The forty year itch

I’ve been waking up at 6:00 AM for years. For a long time, that hour had a purpose. It was for the inbox, for getting ahead, for clearing the deck before the day started asking questions.

Now it’s different.

The house is quiet. My toddler is still asleep. Chennai is still in that in-between state where the sky looks awake but the streets haven’t fully committed. I sit with a coffee and the same thought comes back, not dramatically, just steadily. I’m forty-four, I’ve already resigned, and I’m back with my family. The plan I thought I was following has stopped feeling like a plan, and I’m living in that gap.

Not in a panic way. Not as a crisis. More like a quiet noticing. The kind you do when you’ve been walking the same route for years and suddenly realize you could do it blindfolded, and that’s exactly the problem.

I spent twenty-two years in Talent Acquisition and HR. It was a good run. IT, banking, and most recently the GCC world, where everything is a build, everything has a timeline, and every conversation ends with a version of “so what’s the plan from here.”

Over time, the role becomes more than a job. It becomes your shape. You become the person who can handle it, who knows how things work, who has a view. There’s comfort in that, because life is easier when the world knows where to place you.

Then somewhere around forty, something shifts.

It’s not the movie version of midlife. No sports car fantasies. No dramatic reinvention. For me, it felt more like an intellectual itch. A restlessness that doesn’t shout, but doesn’t leave either. Even now, after the resignation, it’s still here. Maybe that’s the point. You don’t leave the itch behind. You just give it room.

Some mornings, I catch myself looking at the road ahead and thinking, I’ve seen this already.

Same meeting, different calendar invite.
Same urgency, different dashboard.
Same “quick call,” different time zone.

I used to be proud of how familiar it all felt. Familiar meant competent. Familiar meant safe. But familiarity has a way of becoming a loop if you stay in it too long.

Back in Chennai, the calendar is mine now. That sounds peaceful until you actually live with it. A blank calendar is not instantly calm. It can feel oddly exposing. Like a room with too much light. There’s no structure to hide behind, no title doing the introduction for you, no steady stream of tasks proving you are still useful.

The funny part is, I still wake up at six. The discipline hasn’t left. But the “deep work” is unrecognizable now. One day I’m reading about goat farming. The next day I’m looking at retail franchises. Some evenings I’m staring at a trading screen, not sure if I’m learning something new or just replacing one kind of mental noise with another.

The hardest part isn’t the work. It’s the identity shift.

When you’ve been “the HR guy” for so long, the role does the explaining for you. People know what to ask. They know where to place you. Now the questions are simpler and somehow heavier.

“So what are you doing next?”
“What’s the plan?”

And for the first time in my life, I’m answering without rushing to make it sound impressive.

“I don’t know yet.”

So I keep waking up at six. I drink the coffee. I sit in the quiet. I look at the blank calendar and feel both the freedom and the discomfort of it. And I try not to force it into a neat answer too quickly.

Because maybe the second half isn’t a big reinvention.

Maybe it’s just a slow return to yourself.