My Midlife Crisis

I have spent the past two decades or so living the American Dream; I had a great job earning very good money in my field of interest, a wonderful family with a wife, 2 daughters, and 2 dogs, and a great house in the right neighborhood in the suburbs of San Diego. Living in San Diego, I had a mortgage that kept us living paycheck to paycheck in spite of my salary, along with all the assorted and sundry bills that come with it. We were house-rich but cash-poor.
I was also a collector; of comics, books, statues and knick-knacks, DVD’s and blurays. I honestly believed for years that having more stuff would make me happy, but it could only ever fill the void momentarily. Consumption lead to the need for further consumption, and more and more money spent on the acquisition of things, most of which ended up meaning very little to me.
I still have the family, but literally everything else has changed. I no longer have that job, and currently have no interest in seeking a similar position elsewhere. Call it professional burnout, the desire to try my hand at something new, or if you want, go ahead and call it my midlife crisis; the truth is when I was let go from my job all I felt was a profound sense of relief.
We have sold our house and divested ourselves of 95% or more of our possessions. Everything we own now rests in a tiny storage unit for a few items we couldn’t bear to part with or in our car & small trailer.

The process of minimizing our possessions was an interesting one. I initially had loads of trepidation; how was I going to get rid of it all? Would I be able to get a good price for all that stuff? (Spoiler Alert: No) Would I miss it all? After all, I’d spent years and years gathering it all together.
But a funny thing happened. Each time I sold something, or gave it to a friend, or donated it, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. Each of those things was also a responsibility and their loss was simply one less thing to worry about. By the end, I just wanted the non-essentials gone.
We have only a vague plan, which doesn’t involve “moving to” or settling down again anytime soon. Instead we’ve become wandering gypsies or vagabonds, taking time to travel the road less taken; zigzagging back and forth across the west coast visiting friends, National Parks, waterfalls, and wild places while we drifted north to Canada and then east across that vast country towards the Maritimes.
From there? The plan is to keep the road-trip going with slow travel through Central and possibly South America. We don’t have a set time limit or duration; we’re trying it on for size to see how well it suits us. It may well be that we’ll be done with it in a few months time and decide to settle down somewhere else; alternately we could remain as nomads for years.
Currently we have no income, but with few remaining bills the money from our house sale should last awhile, and we plan to start supplementing it with other sources after we’re done with the first leg or so of this trip.
Each day brings new adventure; whether we’re exploring a new town, hiking a new trail or camping in the woods. We are not tied to a single place, job, or home. We have quite deliberately pulled up those roots to see what else life has in store for us.
Not every day has been amazing; it’d be rather peculiar if they had. Life is still life, and there are inevitably ups and downs. My wife and I have snapped at each other and argued more seriously occasionally; we’ve been bored waiting around for specific things to happen, have been disappointed when we haven’t been able to do something we really wanted to do, and have had to cut short our stay in areas we’d love to have explored further.
Traveling with pets has added its own challenges. Most US National Parks strictly prohibit dogs from walking on the trails which has limited our ability to hike and explore them as we’d like. Hotels and Airbnb accommodations have been limited to pet friendly locales, and the dogs themselves have gotten into a fair amount of hi-jinx along the way. Jade was nearly shot by an angry farmer when she managed to find a way into his sheep pen and began wreaking havoc — she’d never seen sheep before — and Tricksie decided to go on a walkabout of her own at a hotel one evening while we were out for dinner, cleverly opening the door to the hotel room after we left and receiving half a pork chop for her efforts.
Still, along the way so far we’ve reconnected with family we hadn’t seen in decades and have visited some truly magical places; swimming in glacial lakes and waterfalls, camping on lake shores, enjoying sunsets together, climbing mountains to incredible views, and walking amid the reverent hush of majestic redwood groves. We have laughed aloud, shared experiences with our daughters, and I think we’ve grown closer as a family.

I don’t know what tomorrow brings, but the idea excites me far more now than it did when I was slogging to my regular 9–5 job for years and years. The potential for each tomorrow is so much bigger now than it was then.
Wanderlust. The desire to see and experience more than just a tiny corner of the world. A nomadic impulse. A midlife crisis. The label doesn’t really matter… what it amounts to instead is a grand adventure.
