to suggest are solutions that worked before in the old days.

I want to tell you that it doesn’t mean you’re lost because you feel out of sorts in a world that you were supposed to know and understand. As you awaken, it just means you’re becoming more of a pioneer out there. And pioneers always need a new sense of purpose. So, stop waiting for it to magically appear, and start creating yours.

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