The 40-something mid-life crisis.

You can’t ask the band. You’d look lame doing so.

Jun 20, 2026

On the night of the 14th of April 1912, the RMS Titanic was making excellent time.

The crossing was going well. The ship was magnificent. The destination was New York. The speed felt like confidence — like proof that everything was working exactly as it should.

The iceberg was on the charts. The warnings had come in by wireless. They were noted, and then the ship kept going, because the destination mattered and the schedule mattered and stopping to reconsider felt like weakness when everything looked so good from the bridge.

I think about that night sometimes when I think about a man I used to work with.

The man who had everything

He had everything, by any reasonable measure.

A high-paying, high-powered job in Information Technology. A nuclear family — children nearly grown, the kind of almost-adults you look at and think: we did something right. A house in a good suburb, freshly renovated, worth half a million dollars more than it was five years ago. A career trajectory that pointed in one direction: up.

He was making excellent time.

And he was dying.

Not literally. But something in him was. The pressure of sales targets and quarterly deadlines and the particular grinding weight of working for a large company’s bottom line, year after year, without being able to answer the question that had started arriving in the early hours of the morning, quiet and persistent and impossible to sleep through:

What is this actually for?

Not the job. Not the house. Not the renovated kitchen or the nearly-grown children or the suburb with the good schools. All of that was real and earned and worth protecting.

But underneath it — underneath the trajectory and the targets and the excellent time — there was a man who had been going in one direction for so long that he’d stopped checking whether it was the right one.

You can’t ask the band

Here’s the thing about a mid-life crisis that nobody tells you.

You can’t talk about it.

Not really. Not to the people who know you. Because the people who know you are also invested in the version of you that has everything — the version that is making excellent time and doesn’t need to reconsider. To say out loud, to someone who loves you, that you don’t know if any of this is right anymore — that’s a conversation that has consequences. For the house. For the marriage. For the children who are nearly adults and watching how you handle things.

So you don’t say it. You keep going. You smile at the right moments and hit the targets and renovate the kitchen and wonder, in the early hours, whether Captain Smith felt anything like this in the hours before the lookout called.

My colleague sat with that question for longer than was good for him.

In 2012, if you wanted to investigate options — to quietly, privately, without consequence, ask what else could I be doing with my life — you googled. Which meant weeks of effort, rabbit holes that went nowhere, and the particular loneliness of researching your own unhappiness on a laptop at midnight while everyone else slept.

There was no thinking partner. There was just the search bar, and the iceberg, and the ship still moving.

The turn

He made it, eventually. The turn.

He resigned. Left the job, the targets, the bottom line, the trajectory that had pointed in one direction for twenty years. And he went somewhere that nobody who knew him in 2012 would have predicted.

He coordinates activities at an aged care community centre now.

He makes sure that elderly people have something to look forward to on a Tuesday. That the music afternoon happens. That the garden group has what it needs. That the people in his care — and they are his people, genuinely — move through their days with moments of pleasure and connection rather than just time passing.

Every time I see him, he is smiling.

Not the smile of someone performing contentment. The smile of someone who found out, later than expected, what they were actually for.

What a thinking partner could have done

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a post about AI solving a mid-life crisis. Nothing solves a mid-life crisis except time, honesty, and the courage to make difficult decisions.

But the thinking partner matters.

The question ‘what is this actually for’ needs somewhere to go. It needs to be asked out loud, to something that won’t panic, won’t calculate consequences, won’t filter its response through its own investment in the status quo. It needs a space where you can say I have everything and something is wrong without the words landing like a grenade in the middle of a life that other people also live in.

AI is that space.

Not because it has the answer. It doesn’t. Only you have the answer, somewhere underneath the targets and the trajectory and the excellent time you’ve been making.

But it can ask you the questions that get you there. What would you do if the salary didn’t matter? What did you want before you wanted this? When did you last feel like the work meant something? What would the person you were at twenty-five think of the life you’re living now — and would that person be proud, or just impressed?

Those questions, asked carefully and without judgment, in the quiet of a Tuesday night when everyone else is asleep — can change the course of a ship that is still, for now, moving under its own power.

The iceberg is on the charts.

You still have time to steer.

Sandi is a Melbourne-based problem-solver, crisis-averter, and translator of the technical into the human. She spent decades being the person everyone called when something was broken, confusing, or just needed explaining properly — earning a reputation that preceded her wherever she went. Now she’s channelling that same instinct into AI: making it accessible, practical, and genuinely useful for people who think it isn’t for them.