By your 50s, if you’ve achieved some success, outgrown most bullshit, and seen the same mistakes on loop, the world can stop feeling new. It’s not burnout exactly, it’s existential fatigue. You may lose the will to stay engaged, to reinvent, to stay in love with the world despite its absurdity. Building new "tribes" when the old ones dissolve and vitality that isn’t tied to novelty? Even the meaningful enemies are gone. Being wealthy but without the worm in your brain/ demons that thrash you to“Do more, be more, show them”, all gone. It's not a great life anymore. The striving stops. And in that silence, you meet yourself in an unsettling kind of stillness. It’s not depression. It’s not burnout. It’s existential fatigue, a numbness at the edge of success. All that's left is to not be a bad example to your kids, in the hope that they won't have the same happen to them.
While tea, toast with salt butter fixes many things... I'm reminded of "After you’ve got everything you want, you find you don’t want it." George Bernard Shaw. Edit: He hated tea I have just learned. Well I'm not that bad then. "5. Shaw was a vegetarian In 1881, at the age of 25, Shaw began experimenting with vegetarianism. He later declared that “a man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses”. Shaw considered eating to be a “troublesome necessity”, and was a firm advocate of clean living - as well as shunning meat, he didn’t drink alcohol or smoke, and he drank neither tea nor coffee!" https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-...ery-priceless-education/five-things-about-GBS
I was pondering and I think my malaise is that I haven't have any victimhood to drive me for a long time. I never had much ever, just momentary tensions that resolved one way or another. Many rich people live with a kind of engine inside them, fueled by injustice, trauma, or the need to prove something to the world or to themselves. But if your past isn’t full of demons, and you’ve emerged physically, emotionally, and socially intact, it can leave a curious vacuum in your fifties: Now what?
It seems the destiny of life is just keep moving. When I study aminals, insects, birds, humans, they all have the same characteric of moving. Everything moves. Don't think when you retire or finally make it financially that your goal is then to relax. No, ya gotta keep moving. When you stop moving, next up is the grave.
Well before tve grave I'm trying @tetramorium 's tea and toast suggestion. Seems to help alright. Chunky marmalade now... I'll have to make that as you can't buy it here. That will keep me busy some of today. Well