Mid-life Careers -- The Best Is Yet To Come

“This breakfast is depressing,” I thought.

A number of my friends and I were recently talking. Most of them unemployed. They’ve been for many months. A few have been searching for more than a year.

The talk was about fruitless interviews, endless applications and useless job fairs. There is pain — and failure — in their eyes.

They’re all my age, stuck in the middle of life, feeling a little lost. Their career path is irrelevant in the modern economy. Their training is out of date. their experience worthless. They look at their hands that turned nuts and laid tile and built computer components and they wonder what’s next.

A change in the economy, a turn in legislation or a restructuring and it could be me, looking at my own hands.

Billy Coffey’s main character in Snowday reflects on his own mid-life.

“I’m just a man. Not too bright and not too stupid, not too rich and not too poor, not too happy and not too sad. A middle-of-the-road, ordinary man. That was me. Nice to meet you.”

A lot of us guys — and girls — can relate. We all had big dreams at some point in our life. We all wanted to change the world — find a cure, feed the hungry, start a successful business. But through a series of events, we are where we are.

How in the world did I get here?

Coffey says

“There are two things every decent person possessed in his or her life. One is a set of lofty goals that rise just out of reach and the other is a desire to do something good for the world.”