From the outside, there is often very little to complain about.
Work is stable, the bills are being paid, the children are healthy, and most responsibilities are being handled reasonably well. Life appears to be functioning exactly as it should. In many ways, it resembles the version of adulthood you spent years working towards.
Yet every now and then, a question appears quietly in the background.
Not during a crisis, not after a major setback. Often it arrives on an ordinary Tuesday while driving home from work, sitting on the couch after dinner, or staring out the window with a coffee in hand.
The question is simple:
What am I actually working towards now?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.
After moving from Australia to Lithuania, I spent nine months looking for work before eventually accepting a role making prosthetics for amputees. At the time, I was genuinely grateful to receive an offer. After months of uncertainty, having stable employment felt like progress and, if I’m honest, a relief.
Part of me also believed the role would feel deeply meaningful. Helping people walk again seemed like the sort of purpose-driven work many people spend years hoping to find.
The reality turned out to be more complicated.
The work itself is valuable, the people are good, and the company has treated me fairly. There are many aspects of the role that I respect.
Yet over time I found myself feeling less fulfilled than I expected.
Nothing was objectively wrong, which made the feeling surprisingly difficult to understand. It’s easy to identify dissatisfaction when something is clearly broken, it’s much harder when life is mostly working.
That’s what made me realise that perhaps the issue wasn’t unhappiness at all.
Perhaps it was direction.
The Hidden Benefit Of Having Something To Chase
For much of our lives, direction is built into the process.
When we’re younger, there is always another milestone waiting ahead. School leads to university, university leads to a career, careers lead to promotions, mortgages, relationships, children and financial goals. Even when those periods feel stressful, there is usually a clear sense of movement.
You’re heading somewhere.
Looking back, some of the busiest years of my life were also some of the most energising. During university, I worked multiple jobs while studying full-time. Later, I spent more than twenty years working in pharmaceuticals, managing sales territories, customer relationships, performance targets and additional responsibilities.
The workload was often significant, but I rarely felt directionless.
There was always another challenge to tackle and another objective sitting just over the horizon.
What I suspect now is that many of us weren’t drawing energy from achievement itself.
We were drawing energy from momentum.
Life felt engaging because we knew where to direct our effort.
The challenge is that this dynamic changes as we move through midlife.
Responsibility Is Not The Same As Direction
Something I’ve been wrestling with recently is the difference between being busy and actually feeling like you’re moving towards something.
For most of my adult life those two things felt almost identical.
If I was working hard, making progress, solving problems and handling responsibilities, I assumed I was moving forward. Looking back, I think many of us make that assumption because for a long time it’s true.
In your twenties and thirties there is usually a clear target ahead. You build a career, you buy a home, you raise children, you pay off debt and you work towards the next promotion or the next opportunity.
Even when life feels difficult, there is a sense of direction because there is something obvious to aim at.
What I’ve started noticing recently is that direction becomes harder to recognise once many of those goals have already been achieved.
The responsibilities don’t disappear …. If anything, they increase.
There are still bills to pay, work to complete, children to support and obligations to manage. The calendar remains full and the to-do list never seems to get shorter.
But somewhere along the way I realised that responsibility and direction aren’t quite the same thing.
Responsibility tells you what needs to be done.
Direction gives you a reason to feel excited about where you’re going.
The two often overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.
I think this is partly why some men reach midlife feeling confused by a sense of dissatisfaction they can’t fully explain. From the outside, life appears successful, the responsibilities are being handled and the important boxes have been ticked.
Yet internally there can be a growing sense that most of your energy is being spent maintaining what already exists rather than building something new.
I don’t mean that in a negative way.
Maintenance is part of adult life.
Families need stability, careers require consistency and responsibilities matter.
But I also think human beings need something beyond maintenance.
We need curiosity …. We need growth!
We need the feeling that some part of our life is still expanding rather than simply being preserved.
That has become increasingly obvious to me through the work I’ve been doing with The Frictionless Man. This project makes very little logical sense, it consumes time, generates no income, some weeks it generates almost no traffic at all.
Yet I keep coming back.
Not because I have a detailed plan, but because it creates energy.
And lately I’ve started wondering whether energy might be one of the most useful signals we have when trying to understand what matters to us.
When Stability Stops Feeling Satisfying
For years I thought stability and fulfilment were closely related.
The assumption seemed reasonable enough. If most of our stress comes from uncertainty, then surely removing uncertainty should create satisfaction.
To some extent it does.
Financial stability reduces pressure.
Career stability creates security.
Routine creates predictability.
All of those things are valuable.
The problem is that security and fulfilment aren’t necessarily the same experience.
