A memoir on transforming crisis into
Today is a special day — it’s publishing day for my new book, The Midlife Shift.
If you’ve been following me here on Medium, I think you will enjoy it, as it captures much of what I’ve been sharing over the years. This book delves deeper into those reflections, exploring themes of self-awareness, purpose, and the journey toward an authentic life.
Here is the full Introduction from the book. Thank you for coming along on this journey with me — I’m excited to share this with you.
“Your problems have nothing to do with your heart but with your head,” the doctor said.
It was May 2008 when my doctor suggested I see a psychiatrist for my malaise. What I was going through was not heart failure but panic attacks. It’s true, the twelve months leading up to that point were turbulent, but I’d felt a dissatisfaction creeping into my being well before then. Somehow, the fulfilment I used to get from working at my company was drowned by the weight of responsibilities and expectations.
I still wasn’t as financially free as I thought I would be when I first created my company fifteen years earlier. Yes, my earnings helped support a rich, extravagant, and busy life, but I had no safety net. Buying four Rolex watches within eighteen months wasn’t making my happiness last. The more I made, the more affluent my life became. I had become enslaved not by a person or a giant corporation but by striving for money, prestige, and success.
On that night in 2008, on a hotel balcony in Lebanon, with a cigar in hand, I contemplated the doctor’s words and could see, for the first time, myself split into two. First was the extroverted and successful business owner, an esteemed member of society whom everyone thought they knew and admired. Then there was the other person who no one but I knew. The person who wanted to be alone with his thoughts and had an insatiable curiosity about the mysticism of life. The person who craved a far less lavish lifestyle.
It was now apparent that the formula for living the good life I’d learned through osmosis was failing me. Striving for success, money, and prestige wasn’t giving me the happiness I thought my achievements guaranteed.
I had followed the model my father had shown me — what all of his peers and what the wider Lebanese expatriate society had demonstrated regularly. A good life was about hard work, making money, taking care of your family, climbing the status ladder, and enjoying the fruits.
At the start of my adult life, I followed it so well that, together with the family and friends that I grew up with, we became the talk of the town, the envy of many, and the top of the list for any dinner or party invitation. We were wealthy, affluent, and sophisticated, all regularly criss-crossing the globe. As a result, we were dubbed the Millionaire’s Club.
However, by the time the panic attacks began in 2008, I had become disillusioned, ambivalent and angry. I’d lost my zeal for my business and started questioning myself and the values under which I’d been living.
Why wasn’t I happy? Why did the rest of the Millionaire’s Club seem much more content than I did? These constant questions plagued me. Then, as my ruminations and reflections got more profound, I started to ask a more searching question:
What if I was living my life all wrong?
Maybe it didn’t matter what other people thought of my life. Maybe it didn’t even matter that I was living according to a self-imposed happiness formula. None of it matched what was true in my heart.
As we’ve evolved from being hunter-gatherers to more sophisticated human beings, our brains and psychological needs have grown. Today, there is an existential crisis that has left many, like me, feeling depressed, empty, and in search of meaning.
The uncomfortable truth is that we go through the first part of our lives in action mode, like rats chasing dopamine hit after dopamine hit, until a crisis beckons us to ask: “What if we are all living our lives the wrong way?”
We all need to sit up at various stages of our lives and ask ourselves if we are on our rightful, authentic paths. We so seldom do this. Instead, we allow the busyness of life to numb us into believing that we are doing fine. Without warning, we become slaves to our impulses — those desires consciously and subconsciously bestowed upon us by our genetic disposition, upbringing and environment, the constant media barrage, and the confusing signals of our bodies. The breakneck speed of today’s world doesn’t make it any easier on us. There are endless options on how to live and a never-ending number of gurus telling us how to become our best selves. There are also easy and accessible platforms for us to compete and compare. Unfortunately, the noise surrounding us has stopped our music’s eruption from within.
We can all live happier, more content lives full of meaningful experiences and unique connections — and still leave a legacy — without the need for striving and without the running and the exhaustion that comes with it.
We can be healthy and have enough money to be free from needing other people, governments, or institutions. We can have a wonderful group of friends and family around us and feel useful by contributing to our communities without feeling pressured to live in the rat race.
First, we need to slow down, dig deeper into ourselves, and find out what we want. We must discover the obstacles that stand in our way and recognise the values we want to live by. We must then use those values to inform the kind of lives we want to live. No, it’s not easy, but when we accept that struggle and discomfort are ways to grow and that doing the work on ourselves means removing the old paradigms that don’t serve us anymore, we slowly install the habits that can lead us to what we truly want.
My story is not a Hollywood rags-to-riches story but rather a story of growing self-awareness. This inner journey is long and endless, but it’s a human one. As Socrates said thousands of years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
I got to know myself much better by removing my egoic exterior, layer after layer. I share my innermost feelings as a testament for others to see why examining our values and beliefs is imperative. These values are the springboard from which we can clarify what we want . . . and then have the courage to go for it.
As I started to let go of the old values that I’d lived by, I was able to create new ones that resonated more with my authentic self. As a result, I started to live a more meaningful life aligned with my fresh set of values.
My values were now not extrinsically motivated but more intrinsically driven. Instead of success, prestige, accomplishment, and money, I now craved creativity, presence, simplicity, vulnerability, and authenticity. Instead of allowing my mind and society’s influence to affect my wants, I now allowed my heart and body to lead the way. The more I expressed the depths of my soul and allowed my muted voice to speak, the better I connected with people and the world.
My self-discovery journey has been long and riddled with cul-de-sacs, where old demons pulled me into bouts of confusion, ambivalence, and mild depression. However, because I failed repeatedly, my path was being self-corrected, just like a rocket shooting from the Earth to the moon; it adjusts its trajectory slowly but surely to land on the right spot.
Through this journey, I have come to know what I stand for. I’ve clarified my values and have a particular worldview that has become my North Star. These guiding principles include:
- Accepting that letting go of comfort and ease and allowing more pain and struggle in our lives means more growth, presence, and richness of life.
- Not caring about society’s whims (e.g., status and prestige) and instead focusing on having genuine connection and community.
- Recognising that money beyond a certain point poisons the heart and that living frugally and simply results in purity and freedom.
- Embracing the ordinary — being humble, useful, and competent — rather than the egocentric concept of trying to be extraordinary and saving the world.
- Keeping the following mantra as a guide: Get into action. Do what you love. Go for your goals. But detach from the results. Detach from the fruits of your actions. We can only control our actions — not their outcomes. But we should never — never — detach from our actions. We lose ourselves if we do.
As you follow along on my personal journey, I hope you too will come to see the value in these principles and find ways to adapt them for yourself.
You deserve a life free of malaise — free of the disconnect that comes along with superficial success. But this can only be achieved through a fundamental shift in your mindset and the way you view yourself in the world.
Allow me to share my experiences and learnings to guide you toward a deeper, richer, and more content life.
Thanks for reading.
The Midlife Shift: How I Left the Rat Race and Found Myself is available on Amazon and Apple Books.
If you are in Ghana and want to order a copy, please call 0244334948.
