I turned 40 today. Whatever.
I turned 40 today. Whatever.
Thought it would hit different. Like I'd wake up, look in the mirror, and see some middle-aged guy with dead eyes staring back. Midlife crisis mode activated.
Nope. Nothing. Weirdly enough I feel more awake than I did at 35. Maybe because I finally stopped pretending everything's fine.
I worked assembly lines. Then industrial cleaning — warehouses, factories, that kind of thing. Managed crews, optimized processes, all the unglamorous stuff. Now I'm in logistics.
Decent work? Sure. Pays the bills, coworkers aren't assholes. But somewhere along the way I caught myself running on autopilot. Like a phone in low power mode. Technically functioning. Barely.
Wake up. Work. Home. Some show on Netflix. Sleep. Repeat.
I wasn't miserable. Just... nothing. Empty in a way that's hard to explain.
Friends started joking: "Forty! Time to buy a Harley and disappear into the sunset!"
Look, I actually like motorcycles. Got my license and everything. But this isn't about some desperate "oh shit I'm old" panic move. It's different.
At some point your brain just asks: do we really want to do this for another 20 years? Or can we finally be honest about who we are now instead of who we were supposed to be at 25?
At 25 I thought stability was the goal. Got a job, getting paid, what else do you need. At 40 you realize "stability" often just means "stuck and too scared to move."
Didn't buy a sports car. Started asking myself questions I'd been avoiding instead.
What would I do if I didn't have to prove anything to anyone? Turns out — tech stuff. Automation. I've always been curious about how you take an idea and turn it into something that actually works. But I figured that's "not for people like me." I'm from cleaning, the hell do I know about technology.
What am I actually scared of? Looking like an idiot. Starting from scratch at 40. That voice in your head going "dude, kids half your age will run circles around you."
Yeah well. Fuck it. Let them. I'm not competing with them anyway.
Here's the funny thing. I thought my background was a liability. Who's gonna take a 40-year-old from industrial cleaning seriously in anything new?
Then it clicked. I spent years managing people when everything's on fire. Solving problems on the fly. Dealing with difficult clients. Squeezing every penny out of broken processes.
That's management. Operations. People skills. Different tools, same principles.
Right now I'm messing around with automation. Trying to build my own stuff. Going terribly. First script I wrote did absolutely nothing. Second one deleted the wrong file. Great times.
But every expert was once a clueless beginner who just didn't quit.
Am I scared? Of course I'm scared. That I'll waste my time. That a year from now I'll be in the same spot, just older. That people will look at me like I'm having some kind of breakdown — "dude you're 40, why are you acting like a college kid?"
Whatever. Rather be the weird guy who's trying something than the normal guy slowly dying at a job he doesn't care about.
Where's this all going? No idea. Maybe a business. Maybe just a hobby. Maybe something completely different in a year.
Don't know. And that's okay.
I'm moving. Sometimes I look like an idiot. But I'm not stuck anymore. That's something.
Anyone else going through this? Or already did? Drop a line — misery's more fun with company.
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