I can be hypercritical of many writer’s work. I guess that’s what happens when you write for a living. You put your work out there for others to critique, and you critique the work of others in return.
I recently read Mark Manson’s Four Stages of Life and I must say it was terrific. It crystalized a lot of things for me; things I am feeling now; things I’ve felt over my lifetime. It was something of an eye opener, really. Not quite a barn burner, but it did help me understand that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with me. I am simply moving into another stage of life in a staging process I was totally unaware of until now.
Let me start by doing a Reader’s Digest on Mark’s article, just in case you don’t have 14 minutes to spare and read the entirety of his post.
The four stages of life are: 1) Mimicry, 2) Self-Discovery, 3) Commitment, 4) Legacy. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. You don’t move through one stage and then go on to another. You can be in two or more stages at once or you can be between stages.
So, it’s not really a clean motion. It’s not A to B to C. It can B and C together for a time, or you may even find yourself stuck between C and D in a sort of no man’s land.
I think I’m in no man’s land right now. Before I delve into that, let’s recap the stages, shall we?
Stage 1: Mimicry
We all start out this way. We learn by watching others and then copy what they do. That’s how we learn to walk and talk; it’s how we learn to affiliate with others so we can develop friendships and relationships. It’s how we come to understand the norms and rules of society so we can learn to fit in so we can be useful adults. It is, in its simplest form, the continual search for approval and validation.
Stage 2: Self-Discovery
Woohoo! By now we are getting pretty good at this fitting in thing, but we tire of being like everyone else. So we start to branch out, we make decisions for ourselves, we experiment, we drink too much, hang out with the wrong crowd and learn that nose to nose and toes to toes is pretty boring when you’re in the sack. This is a good thing. It’s what moves us from being a copy cat to being our own person. We learn our abilities and discover our limitations in this stage.
This all happens around the time you’re in your mid 20s to mid 30s. After that, you start to discover that you’re beginning to hit the wall of your limitations and if you insist on staying in Stage 2 much longer than this, people whisper that you’re suffering from Peter Pan Syndrome, and not in a charming, isn’t that cute, kind of way.
Stage 3: Commitment
Skirting responsibilities to stay out partying all night starts to get old after a while. So you decide to make changes. You dump the loser friends who are draining you. You get rid of the unrealistic dreams that have little chance of coming true. Instead, you bet it all on what you do well. You also bet the farm on the relationships you have in your life that are working for you. You find purpose, you find focus. This is when you figure it all out, your purpose in life.
Stage 4: Legacy
Once you think you’ve mastered it all and that you accomplished everything you set out to accomplish or you simply got tired of trying, you move onto Stage 4: Legacy. It happens somewhere around in your mid 50s. You don’t feel the need to burn the candle at both ends any longer or even the proverbial midnight oil. You start to live vicariously through your children. You suddenly understand the importance of mentoring or volunteering your time to meaningful change. You start to realize that life was never about the accumulation of fame or fortune, but about leaving a legacy behind, a lasting statement that you were here for a while and you did something with your life.
These days, I am finding myself somewhere between Stage 3 and 4. I love my career, but I’m not that excited about climbing the old corporate ladder anymore. I’m good where I am. I have fun, I make a good living, and I have some security. I’m finally learned the value of having a great relationship and being true to my word. Staying out all night on a tear has zero appeal to me.
Increasingly, I am judging others based on what they stand for, not what they want out of life. I am far more interested in substance than flash. I’m still not sure I’m done making an impact on the world, not that I think I need to be. Hence, my one foot in Stage 3. Still working on some things in that regard.
Still, I have begun to think about what I will leave behind. I have begun to understand that time and energy are limited, so I can’t continue to be distracted by the meaningless causes or the every shiny object that comes my way. And I have begun to realize that change is a constant in life and that eventually, I will be a mere memory. And it is that memory that I have the most control over these days. It is an awesome and humbling thing to consider.
In the Emerald City, still lots of ‘do’s on the to-do list and my party pilot light still burns brightly, those less frequently,
– Robb