You Deserve More Than A Life On Autopilot

Stop Believing Your Best Years Are Behind You

Photo by Almighty Shilref

When did we decide that turning thirty would be the official moment to file our dreams away in the drawer of “youth things”? I see adults in their forties and fifties living as if they’d signed an invisible contract prohibiting new experiences, unexpected passions, or changes in direction.

We’ve transformed into a society that normalizes stagnation as a mark of responsibility, as if exploring new paths after thirty were a sign of immaturity or existential crisis. The true tragedy of middle age isn’t the wrinkles or gray hair — it’s believing we’ve passed our expiration date for growing, changing, and surprising ourselves.

I look at friends who talk about their fifties as if they were the antechamber to irrelevance, sighing about “those times” with the resignation of someone who has already packed away their musical instruments in the attic of memory. It’s extraordinary how we accept this narrative without questioning, how we convince ourselves that there’s a time window for experimentation that definitively closes somewhere between getting married, having children, or reaching a certain professional position.

We treat life as if it were a multiple-choice questionnaire handed out in our twenties, where all answers become…