One helps you sleep at night, whilst the other gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Looking back, some of the periods when I felt most alive were not particularly stable at all. University certainly wasn’t stable, relocating countries wasn’t stable and building a website with no guarantee of success isn’t especially stable either.
But each of those periods contained something that stable periods sometimes lack.
Momentum.
There was a feeling that I was learning, growing, exploring or building something.
That’s the part I think many midlife professionals miss when life starts feeling flatter than expected.
It’s rarely chaos they want …. It’s movement.
Why The Feeling Often Gets Ignored
One reason this experience can be difficult to address is because it feels vaguely selfish.
After all, many people are struggling with genuine hardship, if life is mostly working, what right do we have to feel dissatisfied?
So instead of exploring the feeling, many of us push it aside.
We stay busy.
We focus on responsibilities.
We distract ourselves with work, television, social media, hobbies or a few beers on the weekend.
I’ve certainly done all of those things, not because the question is unimportant, but because there isn’t always an obvious answer.
What exactly are you supposed to do when life is functioning reasonably well but feels slightly less meaningful than you expected?
There isn’t a productivity framework for that.
There isn’t a checklist.
There isn’t a course.
There is simply a growing awareness that something deserves attention.
The Connection We Don’t Always Recognise
I’ve noticed something else recently.
The periods where I feel most directionless often overlap with periods where I feel less connected. Not necessarily lonely in the traditional sense, but less connected to the people, conversations, and experiences that help life feel meaningful.
That distinction matters.
In Why Constant Interaction Doesn’t Always Feel Like Connection, I wrote about how it’s possible to spend entire days talking to people while still feeling disconnected. Looking back, I think connection provides something many of us underestimate.
It helps us make sense of ourselves.
Meaning often emerges through conversations, shared experiences and relationships.
When those become increasingly transactional, it’s easier to lose touch with what genuinely matters to us.
Sometimes what feels like a lack of purpose is actually a lack of meaningful engagement.
Following Curiosity Instead Of Chasing Purpose
The more I’ve reflected on this recently, the less interested I’ve become in the idea of “finding my purpose.”
Purpose feels enormous.
Almost intimidating.
Curiosity feels more practical.
I’ve noticed that certain subjects continue attracting my attention whether they make sense or not.
For me, that seems to be writing, marketing and, somewhat unexpectedly, shoe making. Nobody is asking me to spend time on any of those things and they’re certainly not paying me yet I keep returning to them.
I don’t need reminders to explore those topics.
Because curiosity often leaves clues before purpose reveals itself. The activities that repeatedly pull your attention may be telling you something worth listening to.
This idea connects closely with When Your Career Quietly Becomes Your Identity. Sometimes we become so focused on the roles we’ve built that we stop noticing the interests trying to emerge alongside them.
The challenge isn’t necessarily abandoning what you’ve built, it’s making enough room to discover what still energises you.
A Different Question
For a long time, I thought the goal was to find fulfilment.
Now I’m not so sure.
Perhaps fulfilment isn’t something you discover all at once, maybe fulfilment emerges gradually when enough areas of life feel aligned. Meaningful work helps, but so do meaningful relationships, opportunities for growth and challenges that feel worth pursuing. None of those things need to be perfect, they simply need to point in roughly the same direction.
Not perfect.
Not complete.
Just aligned enough that life feels like it’s moving somewhere worthwhile, which is why I’ve started asking a different question.
Instead of:
“What should I achieve next?”
I find myself asking:
“What continues attracting my attention when nobody is asking me to pay attention to it?”
The answer isn’t always clear, but if often contains more useful information than another goal ever could.
A Few Questions Worth Sitting With
If life feels stable but slightly directionless, it may be worth asking yourself a few quieter questions.
What part of my life currently gives me energy rather than simply requiring it?
What am I maintaining because it matters, and what am I maintaining because I have not stopped to question it?
What interests keep returning, even when they are not practical or immediately useful?
Who do I feel most like myself around?
What would I be curious to explore if I did not need to turn it into a major life decision straight away?
None of these questions require an immediate answer. Sometimes direction begins by noticing what continues to pull your attention, rather than forcing yourself to choose a new destination.
Final Thought
If you’ve ever looked around at a life that appears successful on paper and wondered why it feels flatter than expected, you’re probably not alone.
Many people reach a stage where the obvious problems have been solved, yet something still feels missing.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve failed, nor does it mean you need to make dramatic changes.
Sometimes it simply means the goals that carried you this far are no longer enough to pull you forward.
And that’s not a crisis …. It’s an invitation.
An invitation to become curious again because direction often returns before certainty does.
And sometimes that small shift is enough to start moving forward once more.
END OF BRIEFING