Happiness often follows a U-curve in which middle age is uniquely stressful, with a heavy dose of responsibilities. That’s all the more reason to seek out atelic activites when the midlife blues hit: meditation, music, running, or almost anything that brings inner peace. But self-reported happiness does increase later in life.

Oddly, as Setiya observes, many of the most consequential choices we make occur in our 20s and early 30s: careers, partners, families, and more. The midlife crisis is a delayed reaction, hitting when we feel more weighted down by those choices. So the challenge is not necessarily to change everything, he says, but to ask, “How do I appreciate properly what I now am doing?”

My daughter turns 7 tomorrow. I’m feeling like I’m finally hitting a point with that relationship where I am not needed as heavily, and I’ll soon be able to indulge in atelic activities more frequently.

The beautiful thing is that I’m now able to enjoy some of these activities with my kids as they get older.

I think that’s the part of parenting I was looking forward to the most: getting to do cool stuff (like go on rides and play Pokémon) with two really cool little people.

For most companies, accessibility isn’t a priority, or worse, something that they pay lip service to while doing the bare minimum to meet regulatory compliance. Ojala’s pet peeve is people thinking that accessibility is a feature, a nice-to-have addition to your product. When they tack on accessibility later, without thinking about it from the very beginning, Ojala can tell — it feels haphazard. (Imagine first creating a product with a colorless UI, then to add colors later as an afterthought, only to use the wrong color combination.)

I heard long ago that the reason developers should start testing software with accessibility in mind is that everyone, at some point in their life, will benefit from accessible technology.

At a minimum, as your eyesight gets older with age, an increase in font size will make it more comfortable to read things.

Any story that revolves around a few people banding together to solve an actual problem, and how that solution literally changed people’s lives, is so inspiring to me.

It’s what I yearn for at this point in my life. I don’t mind making money and building apps which drive business value. The stability of my job has done wonders for my mental health, and I am supremely grateful that I have it.

But boy, wouldn’t it be fun to get to work on something that has an outsized positive impact on people’s ability to live productive lives?

Last night, I posted an article here called “Everyone needs to grow up.”

I shared it because I’ve personally felt drawn to “childish” things lately, and I’m personally trying to make sense of it… How do you find a balance between serious adult responsibilities (raising a family, managing a team, etc.) and needing a break from that?

A good friend saw that post and sent me this article, which acts as a great counterpoint. (He may be the only reader of this blog, honestly.)

I’m of the opinion that the only way to be an adult is to be willing to meet people where they are and care for them in the way they want to be cared for. It is about setting healthy boundaries; it is about knowing who you are and what you, yourself, can do and can handle. It is about planning for the long-term.

The concept of knowing who I am is absolutely top of mind lately. My wife and I have been considering our own individual values and discussing how those mesh, mostly as a way to understand what we want to instill in our children, but also to figure out who we are as individuals.

One thing I’ve realized while undergoing this thought experiment is that I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life suppressing who I am as a way to maintain neutrality and not rock the boat.

An example: I really like using “big words”. I find it hard sometimes to express my thoughts, and it makes me happy when I find a new word which poignantly expresses a thought. But then I often avoid using those words because I don’t want to be seen as aloof or pretentious.

Anyway, I think some people are really in tune with who they are and are unafraid to show that to the world. Being an adult, for me, is finding a way to be comfortable with who I am and not ashamed of it.

I don’t think people are adult babies now, at least not offline. Although I do think it’s maybe harder than ever to be an adult. The traditional markers of transitioning through life-stages are evaporating; basically all that’s left to guide you are bills and literature. The structures that created our modern idea of adulthood have collapsed — which is to say governments aren’t subsidizing things like homeownership like they did after the Second World War — and it’s easy to feel adrift.

Boy, ain’t that the truth. We have a playbook for life all the way up through high school. From there, it’s a boot out of the nest, and it is up to us individually to figure out how to adult.

At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.

