Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What's a midlife crisis look like?

The neighbor's pond!

It's just a little chunk of central Kentucky. It's all over the place around here.

If you shop around a little bit it doesn't cost much either,...as evidenced by the fact that even *I* can afford a chunk of it.

No, she's a solution to a mid-life crisis!!!

funny how some people think mid life is around 60. trouble is you aint living to 120

Were I to have indulged my mid-life crisis desires, I would hope it might have looked like this:

She'd have to be way hotter.

Elbows too pointy

That's the first 44th thing I noticed.

The hell you say!

She only got one leg

That’s kinky

Her stripper heels are half price

Toe thumbs!

Nope.

Mebbe she got them caught in a hay baler......

That isn’t a crisis, it is a reward

Ironically, I have been in somewhat they same circumstances of late. I did just buy my "Retirement" Truck....Ford F350 One Ton 4x4 Crew Cab Diesel. Should pull my Toy hauling travel trailer (when I find the one I want) wherever I want to go in the West when I retire. I think it's more about the change really....new horizons in front of us and old ways left behind. Planning on pulling the trigger in two years when I first hit 62....no use in waiting around and wasting the precious years here at the end.

Oh, and you might want to check out the new Corvette. Stopped for dinner last night at a local cafe and as I was leaving, here came about 8 Corvettes in. Must have been some Corvette club, mostly Senior citizens driving....one of them had a brand new Vette, still had the temporary tag on it...brand spanking new in Race Red....they are a mid engine model and it looked pretty damn good!

IMO a mid-life crisis is about regret or questioning your past choices and where they have taken you: questioning your career, relationships, decision to have a family or not having one etc.. If you are having those kinds of thoughts, then yeah, you're in one. Buying stuff won't change any of that.

For me, life is about finding things you enjoy doing and people you enjoy doing those things with. I have found those things. I have always loved the shooting sports and being around sportsmen. I shoot trap or skeet 3-4 times a week, and enjoy hanging out with people as much as the actual shooting. I've also loved music and later in life, while attending local music venues, became friends with musicians and ended up playing percussion (self taught) in a band. I never thought I'd have the guts to get up in front of people and perform, but I've been in a working band for 13 years now, playing with friends and having a ball. That expanded my horizon some. I also enjoy just hanging out with friends, having a dram or two and chatting with friends while staring into a fire pit.

I've been retired for almost 10 years. I have enough money to buy lots of toys, cars etc if I wanted them and - - - I don't. We live simply cause we're simple people. We have traveled some to Europe and Canada and while I've enjoyed the experiences, I always look forward to coming home to doing those things I enjoy most with the people I enjoy most.

If you're not having fun or don't like what you're doing and especially don't like who you're doing things with, change it up. But you won't find real satisfaction with a new car or a rent-a-chick.

Midlife crisis is something that hits all of us differently. For some of us, it's a matter of getting out of a rut, and rejecting the life we've built for ourselves. For others, it's something that falls on us like a load of brick dropped from the heavens.

Me? I can't say that my divorce from Satan was a mid-life crisis, although it was the defining point of my adult life for years to come.

My midlife crisis, looking back on it, was a somewhat quiet matter that happened about a decade later. I had been working at the Solder Factory for about 5 years. I had become a Technical Services Manager for a Fortune 500 company. I had the farm. I had managed to get back my house in the divorce. It was looking good. Then the business sold, and I quickly realized that I was in a supreme pickle. The way things were, if I tried to change jobs, Satan would see the shift as a chance to reopen litigation. I could ill afford starting a new job only to get bogged down in lawyers and court. I decided to stick it out under the new owners. Another 5 years later, it all came to ahead. I got laid off. The economy had tanked. I couldn't find a new job in my profession, and 8 months into the unemployment, Satan took me to court for something like $250K.

What I realized, just a short time before I got laid off was that, given the life choices I had at 22 or thereabouts, I'd have probably been facing nearly the same situation. It all kind of converged on a single point. At 22, I could have gone a bunch of different ways. I'd tried Broadcasting and Screenwriting. Newspapers were dying. I'd thought about law school. I finally picked data processing. Now I was 52. It was weird. In a very short time, I watched my friends in Radio and TV all having their careers collapse. My buddies in Film all had tanked. Even the lawyers in town were having trouble. Part of it was due to the aftermath of 9/11. Part of it was the Clinton-era changes in TV and Radio. The Internet killed the newspaper. Part of it was the collapse of the Film Industry. Then there was the Financial Crisis of 2008. That tanked everything. Whatever way I would have picked, I'd have probably ended up in about the same spot.

At some point in all this, I realizef that

1) I had family. A lot of guys had lost theirs
2) I had the farm. No matter what, I wasn't going to starve
3) I had friends. A good number of them were dead already, but those that were still around could be relied on.
4 I had what was between my ears. It had done me fairly well so far
5) I had the will to keep going-- if for no other reason that enjoying the challenge


There was one moment where it nearly all went to $hit. My first job, coming out of this hole was the helpdesk job in Scumsuck-- 50 miles of white-knuckle driving from town. I'd never worked a job where you couldn't touch the other guy's computer. I had to do all this by remote control. My phone skills were good from my radio training. My writing skills were top-notch. I was not so vain as to think being meat-with-a-headset was beneath me.

It was just the sheer volume. I had 80 calls a day -- about one every 8 minutes. Sometime in the first week, I started getting the shakes at lunch. I had a half-hour for lunch, and I just couldn't make it back from the car. I told myself that all I had to do was get to my chair. If I could get to my seat, and stay there, nothing worse could happen. The one thing I couldn't do was leave. They would have to throw me out of the chair. I made it back in. I got settled and worked to the end of the shift. All my time with my vet friends over the years, working through their PTSD with them, had paid me back. It never happend again, and for the next 2 years, I went in feeling I was bulletproof.

That was a decade ago. I'm still feeling bulletproof. If God wants me, he'll take me, but he's going to have to knock me out of chair.

I’m in a similar but slightly different situation. I’m 52 and quit working last November to take care of my terminally ill wife of 28 years.
She passed a couple of weeks ago and now I have to figure out what’s next.
I am retired military so I have a check coming in each month that covers the monthly bills but there’s not enough left over to really retire. I have a really nice house with a barn, riding arena and pasture for horses but that was the wife’s thing. I’m not interested in owning horses again and I’m not interested in providing boarding services for other people’s horses. I may try to lease it out to generate some passive income, but I’m not sure how likely it is that I can find a suitable tenant.
I probably have enough equity in this place that I could sell it and pay cash for something smaller or at least put a big dent in the principle on a new place.
I could go back to work in the ship repair industry and make plenty of money but I don’t think I want to go back to that environment. I could make enough money training dogs or mowing grass to get by okay. I’m hesitant to make any significant decisions this soon after her passing and this is the first time since I was 24 that I don’t have anyone else to take care of.
I think I’m just going to do some hunting and fishing and thinking for a while. I’ll probably do some substitute teaching to augment my income so I don’t deplete my savings while I figure it out.

Good luck to you sir. Take your time and heal. Good things happen to good people.

Or a quarter hour. Less if she's got a minute plan.