On our tendency toward (creative) destruction

About five years ago, when I was around 39¾, I had an overwhelming desire to blow up this blog. The idea was that, on my 40th birthday, visitors would be met with a mushroom cloud instead of my writing, with no explanation given.

I almost did it, too. For around 15 minutes on the day I turned the big four-oh, this blog was replaced by a symbol of nuclear disaster. I switched it back, however, for three reasons. The first was that I was concerned that the symbology was inappropriate. The second was that I realised it would be difficult for me to re-find my own stuff again. Third, and perhaps most importantly, everyone would just think I was having a mid-life crisis.

The thing is, though, that this is now the fifth year in a row that I’ve had a desire to blow things up and walk away from the things I’m currently doing. What’s stopping me? Relationships and money, if I’m honest. If I had the ability to do so while feeding my family and not unduly upsetting anybody, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

As humans, I think we are by nature both creative, in that we build things, and destructive, in that we destroy them. Creative destruction is a term that usually used in economics to describe the cyclic accumulation and destruction of wealth, but I’m using the term in a different way. I think we need to destroy the things we’ve created before they destroy us.

In the end, everything fails, everything comes to an end, and all natural things die. As I’ve previously quoted Baltasar Gracián as saying:

The sensible person’s maxim: abandon things before they abandon you. Know how to turn an ending into a triumph. Sometimes the sun itself, whilst still shining brilliantly, goes behind a cloud so nobody can see it setting, leaving people in suspense over whether it has or not.

I’ve tried to turn a corner by embarking on my MSc in Systems Thinking in an attempt to think intentionally what I want to do with the second half of my career. I’ve thought about what a new consultancy offering might look like around this, but I right now I feel like that it would require taking energy from elsewhere in my life to make that a success.

But perhaps it’s just… November? This is one of the lowest times of the year for me. Perhaps I just need to continue listening to Morrissey, even if some of his view are problematic. Life isn’t a purity test.