From time to time you get into this point in adult life when you find yourself sitting in the middle of a life that is, by most measurable standards, totally fine and still wonder what is wrong with me, why am I no longer impressed by it.
The things that used to motivate you do not quite have the same effect, people you once liked are suddenly testing every remaining molecule of your patience, work that once gave you a little rush of importance can begin to feel meaningless, and you may start wondering why you are not happier, more grateful, more energetic or more excited about a life that you once worked extremely hard to create.
And because we live in an age of extraordinary psychological self-awareness, our next move is very predictable: we start self diagnosing ourselves. Maybe I am burnt out. Maybe it is depression, or ADHD. Maybe I’m in menopause, coz otherwise why my nervous system is so dysregulated. I think I need therapy, magnesium, vitamin D (ok this one you most probably really need), start a gratitude journal, and one of those very expensive retreats where learn how to breathe in a forest.
And some of those possibilities may be completely valid, when something feels wrong for too long, medical or psychological assessment matters. But my current studies and particularly now studying Mental Health and Psychiatric Treatment from critical social psychology perspective I have become more aware in how quickly we jump from I feel different to there must be something wrong with me, as if the most obvious explanation for a woman becoming less enthusiastic about her life is that the woman herself has somehow malfunctioned.
Studying critical social psychology has made me much more suspicious of that reflex, because critical psychology asks us to do something mainstream psychological thinking does not always do instinctively: move the camera backwards and look at the whole scene, carefully look around. And instead of immediately asking what is wrong with me, we might ask what has happened or changed around her. What changed in my relationships? What changed in my work? What changed in my body, family, responsibilities, financial situation, social world, expectations, or the meaning I attache to the life I am living?
Context matters, really
If you feel miserable at work, we can talk about your motivation. If you resent the amount you do for other people, we can work on your emotional regulation. If you are struggling with ageing, perhaps you need to improve your mindset. None of those conversations is necessarily wrong, but human beings do not exist in isolation from the worlds they inhabit, and therefore your distress cannot be fully interpreted as something generated exceptionally inside your mind.
You may feel anxious because you have an anxiety disorder, but you may also be working in a company where things changed and nobody knows whether their job will exist six months from now. You may feel low and sad because you have a mood disorder like depression, or you feel like this because your kids just grew up and left to uni and you don’t know how to be. The point is that social context matters as much or sometimes even more as personal psychology.
I think women are particularly vulnerable to this because we have been trained, in hundreds of subtle ways, to interpret successful adaptation as evidence of psychological health. If you can manage the children, the ageing parents, the career, the relationship, the social calendar, the house, your appearance, everybody’s birthdays and perhaps you Pilates class twice a week without ever publicly losing your mind, congratulations, you are apparently doing just as expected.
Your Children Grow Up, and Nobody Updates Your Job Description
Motherhood is probably one of the clearest examples of how profoundly circumstances can change while society continues expecting us to feel exactly the same. For years, your life is structured around another person’s needs in ways that are so ordinary you barely notice them. You know when the dentist appointment is, which friend has fallen out with which friend, whether somebody has eaten, whether somebody is pretending not to be worried about an exam, and why the mysterious silence at the dinner table is probably not good news.
You are needed in a thousand tiny ways, most of which would be almost impossible to list because they become part of the background of your everyday life. Then the child grows up. They go to university, move out, fall in love, travel, work, make decisions you would not make, solve problems without consulting you and occasionally take a day to reply to a message despite being visibly online. Society calls it a great parenting success. And you know it too, the whole point was to raise a person capable of functioning without you managing their life. And yet when that finally happens, the mother’s experience might sound very much like a loss, and although the only psychologically available response is to mourn the change of your role, I find that far too narrow.
This is where Viktor Frankl’s work on meaning becomes particularly useful to me, because Frankl was never especially interested in the modern idea that the purpose of life is to feel good all the time. His work was much more concerned with meaning, responsibility and the possibility of choosing one’s orientation towards changing circumstances. That shifts the question from “Why don’t I feel the way I used to?” to “What is happening in my life now?”
And those are very different conversations. Your child becoming independent does not necessarily mean your life has become emptier. It may simply mean that your life, structured around motherhood has to change, and you now have to participate in deciding what will it be structured around now.
You Can Outgrow a Career Without Having a Crisis
The same thing happens with work, you can want something deeply at 30, work very hard for it, achieve it and discover at 45 that you no longer care about it very much. This can feel very destabilising because society expects us to treat professional ambitions as fixed personality characteristics: if you once wanted the title, the salary, the recognition or the impressive job, you should presumably remain thrilled by them indefinitely.
