I’m 38 and I realized last spring that the question I’m carrying into my forties isn’t “what do I want to do next” — it’s “what have I been doing for someone else all this time,” and the difference between those two questions is the difference between five more years of the same life and a different life entirely, and I’m not yet sure which one I have the energy for

Last spring, on a Sunday afternoon in Bangkok, I sat down at my kitchen counter with a coffee and tried to write a list of things I wanted to do in my forties. The list was supposed to be aspirational. The list was supposed to clarify, for me, what the next decade was going to be for. I had a pen. I had a notebook. I had, on paper, all the conditions a person needs in order to produce a useful piece of self-direction.

What I produced, after about twenty minutes, was three items, all of them generic enough that they could have been written by anyone. The list was so unimpressive that I tore the page out and threw it away. I sat with the empty notebook for another ten minutes. Then I wrote a different sentence at the top of the next page. I wrote, “What have I been doing for someone else all this time?”

I sat with the sentence for the rest of the afternoon. By the time the light was going, I understood that this was the actual question I was carrying into my forties, and that the question I had been trying to write a list around—what do I want to do next—was not the same question at all. The two questions sound similar. They are, structurally, almost opposite to each other. The difference between them is, I am increasingly certain, the difference between five more years of essentially the same life and a different life entirely.

Why “what do I want to do next” doesn’t quite work

The question of what one wants to do next is, on examination, the question one has been answering since college. It is the question that organizes the building of an external life. It assumes that the person asking it has, in some basic sense, an intact apparatus for knowing what they want, and that the work is simply to consult the apparatus and act on its answer.

This assumption may be roughly accurate for someone in their twenties, who is still operating with the calibration their late adolescence installed. By thirty-eight, in my honest experience, the assumption is much less reliable. The apparatus for knowing what I want has, on close examination, been running on autopilot for so long that I cannot, in many cases, easily distinguish between what I actually want and what I have been wanting because some configuration of expectations made it the path of least resistance.

The restaurants I built in my twenties and early thirties were, I think, things I wanted. They were also, on examination, things that suited a particular set of family expectations about ambition, a particular set of cultural assumptions about what a competent young man of my background should be doing, and a particular set of personal anxieties about being seen as serious. The wanting was real. The wanting was also, on close examination, not separable from a great deal of programming I had not, at twenty-six, examined.

By thirty-eight, the programming is more visible. I can see, looking back, how much of the wanting was about other things than the wanting itself. The visibility is what makes “what do I want to do next” feel, on the page, like a question that isn’t going to produce a useful answer. The apparatus that would generate the answer is, in some real way, not currently trustworthy. The answer it generates would be, in some part, more of the same.

Why the other question is harder

“What have I been doing for someone else all this time” is the harder question because it requires the kind of backward audit that most of us spend our adult lives avoiding.

The audit involves looking at the decisions I have made over the past two decades and asking, with as much honesty as I can manage, which of them were really mine. Not in the legal sense—obviously they were all mine, in the sense that I executed them. In the deeper sense. The sense that asks whether the decision was made on the basis of what I actually wanted, or whether it was made on the basis of various accumulated pressures that I had absorbed so thoroughly I had stopped being able to distinguish them from my own preferences.

The audit is, by its nature, uncomfortable. It surfaces things one would prefer not to know. It suggests that some of the major decisions of one’s life, which one has been telling oneself for years were freely chosen, were in fact heavily constrained by conditions one had not been examining. It implies that one is, in some part, a person who has been living a life shaped by other people’s expectations, dressed up in the language of personal choice.

For most of my thirties, I avoided this audit. I did not avoid it explicitly. I avoided it the way most people avoid this kind of work, which is by being too busy with the next thing to sit with the question of why I was doing the previous thing. The busyness was, on examination, partly the point. The busyness made it possible to keep moving without ever having to ask whether the direction I was moving in was the one I would have chosen, if I had been able to see the conditions clearly.

By thirty-eight, the busyness has, in some real way, slowed enough that the avoidance is no longer working. The question is, finally, audible. The audibility is what last spring, at the kitchen counter, finally produced.

What the audit is starting to show me

I am not far into the audit. I want to be honest about that. The work is slow. The answers, when they come, are partial and uncertain. But I can describe, in rough terms, what the audit is starting to surface.

