When Life As You Knew It Stops Making Sense
Read time: 8 minutes
Welcome to My Musings
Where I share insights that have impacted me, thoughts on personal growth, and actionable strategies to help you navigate career and life transitions.
Today: When the life you built starts feeling too small, it’s not a crisis - it’s an invitation to grow beyond it.
The Middle Passage (Part 2): When Life As You Knew It Stops Making Sense
This is the second installment in a series of reflections on The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife by James Hollis.
In Part 1 (which you can find here), we talked about the idea of ‘the provisional life’ - the version of ourselves we construct based on conditioning, expectations, and inherited narratives. But what happens when that life starts to feel too small?
That’s the question Hollis starts to answer in Chapter 2 of this phenomenal (and I think, life changing) book, where he explores how and why this transition occurs, what signs to look for, and why it matters.
When Life Stops Making Sense
There comes a point in life - sometimes all at once, sometimes slowly creeping in - when everything that felt real and solid underneath our feet starts to feel shaky.
The career you worked so hard for? It no longer excites you the way it used to. The relationships you thought would always provide security? They feel strained, distant, or uninspiring. The roles that once defined you - parent, leader, expert - start feeling like costumes you’re wearing for a role in a play that no longer exists.
Often times, this just feels like stress at first. You’ll get through it - put your nose to the stone, and push. Double down, try harder. Partnership is just slightly ahead of you. The next promotion will make you forget about this. That vacation is just around the corner.
And, you might get to those things. But none of it lands the way it once did. Instead, a different thought creeps in:
Is this all there is?
When I first read this book at 29, I resonated with the itch - the early signs that my professional life wasn’t quite “it”.
Maybe I was an “early bloomer”.
But, when I read it again in my late 30s, I was in a different place, wrestling with what I actually wanted beyond external success.
Now, re-reading it after making a major career shift, I see how The Middle Passage is less about a single reinvention and more about an ongoing process.
In Chapter 2 of The Middle Passage, Hollis describes this as a psychological reckoning - one that isn’t necessarily tied to age, but to the moments in which we realize that the life we’ve built is no longer big enough to contain us.
Why Does This Happen?
For much of the first half of life, we do what we believe we are supposed to do.
We tick off the boxes.
We establish careers, relationships, and identities that give us a sense of purpose and security. And, often, we latch onto external markers of success because they confirm that we are on the right path.
We live what Hollis calls the “provisional life”.
Hollis tells us that more often than not, we unconsciously adopt identities that have been handed to us by our families, our culture, our institutions. A girl is raised to be the caretaker, the emotional glue of her family. A boy is raised to be the provider, the one who ensures continuity. We step into these roles, believing they will give our lives meaning.
For a time, they do.
But eventually, cracks begin to appear. The things we worked so hard for don’t satisfy us the way we expected. We achieve what we set out to achieve, and instead of feeling fulfilled, we feel…not that. Something else. Something - unexpected.
Hollis argues that this happens because we have been living inside projections - stories about ourselves that we never fully questioned. And the Middle Passage begins when those projections start to dissolve - when we realize that we are in a narrative that no longer fits - or, perhaps, was never even true.
The Symptoms of the Middle Passage
The shift is often subtle at first. A vague dissatisfaction that lingers in the background, a sense that something is off. Drawing on the lens analogy I used in Part 1, you suddenly see how blurry things were before. Vision was shaped by expectations, roles, and inherited beliefs that we never fully examined. And, at a certain point, that view starts to dissolve. And that can be really off-putting.
You might experience it as:
Restlessness: A nagging feeling that something is missing, though you can’t quite name what.
Depression or burnout: Not the kind that comes from working too hard, but the kind that comes from feeling disconnected from yourself.
An urge to escape: Fantasies about quitting your job, leaving your relationship, or starting over in some distant place.
A pull toward the past: A renewed interest in creative pursuits, forgotten dreams, or long-lost passions.
A deep questioning: Who am I apart from my career, my relationships, my history?
At its core, the Middle Passage is the moment we stop believing that our external roles define who we are. And that realization - while liberating - can also be terrifying.
The Crisis of Meaning
At this point, many people panic. (I know I did). They look at the life they’ve built and wonder if it was all a mistake. Some try to outrun the discomfort - through affairs, substance abuse, career pivots, or reckless decisions - anything to avoid sitting with the deeper questions emerging from within.
Hollis describes this as a necessary suffering. Not because life is cruel, but because our psyches are wired for growth. When we ignore the deeper parts of ourselves for too long, they find ways to break through. Depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction - these are not signs that something is wrong with us. They are signals that something within us is asking to be heard.
Jung put it this way: “A neurosis is the suffering of a soul that has not yet discovered its meaning.”
The Middle Passage forces us to confront that suffering. It asks us to let go of old identities that no longer serve us, to question beliefs that once felt unquestionable, and to redefine what it means to live a meaningful life.
What Comes Next?
If the first half of life is about establishing ourselves, the second half is about becoming ourselves. And that shift - from external validation to internal wholeness - is where true transformation happens.
The process isn’t easy. It requires grieving the old self, making peace with uncertainty, and stepping into a kind of radical self-responsibility. Hollis describes it as a death and rebirth - letting go of the constructed self in order to reclaim the true self.
So what does this look like in practice?
Allow yourself to feel the discomfort. Instead of trying to “fix” your feelings, sit with them. Let them guide you to what’s really underneath. (And, in case you were wondering, yes - this is hard.)
Reclaim forgotten parts of yourself. What did you love before the world told you who to be? Creativity, play, adventure - these are not indulgences. They are essential.
Redefine success on your own terms. Instead of asking, What should I be doing? ask, What actually fulfills me?
Let go of certainty. The biggest mistake we make is thinking we need all the answers before we can move forward. You don’t. You just need to take the next step.
The Invitation of the Middle Passage
For those who resist it, the Middle Passage feels like a crisis. But for those who embrace it, it becomes something else entirely: a second chance at life.
The irony, of course, is that everything we fear losing - our stability, our sense of self, our carefully constructed identities - is what has been keeping us stuck. The Middle Passage is not a breakdown. It’s an invitation.
An invitation to stop living a life that no longer fits. To listen to the voice inside that’s been whispering (or, by now, screaming): There’s more for you than this.
And most importantly, an invitation to finally answer the question that’s been waiting for you all along:
Who am I, really?
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend diving deeper into Hollis’s work.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series, where we’ll explore how the Middle Passage manifests in our careers, relationships, and sense of self - and what we can do about it.
Want to Go Deeper?
I work with individuals and teams to navigate change, build meaningful careers, and hone leadership skills.
If you’re at a crossroads and want to explore what’s coming up for you, get in touch.
Part 3 comes next month.
