Feeling Lost in Midlife? What 4,000-Year-Old Stories Can Teach Us

Perhaps you’re in your thirties or forties. You’ve worked hard - or not hard enough. Built a career - or not. Maybe a family, or longing for one. Made a lot of decisions. Become someone.

And it doesn’t feel right.

During midlife, that “something isn’t right” voice can become louder. You may also feel anxious, lost, fearful or increasingly unhappy. Things that used to motivate you no longer seem to work. Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened but you catch yourself thinking:

I’m not sure I like my life / partner / my career.

Have I spent all these years building something I don’t actually want?

And if I have, what am I supposed to do now?

What is actually happening in midlife?

Earlier life often involves establishing ourselves in the world: developing an identity, building relationships, finding work and adapting to expectations around us.

Carl Jung suggested that the psychological tasks of later adulthood are not necessarily the same as those of youth. The strategies that helped us establish a life may no longer be enough to give it meaning.

This doesn’t mean everyone experiences a midlife crisis. But for some people, midlife creates a growing tension between the identity they’ve built and parts of themselves that have had less room to develop.

What can the Sumerians teach us?

The Sumerians left us some of the world’s earliest surviving literature. Three key stories offer useful ways of thinking about the questions that emerge at this stage of life.

Inanna asks: Who are you when the identities you’ve built no longer fit?

Inanna was a powerful Sumerian goddess who chose to descend into the underworld. At each of seven gates, she was required to surrender something representing her status and power, until she arrived stripped of the identity she had carried above.

Midlife can feel similar. If you’ve been building your life so far, this doesn’t mean starting again or destroying what you’ve created. It may mean allowing parts of the old self to “die” so something more fitting can develop.

Ask yourself: Which version of me am I trying to maintain simply because it used to work? What does the person I am becoming need now?

Ur-Namma asks: What happens when the life you worked for isn’t the life you expected?

Ur-Namma was a powerful Sumerian king. In the ancient text describing his death, he mourns what has been taken from him - the work he cannot finish, the family he cannot return to - while questioning why his devotion and achievements did not protect him from his fate.

One of the harder parts of midlife is accepting that effort doesn’t guarantee the outcome we imagined. Perhaps the version of yourself you worked towards hasn’t become what you expected. We can spend years fighting reality because we’re still emotionally attached to how things should have turned out.

Notice what you may need to grieve. Ask yourself: What did I expect my life to look like by now? Which part of that expectation am I still waiting for?

Your original plan may be gone. Your ability to make a new one isn’t.

Gilgamesh asks: What do you want to do with the time you still have?

Gilgamesh was a legendary king whose stories began in Sumerian tradition. After the death of his closest companion, Enkidu, he is confronted with his own mortality and sets out searching for a way to escape death - only to discover that human life has limits.

Midlife confronts us with something increasingly difficult to ignore: time is limited. That can be frightening. You probably cannot live every version of the life you once imagined. Some doors will close.

Ask yourself: What have I been postponing because I’ve been behaving as though there will always be more time?

Midlife doesn’t ask you to abandon the life you’ve built. It may simply ask you to stop living it on autopilot and start becoming aware of what truly matters to you now. Honestly.

If these questions feel uncomfortably familiar, that may be exactly why they are worth exploring.