While in real life it’s more like: At one stage of life, success meant proving that you were capable. Later it meant financial security. Then flexibility became more valuable because you had children. Later meaningful work more than money or simply being respected as an expert of something that you do. You see, the goalposts aren’t static, they move because you move. And yet instead of asking whether the goal has changed, we start asking why we have become so demotivated.
Motivation is unreliable. It comes and goes, sometimes for extremely sophisticated psychological reasons and sometimes because you slept badly and somebody scheduled a meeting that could have been an email. This is where I think Frankl’s emphasis on meaning is far more useful than the contemporary obsession with motivation, while meaning is a thing that tells us more. Does this still matter to me? Does the life I am building still represent something I value? Am I working towards something that feels worth the effort, or am I stubbornly attached to the plan created by a younger version of myself because she once thought this was what success looked like?
There is a very important difference between losing motivation and losing meaning. If the meaning has changed, forcing yourself to become more motivated may simply make you more efficient at doing something you no longer want.
Then There Is the Body, Which Has Its Own Opinions
In woman’s life there are quite a few moments that shakes us out of our understanding of our own skin. Critical and feminist psychology is highlighting that bodies are never experienced outside culture. We experience looks inside a society that attaches very different meanings to how men look and how women, and women receive a particularly absurd collection of instructions about how they suppose to be looking. At the same time we are told to accept our bodies, while simultaneously receiving very detailed information about everything that apparently needs correcting. We are told to embrace cellulite, stretch marks, ageing, while being sold products designed to make sure nobody can detect it. We are told menopause is natural, but also expected to continue working, parenting, exercising, socialising and performing as though nothing absolutely nothing is happening.
And after all, at some random point of your life, you may discover that the rules and schedules created by your 32-year-old self is no longer make sense with your 45-year-old body. And ate this point you have two options really: one is continue declining idea of aging and treat aging as evidence that you need to become fitter, more disciplined or better at mindful breading; or a second – asking whether your body goals need to change too, maybe you switch your focus from abs to stretches, and from lean legs to glute mobility?
We Have Become Very Fluent in Diagnosing Ourselves
On one hand, it is wonderful that we now have language for experiences that previous generations were expected to endure silently. Depression, anxiety, trauma, neurodiversity, menopause, burnout and many other experiences can be recognised and discussed far more openly, and that matters. On the other hand, psychological language has become so available that sometimes we use it before we use ordinary curiosity.
We no longer simply dislike a colleague, now they are a narcissist. We are not lazy anymore, we have lost motivation.
The moment I define myself as having a motivation problem, the obvious task becomes fixing my motivation. But if I say, “The career that mattered to me ten years ago no longer feels particularly meaningful,” I have opened a much bigger conversation about values, identity and my own direction that I must choose. Critical social psychology reminds us that the language we use does not simply describe our experience, it organises how we understand that experience and what kinds of solutions appear available to us.
If the problem is me, then I work on myself. If the problem is the relationship between who I have become and the life I am living, suddenly I have many more options. I first need to acknowledge the change, and usually right after I do so, the meaning comes it place by itself.
Sometimes I imagine meeting the younger version of myself who made some of the major decisions that shaped my life. She was making decisions with the information she had, the priorities she had, the body she had, the responsibilities she had and whatever level of confidence, fear, ambition or naivety happened to be operating at the time. That woman chose certain things for good reasons. But why would I assume she should continue choosing for me forever?
We accept that children leave, careers change, relationships develop and societies evolve, yet somehow we remain slightly suspicious when we develop enough to want something different from the life we’ve created.
Perhaps you no longer want the promotion you once imagined would prove something important. Perhaps you do not want to spend every weekend socialising. Perhaps your relationship with your adult children works better with slightly more distance. Perhaps money now represents freedom rather than status. Perhaps you care more about meaningful work than impressive work.
That is not necessarily decline, burnout or crisis.
It can simply be changes.
The interesting question, and the one Frankl’s work continually brings me back to, is what part do we take in that change. It’s in our responsibility to recognise that even when if changes happened without our permission, we still participate in deciding what meaning we give them and what we do next.
You cannot stop your children growing up. You cannot control every workplace, relationship or person around you. You cannot stop aging. But you can notice when the life you are living no longer matches the person who is living it. And once you notice that, you have choices.
Ask What Changed Before You Ask What Is Wrong With Me
So when you catch yourself worried of what is wrong with me: why your motivation has disappeared, why your patience is shorter, or why you seem to have become strangely uninterested in the life that used to keep you happy – look around. Maybe the problem is not that you have become less psychologically capable of living your life and need diagnosis, but simply that you no longer want exactly the same life. And instead of spending months trying to squeeze the woman you are now into a life you were wearing ten years ago, and then questioning as though there must be something psychologically wrong with us when it no longer fits comfortably.
There may be nothing wrong with you at all. Your life may have simply changed.
