I’ve seen a number of people talking about their midlife crisis recently, probably because lots of my friends are of a similar age to me. I enjoyed listening to Kieran Setiya discuss this on Philosophy Bites.

“If you have a desire for a goal and your life is guided by that, that’s what’s giving meaning to your life, in a way, by aiming to complete that goal, to finish that project, what your aiming to do or the effect of your success will be to eliminate that project from your life.  It’s now done and thereby to eliminate a source of meaning from your life.

So pursing projects has this paradoxical self destructive quality whereby the things that are giving purpose to your existence are the very things, in pursing which, you are extinguishing and thereby destroying the purpose of your life.”