Have you ever looked over a cliff and felt vertigo--not to imagine falling but just feel the dizzying spin of the mind as it copes with the perspective and its implications. To brace for the impact that isn't coming, but feels real nonetheless. To feel unstable even with four points of contact on the rock.

That's what considering a professional shift feels like, anyway. The paychecks are coming, hands are on the rock face, something feels like it is floating down and away.

Instead of doing a web search for something obvious ("mid life crisis") I opted for "know thyself". Don't ask me. I just live in this head.

The first (useful) link (that wasn't about motivation or self-realization or some other claptrap that I'm probably going to be invested in within days at the current rate) was this one: Bence Nanay, "Know thyself is not just silly advice: it's actively dangerous". That's not what I was looking for. I was looking for something a little more soothing so I could sleep tonight and make it through eight hours of work tomorrow. Just give me one of those quizzes and tell me what I am.

There is a huge difference between what you like and what you do. What you do is dictated not by what you like, but by what kind of person you think you are.

The real harm of this situation is not only that you spend much of your time doing something that you don’t particularly like (and often positively dislike). Instead, it is that the human mind does not like blatant contradictions of this kind. It does its best to hide this contradiction: a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.

And there's a link in there to this paper: Quoidbach, Jordi, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson. "The End of History Illusion." Science 339 (2013): 96. (Full copy here wink wink.)

Let's just pick off the first sentence to set the tone:

At every stage of life, people make decisions that profoundly influence the lives of the people they will become—and when they finally become those people, they aren’t always thrilled about it. [...] Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?

Google, show me "mid life crisis". Mine, yours, anyone's. I'm not picky. How much is a red convertible?

[...] people may believe that who they are today is pretty much who they will be tomorrow, despite the fact that it isn’t who they were yesterday.

That's more promising, right? A person doesn't expect to change much in the future because they don't recognize how much they've changed in the past. That's the "end of history illusion". The vertiginous feeling is leaning into the future over what your brain believes was a horizon not that far away. Imagining yourself becoming something else is, in that case, not much different than poking your head through reality. How else would you expect a healthy brain to react?