The 40-Year Itch - Seeking Fulfillment
This article is based on the transcript from the Cafe Grit Podcast, S1E04.
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🦟 The itch often starts around the age of 40.
🕰 It's noticeably different how you feel about your job. You start hearing that little word “fulfillment” whispered in your head on a regular basis. 🤫
(fulfillment)
After a few years, it's unmistakable. Your career isn't what you thought it was. It's the same role you've been grinding at for a while now...same tasks, same coworkers, same boss, same company. 🎡
But the truth is…it's not the same.
🤔 You are not the same. Something has changed.
You need something more. 👊 🌈 🤗 🍁
The general timeline varies, but somewhere around 40, give or take…it hits, and it doesn't go away. ⏳
Sometimes people scratch this itch by moving into a different role or a different department. Some start working for a different company altogether. And a lot of people just say “fuck you” to the corporate world and start their own business. 🖕🏼🖕🏾🖕🏻
What does this 40-Year Itch look like?
The symptoms I experienced and have heard about from others tend to include things like:
🧠 You no longer tolerate the bullshit of your job whereas before it didn’t rattle you as much.
🧠 You feel like something is missing. You’ve been doing your job for years (and you're still rocking it!) but it no longer provides fulfillment.
🧠 You start to switch from prioritizing income and stability to prioritizing happiness and satisfaction. The money is less important than loving what you do to earn a living.
🧠 You can no longer deny that you crave change…even though that change—whatever it happens to be—is a very scary thing. Because to stay where you are is worse.
🐛 This itch happened to me in a previous job. I didn't feel effective anymore. I was lost in the noise, lost in the chaos of a big corporation. I was surrounded by great people, amazing leadership, I was in a stable position and I was well-paid...but something had changed. 🦋
I had been there for 16 years when I left. Other than a very dark couple of years that culminated in a big bacon-themed protest (which I wrote about in Where The Hell Is My Bacon?), it was a great place to work. 🥓📚
😲 Then things started to change. First, I became a manager, and it took me a long time to find any kind of fulfillment in that role. Suddenly I was not working for my own satisfaction, but instead responsible for an entire team of people. That was a hard adjustment.
I was also working in multiple roles. I had too much to do and no prioritization, everything was critical. 🌪
I started going through what a lot of people go through at that age, after a lot of years in the rat race. I really wanted to be effective and valued and successful again. I craved fulfillment and found none. I got burned out. The money and stability I had after working 16 years for the same company became secondary to happiness.
☝🏽 And I know so many people with similar stories.
Why does this happen?
What is it about our 40s and 50s where we start getting this itch that we never had before?
👩🏻🦰👨🏽👱🏻♀️👨🏼🦳🧔🏻🧑🏼🦳👩🏾🦱 There isn’t any one thing that sticks out as the smoking gun. The reasons why this happens are pretty diverse, unique to the individual, but there are some common themes and I want to explore a few that stand out.
1. As we age, we are looked at differently.
🦕 There is no doubt that we don’t exactly revere aging, at least not in the US. A lot of people, especially women—who do tend to get judged a little harder as we age—start to sense this subtle change in perception toward us when we hit our 40s.
Some of that may be internal. But not all of it. I see it today. Women of a certain age, especially ones who speak out, tend to bring out the slightly patronizing and condescending tones just a teensy bit more than others. 🙄
Not from everyone. But you notice the one.
For anyone aging, the myths abound: We are slower, sicker, less sharp, old-fashioned, less tech-savvy, counting the days (to retirement), etc. Maybe we even believe it ourselves.
And no doubt this plays into our job satisfaction.
2. After years or even decades at the same or similar jobs, we get burned out.
🔥 Oh yeah. For me this was huge.
I read an article recently in psychologicalscience.org about some research on job satisfaction (link below). It showed that while job satisfaction overall tends to improve as we get older…it also tends to decrease the longer we stay at a particular job.
🏖 Apparently, there is a honeymoon period when we first start a job. Life is great for a while. But then it goes downhill from there.
Which is fascinating, because if this is true, then the job hoppers are the ones who really have it figured out! 🦘
This study makes total sense to me. A lot of people experience burn out. Everything is a priority, there is no focus, it's all noise. You feel like you're living in chaos every day, just trying to keep your head above water, forever fighting just to get things done with little or no sense of fulfillment even when you do. 😫
After a while, the thought of doing something new—anything new—gets very appealing.
3. Something changes at work and it drives you out.
Often there is something tangible that kickstarts that itch:
😳 “I loved my job for seven years, then something changed, and then I hated it.”
😳 “It was great until they hired a new management team.”
😳 "After 11 years we merged with another company and I got moved into another role."
😳 “They brought in a CIO from another industry, she hired a bunch of her colleagues, outsourced our jobs, and then someone removed bacon from the cafeteria salad bar.” 🥓
Okay, that last one might have been mine. 📚
🌎 🌍 🌏 All it takes is one thing to turn your world upside down. This can happen at any age, but maybe when we get into our middle years (our glory years!), we have less tolerance for the bullshit than we did when we were young whippersnappers. 🐣
Which is ironic because we often have more to lose.
4. When we reach those glory years, we finally have the courage, the confidence, to go after what we want.
Personally, I think this is huge.
🦁 I have heard a lot of people say they never had the guts to quit their job or speak out to their management team or start their own business when they were younger. But at some point, they were comfortable enough in their own skin to find the courage to make a change.
Maybe 40 or 50 is the new Fuck You. 🖕🏻🖕🏼🖕🏽🖕🏾
I mean, let’s face it. There are a lot of things going on around that age that pave the way for a career change.
👍🏾 The kids (if you have them) are often out of the house, on their own. You no longer have as much focus on them.
👍🏽 You’ve got a good amount of years or even decades of work and life experience.
👍🏻 You’re probably a bit more financially stable, on average. Income is good, maybe you’ve even put some away for a rainy day.
Suddenly, you find yourself brave enough to go through with it. And I think that’s pretty cool! 😎
So there you have it.
These are a few of the more common reasons I’ve heard for people getting this itch for fulfillment in their 40’s and early 50’s. There are probably a hundred more factors to consider.
But there’s one thing that really stands out to me, as someone who has spent the last 20 years in the corporate world: Companies let a lot of really good people go. And that is sad.
But as it happens…sometimes a company loss is a gain for the rest of the world. BOOM.
What do you think?
Now I want to hear from you:
❓❓❓Tell me...have you gone through this?
❓❓❓Did your need for fulfillment correlate to anything tangible?
❓❓❓Was it strictly an internal feeling?
❓❓❓Do you think we get perceived differently as we age? Are women judged a bit harder?
🧠 Let me know your thoughts about this in the comments.
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Thank you once again for stopping by Café Grit, where the moxie is fresh, the passion cold-brewed, and everything is served with a heaping side of mojo.
I’d love to hear your comments, questions, suggestions for future topics, or corrections (except for the Grammar police…you all can just keep your damn mouths shut, no one wants to hear from you).
And check out Where The Hell Is My Bacon: How An Innocent Pork Product Conquered Employee Engagement And Change Management At A Large Midwestern Corporation for the true story of how one stressed-out IT department found their voice through bacon.
That’s all for now, we’ll talk to you soon…and remember: You don’t have to deal with the bullshit, and there IS something better out there. Let’s figure it out together.
Take it easy…
Links:
Links to your favorite podcast platforms are available at the Café Grit Buzzsprout website here: https://cafegrit.buzzsprout.com/
Link to the article on Job Satisfaction mentioned above: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/job-satisfaction-tends-to-increase-with-age.html
