Your Midlife Crisis Isn’t a Bug – It’s a Feature

From about 40 to 45, I was confused. Not just “having a rough patch” confused – but questioning everything: my choices, my values, my purpose, who I even was. I tried to go back to the achievement path that had worked before. Couldn’t. I tried to figure out what was next. Couldn’t do that either. For five years, I thought something was wrong with me.

Then I found something that reframed those entire years – and it matters as something that changes how you show up in the confusion, not just how you think about it.

I discovered three completely independent frameworks – one from developmental psychology, one from leadership research, one from the study of masculine maturity – that all describe the same transition. They have different names for it: the shift from “conventional” to “post-conventional” thinking, the “crisis of integrity” between achievement and reflection, “the tunnel” between prince and king. But they all point to the same thing: around midlife, some people outgrow the achievement-focused life and start moving toward something deeper. Questions about meaning, purpose, values – not as abstractions, but as actual lived concerns.

Here’s what matters: all three frameworks say this transition is normal. Expected. A feature of human development, not a bug. It happens to intelligent, questioning people who’ve actually succeeded at the achievement game and found it hollow. The confusion isn’t a sign you’re broken – it’s a sign you’re evolving.

When I first read this, I understood what was happening with me. I wasn’t failing at life. I was in a documented developmental stage that millions of people go through. The frameworks even explained why I couldn’t go back (you can’t un-outgrow something) and why I couldn’t rush forward (developmental transitions take as long as they take – for me, about five years).

I didn’t know this at the time I was going through my midlife crisis. But if I did, I can only guess that my anxiety would have dropped. Not because the confusion would have gone away, but because I would have stopped fighting it. Same questions, same uncertainty, but a completely different relationship to it. Instead of “what’s wrong with me?” it would have become “I’m in transition – there’s something on the other side.”

That shift – from thinking you’re broken to understanding you’re evolving – is what makes the difference in how you move through your days.

The video walks through all three frameworks and what actually shifts when you understand this. Watch it above.