This may mean letting go of a false or outdated self-image, including some cherished illusions of unique unlovability.

I recently had a talk with Shannon that was eerily similar to the central conceit of this article.

We don’t get to pick how we show up in other people’s interpretation of ourselves. The author’s story about his dad sleeping at the movie theater next to him is a great example.

Any time we scrounge away from work is to be filled with efficient blasts of high-intensity exercise, or other improving activities, such as meditation or prepping nutritionally balanced meals. Our hobbies are monetised side hustles; our homes informal hotels; our cars are repurposed for ride-sharing apps. We holiday with the solemn purpose of returning recharged, ready for ever-more punishing overwork. Doing nothing – simply savouring the miracle of our existence in this world – is a luxury afforded only to the respectably retired, or children.

Oof. As someone currently on vacation, this hit particularly hard.

The history of American housework suggests that both sides have a point. Americans tend to use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime in inferior conditions. And when material concerns are mostly met, Americans fixate on their status and class, and that of their children, and work tirelessly to preserve and grow it.

But most Americans don’t have the economic or political power to negotiate a better deal for themselves. Their working hours and income are shaped by higher powers, like bosses, federal laws, and societal expectations.

To solve the problems of overwork and time starvation, we have to recognize both that individuals have the agency to make small changes to improve their lives and that, without broader changes to our laws and norms and social expectations, no amount of overwork will ever be enough.

Two parts of this article really spoke to me:

The more capitalism wants us to feel scrambled so that we are isolated, automatonized, and susceptible to replacing our own needs with the needs of capital, the more quickly capitalism needs to sell us an ever-wider array of identities to feel secure and logical within.

It does feel tough, as a millennial with a school-aged child, to navigate all of the various identities that “youths” cling onto these days.

“A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses,” he writes. “Hopefully, alternative rhythms can challenge, or at least syncopate, the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism.”

What he’s saying is that we need to stop taking the stripping of our identities and the selling of new ones to us as a given, and start to create our own, at our own pace, in our own way.

I went for a walk around Lough Eske this afternoon, and I was thinking about the identity I want to create for myself.

Identity has been something that is of keen interest to me lately, especially after leaving JMG.

I feel like since taking a step back from the persona of “app developer / entrepreneur”, I’ve been able to be more curious and exploratory.

It’s why my headline on LinkedIn is “anecdotalist.” It’s a touch douchey, for sure, but it feels like the closest I can get to how I feel.

Anyway, read this article and think about how it applies to the beliefs that you hold most closely. Whether that’s Christian, an intellectual, a parent, or whatever. Take some time to reflect on why you feel like you have to be ”something”.

Managers: If your job ladder doesn’t require that your senior people have glue work skills, think about how you were expecting that work to get done.

Glue people: Push back on requests to do more than your fair share of non-promotable work, and put your effort into something you want to get good at.

Our skills aren’t fixed in place. You can be good and lots of things. You can do anything.

According to the website 80,000 Hours, the typical career is just that: 80,000 hours long. That’s an almost unfathomable amount of time. But life is long too. The typical person is alive for slightly more than 4,000 weeks, and awake and conscious for the equivalent of 3,000 weeks. When you do the basic math on 80,000 hours, you discover that the average career is roughly the equivalent of 480 sleepless weeks of labor. A little bit more math, and you realize that the typical person has five waking hours of not working for every one hour of their career.

Work is too big a thing to not take seriously. But it is too small a thing to take too seriously. Your work is one-sixth of your waking existence. Your career is not your life. Behave accordingly.

I also liked Derek Thompson's advice about chasing the job you want, not the title you want to tell people you have.

This is not meant to be a happy story about the need to get out of the bubble of like-minded coastal elites; I think it’s totally OK, recommended even, to stay far far away from people who think you are going to hell. But I guess I think it’s also OK to touch the hot stove occasionally if you want to, to pretend that this time you won’t let it hurt you.