Some of it, predictably, is about the restaurants. I built them. I worked extremely hard on them. I sold them, eventually, in conditions I had not anticipated. The selling was, at the time, framed in my own internal narrative as a difficult but rational decision. The audit suggests that the selling was, on closer examination, the moment when something I had been carrying for someone else’s reasons—the version of ambition I had been trained to perform—finally became too heavy to keep carrying. The selling was not, in this revised reading, the loss the cultural framing suggested it was. It was, more accurately, the first quiet act of refusal I had performed in my adult life.

Some of it is about location. I have lived in London, New York, Sydney, and now Bangkok. Each move, at the time, felt like a choice. The audit suggests that most of the moves were, in fact, calibrated to the prevailing expectations of the people I happened to be surrounded by at the time. The expectations were different in different cities. The expectations were not, on close examination, mine. I moved, in some sense, in order to keep performing the version of myself that the surrounding expectations had calibrated me to perform.

Some of it is about relationships. The patterns I have run in romantic relationships—patterns I have written about in other articles—are, on examination, patterns that were performing functions that had little to do with what I actually wanted from a partner. The patterns were performing functions related to how I had been loved as a child, how I had been trained to seek certain kinds of approval, and how I had learned to mistake intensity for substance. The wanting that I thought I had been doing in those relationships was, in some real way, not my own. It was a particular kind of doing that I had been doing for someone else, somewhere along the way, before I had any conscious memory of being trained to do it.

None of this is, in any single instance, devastating. None of it is, in any single instance, even particularly surprising. What is striking, when the items accumulate, is how much of my apparent self turns out, on examination, to have been a structure built around someone else’s blueprint. The blueprint is not, in any malicious sense, anyone’s fault. It was just the blueprint that was available, given the conditions I was raised in. The blueprint produced the building. The building, by thirty-eight, is what I have been calling my life.

The energy question

The question that follows from all this—and this is the question I am genuinely uncertain about—is whether I have the energy for the second life or whether I will, in the end, settle for the first.

The first life is the one I have been living. It is, by external metrics, a good life. The bills are paid. The dogs are healthy. The writing is, slowly, producing work I am increasingly proud of. The friendships I have are warm, even if some of them, as I have written elsewhere, are quietly inadequate to the depth I now realize I want. The life is not a failure. The life is, more accurately, a livable continuation of the structure that the blueprint produced.

The second life is the one that would result from acting on the audit. It would involve making different choices in the various dimensions the audit has surfaced. The choices would not, in any single case, be dramatic. They would be the kind of choices that, made slowly and consistently over a decade, would produce, by fifty, a life that was, in some real way, mine in a way the current life has not quite managed to be.

The second life is, on examination, the more interesting one. It is also, on examination, more expensive in the kind of currency I have less of than I used to. The currency is the energy required to make choices that go against the long-running pattern. The currency is the energy required to disappoint various people whose expectations have been load-bearing in the structure of my current life. The currency is, in some real way, the willingness to face the small daily friction of operating against defaults that have been running, unexamined, for twenty years.

I am not sure, at thirty-eight, that I have enough of this currency. I have some. I have, on the evidence of the last year or two, more than I had at thirty. I do not yet know whether I have enough.

What I am, tentatively, trying

What I have been doing, in the time since last spring, is small. I have been treating the audit as a long project rather than a single revelation. I sit with one item at a time. I notice, on a given Tuesday, that I am about to make a decision on the basis of a pattern the audit has surfaced. I pause. I ask, more honestly than I have asked in years, whether the decision is something I actually want or something I have been doing for someone else. Sometimes the decision is fine. Sometimes the answer is harder. When the answer is harder, I try, in small ways, to choose differently. The choosing is slow. The choosing is also, increasingly, the only work I find I actually want to be doing.

The forties, if I am lucky, will be the decade in which I find out which life I had the energy for. I do not know yet. I have a notebook. I have a coffee. I have, finally, after twenty years of avoiding it, the right question on the page.

That is, for now, what I can honestly report. The rest will be the work of the next decade. The work will be slow. The work will be, I increasingly suspect, the most important work available to me. Whether I will, in the end, do enough of it to produce the second life rather than the continuation of the first is a question I cannot, at thirty-eight, yet answer. I would like to think I will. I am also, on the available evidence, not quite sure.