I’ll give that a try. It couldn’t hurt.
I think a lot of this is hard for my wife. Plus I think she has her own issues she is dealing with such as her aging parents, probably some self esteem issues, and God knows what else.
I have to deal with stress / anxiety / depressions and there are some things that help me.
One thing. There is this theory:
So if you suddenly lose your job, or was in a really uncertain position prior to that, then a lot of your basic human needs are getting ripped away from you. There goes the security, the economic well-being is now in danger, you lose the sense of belonging to a group, you aren’t getting recognition from accomplishing things at work, and you lose control of your life.
It’s simply human nature to get stressed, anxious, and depressed in these circumstances.
For me, I find that the part of me that is so worried and depressed is emotionally really young, so it helps me by talking to myself like I would a child. It doesn’t always help, but often it does.
Having hope also helps me, so I spend time finding hope.
I keep track of progress, which also helps me find help.
I’d say all this is accurate.
What I’m having trouble with is the hope. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find a new job that’s at least as good as my old one.
My relationship with my wife, I don’t know. Like I’m so mad that she stuck us with this house in the middle of nowhere. Especially when I’m here by myself. Plus how she keeps everything a pig sty.
We went to an estate sale at one of the houses down the street. The house was filled to the brim with 50+ years of crap. And the dude who lived there was a former fighter pilot, mayor of the town, and owned his own book store. And yet they ended up in this hoarders house in the middle of the woods. Is that my future if I don’t leave my wife?
Have you ever considered whether there might be a way to gain some distance from your wife and your current life, a sabbatical from your marriage, so to speak? You could live in a furnished apartment for a few months, perhaps in another city, and look for a new job in peace. This would allow you to gain distance from all the things you don’t like at the moment and that are weighing on you. You could find peace and relaxation and figure out how your life can go on, with or without your wife. Distance can give you relief; it can free you from the confinement you’re living in now, which is taking a lot of your energy and joy out of life. Perhaps you will also meet new people who can give you fresh inspiration. From a distance, you can assess whether you want to return to your former life or start a new one.
At some point I was faced with the question “Am I going to allow my “happiness”, e.g., mental state, to be controlled by circumstance largely beyond my control?”
This forced me to rethink what I was using as criteria for determining my mood. I was letting the fighting between my kids get to me. Imagine turning your mental state over to the whims of two adolescents! Absurd. It’s as silly as my wife getting upset that their socks are on the floor.
That is to say, of course you don’t have to be happy they are leaving the socks. You also don’t have to accept the situation. But the million-dollar question is how to handle it without it driving you crazy.
Ok, so what if you never get another job as good as your old one? What if you get one that’s only 50% as good as your last one? Should you only be 50% as happy?
What are you hoping for? Is it something you have control over?
My job wasn’t THAT good. I mean it was ok for a couple years and I liked my boss and most of the people I worked with and we had a really cool office (when I went there). But really the work was a lot of boring backoffice banking bullshit that I could take or leave. And as a company they were really fucking cheap and I didn’t see my career going anywhere anyway. I’d mostly be happy with a job that paid about the same that didn’t drive me nuts.
I think for me I’m just going to mostly focus on stuff I can control and try not to worry about what might or might not happen six months from now. Work on my job search. Clean up our living space (whether my wife likes it or not). Also take some time to relax and enjoy my time off. One thing I regret from when I lost my job like 7 years ago was I got myself so worked up I couldn’t enjoy myself at all. And I guess I’m not really sure why.
Unfortunately my wife is dealing with stressful shit of her own. Her mom just got out of surgery and is in rehab for a knee injury from way back in Christmas. Which means her senile dad needs a bit more taking care of (which I guess is fortunate that he is two houses down). Problem is my wife tends to deal with stress by micromanaging everyone and everything around her. So I guess I’ll have to figure something out with that.
One thing I’ve also been doing that seems to help is referring to various quotes from various sources along a similar theme of worrying about shit that MIGHT happen is often worse than if that thing actually happens and really doesn’t do much in the way of altering whether or not it is going to happen at all.
Yeah, that’s something which we often forget.
And at some point in your life, you may not get jobs what pay the same. That happened to me as well.
Exactly. I am constantly having to check my worries as well.
I have a lot of regrets as well, including that fact that I didn’t do more with my kids during the pandemic. I’m working on letting go of regrets as well, but they are good reminders for us to change our behaviors.
I tend to do the same thing as well. It drives my kids crazy and it’s something I am also working on.
But it’s great that you have figured out her pattern so it makes it easier to figure out how to deal with shit.
That’s really cool. It sounds like you’ve found something what helps.
I made a “toolbox,” a small notebook of saying and thoughts that help me deal with various situations.
