Life Purpose At Forty and Beyond, Is There One?
While midlife is different for everyone, there is still plenty of shared experience that is associated with this stage of life, and not all of it is 
positive. Many people are completely at a loss for how to go on with their lives after they turn forty.
Emotional crises can occur at almost any age, particularly in an era where people seem to have a quarter-life crisis five years before having another crisis at age thirty. However, the emotional crisis associated with your fortieth birthday seems to take on a life of its own.
Some people experience a crisis after turning forty because they believe that they have not led sufficiently fulfilling lives, and that they may be running out of time. As a result, people can feel depleted, vulnerable, uncertain about the future, and depressed.
They may feel that they’ll never be able to accomplish any of their goals at their relatively advanced age, which can leave many people feeling completely listless and unable to proceed with anything at all. Some people in this state turn to mindless indulgence to feel better, even if it won’t necessarily make them feel better about themselves. Other people simply slip into a state where they don’t have a life purpose, and fail to move forward at all.
However, even people who have accomplished a lot can still feel completed defeated at forty. By the age of forty, people have often already accomplished many of the goals that they had in mind when they were younger. In their youth, people often set out to find a life partner, have children, find a strong circle of friends, establish themselves in a successful career, and achieve financial, emotional, and material stability in the process.
While people pass many adult milestones later in life today than they did in previous generations, many people reach all of them by the age of forty. While society has created plenty of milestones for people under the age of forty to pass, people over the age of forty seem to have very few.
People need direction and purpose in order to progress with life, or they’ll probably find themselves drifting aimlessly. The feeling of aimlessness is part of the general feeling of emptiness that people in their forties experience.
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People who had children early in life may be watching their children grow up as they approach their forties. Their children have their whole lives ahead of them, which can only cement the feeling of emptiness further. Many people who have a crisis in their forties will have another crisis when their children finally leave home entirely.
Finding A Life Purpose
People who have based their sense of life purpose upon caring for their children can find themselves adrift when their children are gone, and the same thing can happen to people who have been fired in their forties.
There are plenty of things that you can do to alleviate the emptiness that many people experience at this point in their lives. People over the age of forty need to find new life purposes. People who feel very accomplished and secure in their own careers can potentially find a new source of life purpose by doing volunteer work and helping the less fortunate.
Other people may want to change jobs altogether, secure in the knowledge that it is certainly fine to change careers at any age. Many people try several different careers over the course of their lives, and indeed, finding what makes you happy can help you work towards a new life purpose for yourself.
People may define themselves primarily through their families and their careers, but there are other ways to motivate yourself. Many of the things that people do when they’re trying to expand their horizons, such as learning new hobbies and skills or traveling more often, can often be easier to accomplish at forty than in early adulthood. Many people are more financially stable at forty, even if they haven’t accomplished all of their financial goals.
People also have more experience with what they like. People who think that they’ve seen it all by the age of forty should experiment more with what’s out there, in order to find a new source of life purpose and in order to feel more connected with the world.
There may be few culturally sanctioned milestones past the age of forty, but people can certainly invent their own, and achieve a whole new life purpose for themselves in the process.
To help with figuring out your life purpose pick-up your complementary e-book, “Integrating Mind, Body and Spirit ~ Keys to Life of Fulfillment” HERE.
