The reason so many high achievers experience a crisis in their late 40s may not be burnout – it’s the moment they realize they’ve been performing success for so long they may struggle to remember what they actually wanted before someone told them what to want.

by Lachlan Brown | May 5, 2026, 9:38 pm

I run a media company. I wake up at 5:30 most mornings, I manage a team, I make decisions all day, and by most external measures the thing is working. But I turned 37 this year, and I’ve started noticing something in the high achievers around me, the founders, the executives, the people who built impressive things in their twenties and thirties. Somewhere around their mid to late forties, something cracks. Not their businesses. Not their health. Something underneath.

A question they can’t answer: do I actually want this, or did I just get good at wanting what I was supposed to want?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I can feel the early tremors of it in myself. And the psychology behind it is more interesting than the midlife crisis cliches would suggest.

The Research on What Actually Happens

A recently developed and validated measure of midlife crisis, published in Scientific Reports, identified the core psychological components. The first theme was identity and self-perception: feeling uncertain about who you are, questioning your life choices, feeling disconnected from the person you used to be.

The second was life satisfaction and regret. The researchers found that heightened awareness of mortality prompts people to evaluate their current achievements against their earlier aspirations, and that existential anxiety intensifies when cultural values emphasizing individual achievement and success make personal accomplishments feel insufficient.

But here’s the part the research makes clear that most popular accounts of midlife crisis miss: the distress isn’t about failure. For high achievers, it’s often triggered by success. You reached the goals you set in your twenties. You got the title, the income, the recognition. And the arrival doesn’t feel like you imagined, because the goals were never really yours. They were inherited. Absorbed from parents, peers, culture, the implicit curriculum of what a successful life is supposed to look like.

Why Achieving the Wrong Goals Makes You Feel Worse

Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan’s research on intrinsic versus extrinsic aspirations, conducted across multiple studies and populations, found something that should be required reading for every ambitious 25-year-old.

People who place high relative importance on extrinsic goals (financial success, social recognition, image) show lower vitality, lower self-actualization, and more physical symptoms than people who prioritize intrinsic goals (personal growth, close relationships, community contribution).

The extrinsic goals aren’t just less fulfilling. They’re associated with measurably worse psychological health.

A longitudinal study following college graduates into their post-college lives extended these findings further. People who attained their intrinsic aspirations showed improvements in well-being.

People who attained their extrinsic aspirations did not, and in some cases showed worse outcomes. The researchers explained this through self-determination theory: extrinsic goals don’t satisfy the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

You can achieve them fully and still feel empty, because the achievement was never connected to what actually sustains you psychologically.

That’s the mechanism behind the late-forties crisis in high achievers. They didn’t fail. They succeeded at the wrong things. They optimized for metrics that the world told them mattered, and the optimization worked, and the reward was a growing sense that something essential was missing.

The Jungian Frame That Makes It Click

Carl Jung divided life into two halves. In the first half, you look outward: building a career, a reputation, a social identity. In the second half, you’re called to look inward: asking who you are beneath the roles, what actually matters to you independent of what others expect.

Jung called the persona, the public self you construct for the world, a necessary structure for the first half of life. But he warned that if you never develop anything beyond it, if the persona becomes your entire self-concept, midlife brings a reckoning.

For high achievers, the persona is exceptionally well-built. It’s polished, competent, successful. It’s been reinforced by decades of external validation. And the better it works, the harder it is to see it as a construction rather than the truth. The crisis arrives when you catch a glimpse of the gap between the persona and whatever is underneath it, and you realize you have no idea what’s underneath it, because you stopped looking thirty years ago.

What I’m Doing With This

I’m not in crisis. Not yet, anyway. But I can see the pattern clearly enough to know I don’t want to arrive at 47 and discover I’ve been performing a version of success that has nothing to do with what I actually value. So I’ve started asking myself a question that I think every high achiever should ask before the cracks appear: if nobody could see the results, would I still want to do this?

Not “would I still do it for the money.” Not “would I still do it for the status.” Would I still want to do it for the experience of doing it? That’s the dividing line between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and it’s the dividing line between the people who arrive at midlife with a sense of continuity and the people who arrive with a sense of fraud.

I’m also paying attention to the research on retirement and purpose, which found that people who were dissatisfied with their work actually experienced an increase in sense of purpose after retiring. Their identity wasn’t lost. It was liberated. The work had been suppressing their authentic interests, and retirement removed the suppression. But for people whose identity was deeply fused with their professional role, the transition was destabilizing.

That tells me something useful right now, at 37: build an identity that isn’t entirely dependent on the work. Have interests, relationships, and pursuits that would survive the company disappearing tomorrow. Not as a backup plan. As the actual foundation. Because the work might be going well, and it might keep going well, and I might still arrive at 47 and realize that the whole thing was a beautifully constructed answer to a question nobody asked me.

The midlife crisis of the high achiever isn’t burnout. It’s the moment the performance becomes visible as a performance. And the only way to prepare for it is to make sure that underneath all the achieving, there’s still a person who knows what they want when nobody’s watching.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.