Tread cautiously.
When I read that second thing after having read that first thing, alarm bells went off in my head.
Be careful not to let this become a zero sum game, where your ‘happiness’ (or contentment) has to come at the expense of your wife’s.
Bad things could happen. I would wager that ‘bad things happening’ would be the foreseeable outcome of the path described above.
No, I just meant that it’s something I recognize with how my wife behaves and try to adjust accordingly.
It may be worth re-reading what I wrote in the context of the two quotes I cited from your post.
ETA:
What you might do:
The critical context about your wife:
I would never suggest that somebody do the first thing, given the context offered in the second thing.
IMHO, it’s somewhere between asking for trouble and passive-aggressive. In any case, a really bad idea.
Would I be happy living the remainder of my days as a complete professional failure working an underpaid job I hate so my wife can have some stupid house out in the middle of nowhere where I don’t want to live?
I think I would probably be very unhappy with that.
Now that’s a darn handy little summation of the situation.
That formulation is a guaranteed failure for your happiness and probably your marriage. It might be an accurate formulation, or it might be your anger and resentment building up a seductive reductive framing of it. IOW, a caricature designed to inflame, not inform. And one not consciously designed, which makes it all the more insidious.
I’m in no position to say which is closer to your truth. But you are.
Let’s try a different alternate future:
Would I be happy living the remainder of my days as a complete professional
failuresuccess working anunderpaidoverpaid easy job Ihate solove while my wifecan havestill has some stupid house out in the middle of nowhere where I don’t want to live?
If that sounds happy, then your solution may lie in a job. If that sounds unhappy, well, at least you understand that a better job won’t solve your problem. That’s a darn handy bit of info to have, and removes a lot of pressure from the job hunt.
Try swapping the other elements around. OK job, lose the house. Shitty job, lose the wife. Etc. Explore that territory and take note of how you feel about each alternate future. You might surprise yourself.
Your life is bleeding from several wounds. Figuring out which is urgent / important enough to address first and most thoroughly is essential. Get it wrong and you’ll bleed out with a shiny fresh bandaid on some minor cut.
You sound like a man who’s totally cornered and despairing while watching his life drain away. That was me a couple years ago and I solved it by leaving my fairly new wife. But I had a much simpler situation than you do. My leaving caused far less collateral damage than yours necessarily will. My leaving also avoided far less future problems than yours would. IOW comparatively mine was lower pain and lower gain than yours would be.
But I finally realized that it was not my job to destroy my life to avoid other people experiencing pain they’ll never realize I was saving them from. They’re happily walking over a bridge I’m holding up, oblivious to the effort I’m expending to create a bridge I’m not even using.
I have no conclusion for you. Your life is not the same as mine. But some knots are truly Gordian enough than only a sword slice can take them apart. Picking at the edges does nothing but run down the clock.
Good luck on whatever path you take.
Of course that sounds better. Life is always a lot better when you have a big pay check coming in every few weeks. That’s basically how my life was up until now. Sure, there were still issues we were dealing with but they were mostly typical life annoyances or logistics with the kids.
Getting an equivalent job in terms of salary, time off (I had like 5+ weeks), flexibility, location, and mostly lack of assholes would solve a lot of my problems.
The problem is I’m not sure how likely a future that is.
For sure a hefty job would be an improvement. I’ve had getting-by jobs and they’re-paying-me-stupid-money jobs. The latter makes the rest of life a lot easier.
My point was whether that change, assuming it came through, would solve your problems, or just leave them to fester longer before your personal crisis boiled over again.
IOW, a better job might be a necessary condition for your happiness, but is it a sufficient condition?
To be honest, I don’t know.
A huge part of my problem is that my entire career has been highly unstable (if relatively lucrative). My wife OTOH has enjoyed a very successful career at her company for decades. In fact most of the people we know have been pretty successful as executives, partners in their firms, or business owners.
So for me, it creates a constant sense of stress and anxiety where I feel like my career has gone to shit. Even when I have a job, it feels somewhat like it’s a lower level than I should be at while I’m constantly anxious that it can be taken away at a moments notice. At the very least I feel like a fuckup who can’t hold a job for long.
It also creates a lot of pressure on my wife where she becomes the “breadwinner”. And because she was raised by parents who were poor and unsuccessful, she tends to be overly controlling, lest anyone make a mistake. So now it’s like she can never turn off and relax. Always micromanaging everyone to her schedule.
We also don’t really have a social life or do anything fun that doesn’t involve the kids. All our actual friends have moved out of the area. We spend most of our free time out in the country where we only really interact with her elderly parents and aunts. So to me it feels very isolating.