Am I having a mid-life crisis?

Or, are my diamond shoes just a bit too tight?

I found myself having a bit of an existential debate (with myself) this weekend — perhaps it’s just the shadow of my impending 39th birthday, but something got me thinking about what it is that I do each day, and whether it’s actually what I want to be doing.

For those of you who don’t know me from Adam, allow me to give you the penny tour:

My name is Andy Hawkes, and I am almost 39 years old. For the last three-and-a-bit years I have been a “Technology Team Lead & Solutions Architect” at the London outpost of R/GA, an award-winning global digital agency. Before that, I had various roles and job titles over the preceding decade or so (they’re all lovingly detailed on my LinkedIn profile, if you’re really interested), but the short version is that for the last 13 years or so I have been paid to do “stuff” on the web.

So there we go — I’m a web guy who works in big, fancy London for a big, fancy global agency. I wear jeans, t-shirt and trainers to a bright, air-conditioned office and spend my day sat on a comfy, ergonomically adjustable chair (it’s not an Aeron though, sadly) in front of a small, fancy Apple laptop. We also have a pool table in the agency colours, plus ping-pong, foosball, and a glittering array of massive flat screens bolted to various walls round the office. Oh, and fancy coffee machines. I eat nice food, drink craft beer, and get paid approximately 240% of the United Kingdom average salary, apparently. Clearly it sucks to be me.

What that doesn’t tell you, however, is why I do what I do, and that is where I started to descend into the existential mire.

If I’m brutally honest, I do what I do because I’ve been doing it for a long-ish time, and if you subscribe to the oft-misquoted Malcolm Gladwell’s theory, I should be pretty damned good at it by now.

I’ve been doing it for long enough and have seen enough of this industry to know what I’m doing and to add more value by dint of experience than I do by more directly tangible skills (such as writing code) alone, and as such I am now in a position where I do less “doing” and more “planning”, “facilitating” and “organising” — also known as “leading”.

So far, so… meh. If you asked a good number of people my age the same question you’d probably get a similar story — we do a thing, get good at it, and then start managing and mentoring other people who are less experienced at doing that thing.

In my case, that thing is leading and building digital projects, and because of who I work for those projects tend to fall into the area of advertising and marketing for products and services aimed at relatively well-off first world folk (such as myself).

It is that realisation which gives me pause for thought in my more lucid and reflective moments (possibly with a glass of red wine in hand) — basically my job is to help large, rich companies sell expensive things to rich people, and they’re things for which they have no real need.

Sure, you might want those fancy headphones, the latest smartphone, the big-screen 4K Ultra-HD TV, the premium branded spirits, the ridiculously over-engineered wristwatch, and the prestige automobile, but do you need them? Probably not. Could all of that money do far better things in a world riven by stark inequality and beset by violent conflict? Hell yes.

It’s probably also a reflection on the memory of the late, great Bill Hicks venting forth on the contributions to the world as a whole made by those in the advertising and marketing professions, but I find myself wondering if I might be better able to do something more broadly positive (or at least more meritorious) if I was to break away from the advertising world and get back into a more “tech focussed” role somewhere else.

During my years at the University of York I probably spent more time in the RAG office, going on weekend charity collection “raids” and organising or stewarding events than I did in lecture halls or the library (and my degree results probably reflect that laxness in academic focus). I have many friends who work in the “third sector” as a direct result of their involvement in RAG, and I’ve certainly thought about joining their ranks (and giving my karma a long-overdue top-up).

There’s just one thing that’s held me back to date, and it’s a pretty big one — the elephant in the room, you might say — it’s the money.

Put simply, the charity sector pays peanuts compared to the glamorous world of advertising (or other tech-focussed jobs in similarly well-off areas of the private sector).

Don’t get me wrong, money isn’t everything, but it certainly comes in bloody handy when you’ve got a mortgage to pay, a house to run, and an expensive commute in to London to pay for! I mean, if I could find an equivalent job locally and hop on my bicycle to work, I could afford to drop about £10,000 off my pre-tax income rather than pay lots of tax and then spend £450 a month on a train ticket… but there aren’t any equivalent jobs locally, and if I wanted to find a similar digital / web job working for a charity in London I’d probably be looking at losing double that and still having to pay for my commute!

On that basis, it looks like I’m not going to be switching industries any time soon, unless I get very lucky or make a substantial and very deliberate lifestyle choice.

The question is, will I do it?

Am I having a mid-life crisis, or are my diamond shoes just a bit too tight?

Originally posted on Medium