Back pain, fading eyesight, and inability to sleep: My real mid-life crisis

I've had a pretty great life and I am only really at the halfway point now too. I'm in my late 40's and I have almost zero regrets about how things panned out in my life. Sure, I likely would have been better off if I hadn't abandoned my career in the 2000's to come and work for peanuts in Thailand and then more than a decade later come to Vietnam to do just "whatever" for a job rather than return to the US - the fact is I have no idea what I would do there if I did move there, I know I would be sad, but that is about it.

I have managed to avoid most of the mid-life crisis things that a lot of men go through around my age. I have never been divorced (or married, for that part) and I don't have any estranged kids like so many of my contemporaries do. Do I regret never having had kids? No, not at all. But I am a man so that door is open for me for a while still if I really wanted it. I read the other day that Al Pacino I think it was, is a new father in his 70's so well, the biology is there at least.

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One of the main things that is a problem for me is back pain. It isn't the sort of pain that makes me fall to the ground in some sort of pinched nerve sort of way, it is the sort of nagging omni-present ache that is in my lower back constantly and bothers me most when I am in bed. I have already spent months at the international hospital over this and for a while it subsided but now it is back. It's just this "tinge" that I can feel going on and I am taking ibuprofen basically all the time to deal with it. This one sucks but it isn't a huge quality of life detriment.

I would very much like this to go away but I count my lucky stars when I can. A friend that is just a few years older than me got surprise diagnosed with multiple types of terminal cancer recently and he will be gone in a year or two. That's a brutal mid-life crisis in comparison for sure.

I would say that the largest single problem that I have in my life was summed up in a clip of Parks and Recreation that someone forwarded to me recently.

The quote was "I'm exhausted all the time but I can never get to sleep" or it might have been "I'm tired all the time but never sleepy." That's my life and it is a real plague on my existence. The back pain doesn't help because that flares up pretty bad when I am in bed too.

I spend almost all of my day feeling dead tired, but since I work at home and spend an inordinate amount of time there, I can really go to bed any time that I feel like it. I seriously struggle to get to sleep despite doing other things in my life correctly such as eating well(ish), limiting alcohol intake, and exercising regularly. I think one thing I could do differently would be to exercise later, because I always feel like I could go to sleep after that.

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The other day I was on the roof of my building because the sun was coming through after about 10 days of cloud cover, and accidentally fell asleep in a chair in the sun. Not a lounge chair, just a chair. The only reason why I didn't get more sunburned than I did was because someone else came up there and the sound of the air pressure that slams the door at the top woke me up.

Why was that chair more comfortable than my awesome and huge bed with $1000 mattress cover, temperature control, and white noise machine? It doesn't make sense to me.

I sit now at my computer after having woken up to an alarm (my latest attempt to try to get this under control) and after sitting in bed for hours tossing and turning last night I eventually relented and took a sleeping tablet which is the only reason why I got to sleep.

The real problem with this lack of quality sleep is that during the day, I am more tired than a person probably should be. I don't feel like I am ever tired enough to go to bed, but I lack the energy to participate in many of the things that I probably should do in my daily life.

I think this situation is probably pretty common and one of the things that I know is an issue is that I should stop watching TV or looking at screen in my bedroom. Perhaps this eye strain is a global problem that we all struggle to get to sleep because of the 24-hour access we have to entertainment and information.

I suppose the deteriorating condition of my eyesight could be another things to lump into my midlife crisis too. I have in my 2 bedroom apartment, at least half a dozen sets of reading glasses to accommodate the fact that I can't really see anything anymore unless it is far away. Not long ago a friend of mine told me he was neglecting to get glasses because he was worried that he would become dependent on them or that they would make his vision worse. I don't know if that is even possible but there does seem to be some merit to it. I probably could read this screen that I am looking at now without glasses, but I would have to strain in order to do so. Perhaps my friend is right, maybe if I had never used reading glasses I would just work my eyes more to be able to see what I am looking at. Perhaps by getting the readers I have stopped using the muscles that would normally focus the words for me and now they have atrophied.

Oh well, I guess I should start saving up for eye surgery so that I can fix this.

All in all my midlife crisis isn't that bad, but I could do without a lot of these things especially the part about not being able to get to sleep. I read somewhere recently that most people agree that "quality sleep" is the most important part of your day and if that is the case, it is probably no wonder that the rest of me hurts as a side effect.