I’m Sad, and I Don’t Know What To Do About It

"Hello darkness, my old friend."

How are you doing?

I've been sad for a while. Months, I think. The hard part to explain to whoever's reading this is that I don't have a reason for said sadness. It's a lot of things. When something bad happens, you can be sad about the thing, and people understand, and there's a reason for it. I don't have a thing, at least not one I can put a finger on. I have a job that's fine and a great family and a house we can afford, and I wake up most mornings with a weight sitting on me that I can't trace back to anything, and that's almost more embarrassing than if something were verifiably wrong.

And I know how it sounds. I read the news. There are people with serious problems, real grief, insane hardship, and here I am, (somewhat) healthy, employed, loved, writing about this gunk I can't even explain. So I argue myself out of it and tell myself to "man up", which, it turns out, does nothing except stack a layer of guilt on top of the sadness. Now I'm sad and ashamed of being sad, such a great combo at 6:00 a.m.!

So I haven't told many people. But I'm telling you.

Most mornings, I'll be ready to get out of bed, looking at the time on my phone, with nothing much in my head and a low pressure sitting across my chest and shoulders, like I slept on it wrong, except I didn't, I just feel a blanket of sadness on me. I push the blanket aside. Then our house gets going, kids get moving, and I put on the "dad hat". Breakfast, clothes, where are your shoes? Did you brush your teeth? I'm good at wearing my "hats". By the time I'm sitting at my desk, I sound like a man who's fine, and most days, nobody, including me, looks any closer than that.

By late afternoon, I'm running on empty. I'm tired of performing fine for ten straight hours. There's a stretch at the end of the day, after the laptop closes and before I go upstairs (I work from home), where I sit in my chair. I'm not on my phone or doing anything. I'm buying myself a little quiet time before I switch hats for the people I love the most.

My wife knows something's off. She's asked in the careful way you ask when you've already asked a couple of times and gotten the same answer. The answer I give her is "I'm just tired." It isn't really a lie, I mean, it's a small true thing I give her, so I don't have to hand over the big one. I don't know why I can put this in front of strangers before I can say it to her at our own kitchen table. That's probably its own problem, sitting underneath this one.

I seldom cry. But how I'd describe the feeling is that someone turned the volume down on everything. The stuff I used to look forward to still happens: Friday pizza, video games, fulfilling mentoring chats, setting up the tent in the back yard, a song I love, and somewhere behind my own face, I can tell I'm not feeling any of it. I keep waiting for it to change me. It doesn't. That's what scares me more than the sadness does.

I'm not going to say much about work. Partly, I'd like to keep some of that private. Partly, the details aren't the point, and I don't want a coworker to read this and put two and two together. But I've been working for thirty years. I think I'm good at what I do. My last couple of performance reviews said I "met expectations". Cool. I keep turning that phrase over. I don't know what they want me to grow into, and I've started to think they don't either, and so we both don't address it, and the not-saying goes on review after review. That makes me tired.

I think being dependable eventually becomes people not checking on you because they've decided you're fine. I think I've become that at work. I'm not sure how to undo it, or whether I want to, or whether wanting to is even allowed at my age. But I'd sure love for something to change.

A while back, there was a meeting where something got decided about work I'd put months into, and halfway through, I realized nobody was going to acknowledge my contribution to the effort… not out of any meanness or spite. It just didn't occur to the room that I'd guided much of that success. I said my piece anyway, near the end. People nodded, and the conversation kept going. I replayed the whole thing in my head that night, trying to work out whether I'd been in the room or just read an AI summary. It sucked a lot of drive and initiative out of me.

Oh yeah, and then there's the AI thing, which I feel almost stupid bringing up because everyone's talking about it and I don't have a take that's any smarter than anyone else's. I'll tell you what I see. A few weeks ago, I watched an AI agent (that I created) do a piece of work that would've cost me most of a day. It did it while I was using the bathroom. And my first reaction wasn't "this is amazing" or "this is terrifying." I sat there and felt something go a little hollow in me. Oh, I thought. So that's what that skill was worth: a few tokens of predictive reasoning.

And I'm doing everything I can to stay up-to-date with AI. I use the tools. I automate things. I watch YouTube creators. Yet… I still feel like I will always be behind it all. I know the speech people will give here. You adapt and become the person who guides the tools instead of the person the tools replace. You lean in. I believe it, mostly. I use them every day. But I don't think anyone shares how tiring it is to rebuild your whole idea of what makes you useful, at 45, while you're also paying a mortgage and raising kids and posting on LinkedIn like you're thrilled about all of it.

I'm not thrilled. I feel behind. And that seems to compound the sadness.

There are more contributing factors.

At some point, as a younger man, I promised myself my kids would get an engaged, vibrant, involved dad. And I feel that energy slipping away. My seven-year-old used to narrate entire video games to me. I loved his play-by-play narration that I didn't understand and didn't need to. I'd say "no way!" and "then what happened?" in roughly the right spots, and he loved that; that was the whole thing he wanted. I noticed last month he's mostly stopped doing it with me. He still does it with his mom, full volume, every detail. I haven't asked him why he stopped with me. I think I'd rather not hear myself ask it out loud.

I'm not taking great care of myself either. I'll leave it there. You can probably fill in the specifics, and you'd probably be close. There's no doubt that a revisiting of my sleep, nutrition, and exercise choices could play its own part. And some of our close friendships are falling apart for various reasons. It's crazy how much fractured relationships play into our health, mental health, and overall well-being, too. The stress of it weighs on me.

I used to write a lot more. For a stretch of years, I got up early because I wanted to, not because an alarm made me, and I'd put words down, and a few thousand people I'd never met would read them, and once in a while one of them would write back to say it helped. That was the best part of a lot of my weeks. I haven't done it in months. Every time I open a draft, I hear something tell me everyone's already said it better, who's waiting on another middle-aged guy's thoughts, and I close the file.

The social feeds don't help. I scroll through them late, and everyone's launching something, celebrating something, or freshly certified in something. I know it's a highlight reel. Knowing that has never once made it feel less true at midnight.

This is the first thing I've finished in I genuinely don't know how long. I don't know if it's any good. I keep wanting to go back and make it wiser, give it a point, and every time I try, it gets worse, so I'm leaving it plain. I don't have advice, but I am trying to find my people. I'm not going to tell you to take a walk, do some hot yoga, or feel your feelings, or that this is secretly an opportunity.

The only thing I've got is small and not exactly a solution.

Yesterday, I shared the forbidden word with a friend. "Sad." Phew. I said it. I said I'd been sad for months and didn't know why. He didn't try to fix it or get weird with me. He just said he'd been feeling something like it too, and then we talked about nothing for a while, and that was it. Nothing got solved. It helped a little anyway, and I've been trying to figure out why, and the closest I can get is that I'd been treating sadness like a secret, and it turned out not to be one. It shouldn't be one.

It turned out to be a shared feeling. I've been sad for some time now; I can't tell you why, precisely, and I'm tired of acting like I'm fine. If any of this is also going on in your brain, maybe we can commiserate together. I don't have the next part figured out yet. Nor do I know when or if it goes away.

I do know, however, that I don't want to keep doing this by myself.

How are you doing?

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Mike Curtis - Medium Read writing from Mike Curtis on Medium. Senior UX Designer / New articles weekly on design & self-improvement /…