And there’s more. A few years ago researchers made an unexpected discovery that, around the age of forty, people begin to experience feelings of dissatisfaction and a diminished sense of well-being. They were surprised to find this in men and women, rich and poor and all over the world. But the bigger surprise was the rebound effect. At around the age of fifty, feelings of well-being begin to rise again—and keep on rising, well into the seventies. In the twenty-first century, fifty is the beginning of a new and aspirational time of life.

SOURCE: Jane Pauley makes the case for reinvention in ‘Your Life Calling’ – TODAY.com.

The primary crux of the source article is about how Jane Pauley has come out to declare that she is bi-polar. This is a very brave and honorable thing to do. It helps take the stigma of this chemically induced state out of the shadows so that people can get a glimpse of real people with the problem.  Jane Pauley is a Hoosier who, like David Letterman, started out in an Indy television station. For that reason I have watched her career throughout the years.

But  as is often the case I want to run off on a tangent to discuss the above quote from the article. All of us at one time or another go through periods of dissatisfaction and a diminished sense of well-being. For some of us it last much longer than others. This condition is more popularly known as mid-life crisis but it really goes beyond that basic concept. Forty is indeed mid-life for most of us. I can’t say that I personally had much of a mid-life crisis. I think I was too busy trying “to do more with less” as the mantra went in those days. I turned forty in the mid-1980s and that was the beginning of our current trend of turning employees from assets to liabilities. More and more people were being laid off and those of us who remained were told we would have to do more with less.

I have always had at least some degree of dissatisfaction with my life throughout it run. I always thought that I was not really where I wanted to be.  But the money was good and the security that comes along with that salary compensated for those feelings.  But over the fifteen years after my fortieth birthday those feelings would increase.  When I left the corporate workforce in 2000 I was more than ready to go.

But then came the post-years where I, as all of us who retires early, came to question just what I wanted to do with this new life. So, to me my mid to late fifties were my crisis years. I can happily declare that my sixties have been the most satisfying years of my life and I hope that trend continues into my seventies which will likely by my final decade.

So, maybe I didn’t exactly fit the trend in the quote above. It was delayed for me. But I am certainly glad that I am over the hump with those types of feelings….