Jake Burhans explains Michael Singer's take on mid-life crisis: the shock in your 40s that chasing degrees, promotions, money, and status never filled the emptiness inside. The fix isn't to quit ambition, but to stop using it as a cure for feeling inadequate. Build self-acceptance and enoughness first, then pursue external wins from a place of wholeness.
And I heard Michael Singer talk about a midlife crisis. And it makes complete sense. A midlife crisis, from the words of Michael Singer, are you wake up one day, you basically, you wake up, say one day, and you're in your 40s, right? 44, whatever it is. You've been chasing things your entire life externally. So you don't feel okay on the inside from whatever programming you had from when you were a kid. And you went to college. And you thought the degree would do it. Then you thought the master's would do it. Then you thought climbing the ladder at your job and being the senior manager would do it. And then you thought if you made more money, it would do it. And then you thought if you were gonna get married, that would do it. And then, oh nope, getting kids, that'll do it. Oh, let's travel around the world, that's gonna do it. Nope, you know what, actually the Corvette, that's gonna do it. And then you've done everything, right? You've done everything. You got married, you had kids, you know, stuff. Then you wake up one day at 44 and you're just like, wow, I still feel like crap on the inside after all that stuff. And then you panic, and then what do you do? You go do more external stuff. You go get another car, and obviously it doesn't do anything. But that's the whole midlife crisis, 'cause you've been chasing things. So if we can just stop chasing external things, doesn't mean that you can't have them, it just means don't seek them out of lack. Mm-hmm. Because you don't feel okay on the inside, so you're trying to get these things to make you feel okay. It's not going to. You have to choose to be happy, you have to choose to be grateful. And it's a lot easier said than done. It's the hardest thing, and it's the work that we do our entire life, is to feel that we are enough and feel grateful and loved and all those things from the get-go. And then you seek these things secondarily.
