When Everything Works, But You Don’t

Middle age is when you realise you have become very good at life, and strangely absent from it. You respond to messages, pay bills, attend weddings, manage parents and in-laws, raise children, survive meetings, book health check-ups, and still feel a vague sense that you are watching yourself do all this from a distance. 

Nothing is collapsing. And nothing feels satisfying. That is the problem. Life is functioning perfectly, and you are functioning with it, like an efficient appliance that no longer remembers what it was built for.

Well, we know it to be our adulthood. It is mostly chores and administration of our daily situations.

There is a particular kind of existence that does not look like suffering. It looks like competence. It looks like someone who always replies, always shows up, always remembers what needs to be done. It looks like a person who is “managing.”

And that is exactly the problem.

Adulthood’s great achievement is competence. Its great cost is presence. We become so good at coping that we forget we were meant to live.

Middle age is when life quietly stops being lived and starts being handled. You do not wake up thinking, what do I feel today? You wake up thinking, what needs attention? The school message. The office call. The aged parent. The leaking tap. The unread WhatsApp group. The weekend plan that must be executed like an operation. Life becomes a checklist that never ends, and you become very good at ticking boxes.

The tragedy is that everyone applauds you for it.

We have built a culture where being sorted is the highest compliment. “She handles everything.” “He is so responsible.” “They are very solid people.” Nobody asks the more dangerous question. Are they alive inside all this efficiency? Or are they simply functional?

Middle-aged Indians are especially vulnerable to this condition because we were raised to worship duty. Our parents did not talk about fulfilment. They talked about stability. They did not ask whether work gave them meaning. They asked whether it paid. They did not speak of burnout. They spoke of sacrifice. So we inherited an emotional syllabus where coping is virtue and exhaustion is adulthood.

Somewhere along the way, “I’m managing” became our most common confession.

Work deepens the habit. The modern workplace rewards people who look in control. You are praised for being reliable, for being available, for being always on top of things. The person who never says no becomes indispensable. The person who never pauses becomes successful. You climb ladders, collect titles, attend meetings, and one day you realise you have become excellent at performing adulthood and terrible at experiencing it.

The over-functioner is society’s favourite employee.

And this over-functioning is not limited to offices. It enters the way we live. Adults now run their lives like departments. One part of the brain is always scheduling. Another is always worrying. Another is always preparing for the next small crisis. Even on days when nothing is wrong, you feel slightly behind, as though life is an inbox you will never clear.

Middle age becomes a strange form of permanent readiness.

There is also a gendered version of this exhaustion. Men often handle life by becoming emotionally minimalist. They become efficient providers, competent and distant, joking their way around feelings they do not know how to name. Their friendships revolve around safe topics, because vulnerability feels like a foreign language.

Women often handle life by carrying everyone. They remember everything, organise everything, absorb everyone’s needs, and often disappear inside their usefulness. Their exhaustion is not empty. It is crowded. They are needed constantly and understood rarely.

Both genders call it responsibility. Both are quietly tired.

And then there is the middle-class obsession with appearing fine. Middle age comes with a particular performance. You must look stable. You must look grateful. You must look like you have figured it out. Admitting that you feel lost sounds indulgent. Admitting that you feel unhappy sounds ungrateful. So you keep handling. You keep moving. You keep managing.

The over-functioner does not collapse. They simply dry up.

Even leisure has been absorbed into this administrative life. Holidays are no longer escapes. They are itineraries. Weekends are no longer restful. They are tasks in disguise. You do not relax, you “recharge.” You do not meet friends, you “network.” You do not sit quietly, you “practice mindfulness.” Even peace now requires productivity.

Middle age is when rest comes with guilt.

And the cruel irony is that over-functioning is rewarded. Society loves people who do not ask for much. People who do not complicate things with emotions. People who keep everything running. The world will clap for your competence while your inner life quietly starves.

You become the person everyone depends on and nobody really knows.

At some point, you must ask yourself a question that feels almost rude. When did life become something I manage rather than inhabit? When did I stop feeling and start functioning? When did I become so busy handling everything that I forgot what it was like to simply be?

Because adulthood was not supposed to be an endless administrative job. Responsibility is necessary, yes. Duty matters. But if life becomes only duty, then duty becomes a kind of slow erasure.

The hardest truth is this. Many middle-aged people are not unhappy because life went wrong. They are unhappy because life went exactly as planned, and the plan did not include joy.

The solution is embarrassingly simple and profoundly difficult. Stop performing competence for a moment. Let something be unfinished. Let silence exist without rushing to fill it. Let yourself be human, not just reliable.

And perhaps that is the final insult of middle age. Not that life breaks you, but that it never has to. It simply keeps you busy enough to forget yourself.