The Midlife Crisis Is Marketing. The Pivot Is Real.
What looks like breaking down is usually breaking free.
They sold us the myth years ago. The convertible. The gym membership. The side relationship. “Midlife crisis” became shorthand for panic with a credit card.
It wasn’t a revelation. It was a campaign.
The story was simple: if you feel restless in your forties or fifties, something must be wrong. Buy something shiny to fix it. Trade your fear for horsepower. Distract yourself from the question underneath it all: what now?
But what if that restlessness isn’t collapse? What if it’s clarity trying to break through the noise?
The midlife crisis isn’t a malfunction. It’s a message. It’s the moment your old definition of success stops working.
For me, it hit in a boardroom. I’d just wrapped a presentation that landed perfectly. Polite applause, nods around the table, the usual validation. And yet walking back to my car, it felt empty. Like clapping for an encore you didn’t believe in.
That’s not a breakdown. That’s your system rebooting.
A pivot isn’t a crisis. It’s what happens when the version of you that played by the rules finally asks who wrote them. It’s choosing creation over consumption. It’s remembering what it felt like to care about something before you were paid to.
Here’s what I know from doing it myself: the pivot doesn’t come from ambition. It comes from honesty. From looking at the life you’ve built and realizing that parts of it belong to an older draft of you. From having the courage to edit.
Crisis is reactive. Pivoting is intentional. One burns everything down. The other builds something new on purpose.
If you’re feeling the pull to change, stop apologizing for it. That’s not a problem to solve. That’s an invitation to answer.
Because the truth is, most of us don’t hit a wall at midlife. We finally see the door, and this time, we’re the ones turning the handle.
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Sometimes it is hard to be honest with yourself and to realize that change/pivot brings new experiences which are good. Our past experiences are safe, it's what we know, however, if a person feels that curiosity of trying something new, therein lies the message to try something new which will become our standard experience and familiarity.