Mid life crisis?

I'm 28 now, just fyi... and I think I'm suffering a mid life crisis of sorts...
email excerpts from my friends in London (who shall remain anonymous)

Friend A:

Had a hectic week in singapore. was at my cousin's wedding, caught up with alot of friends while in singapore and for the first time in my life did i actually not want to board the plane back to london....like seriously seriously....i am considering accelerating my move back to .sg actually. been doing alot of internal soul searching and don't even know anymore why I am staying on in london...

major homesick blues.....if i kena cut in the next round of redundancies i might just pack up and go....i think i am having a mid life crisis

Me:

hehehehehehe i also suffering a little bit of a mid life crisis of sorts. i suppose its a combination of factors:
1 - the gbp drop.. working in london doesn't look so attractive anymore
2 - the economy and the financial crisis - opens you up a little and you start wondering if there's more to life than just work and money
3 - age.. well for me at least since my birthday just passed, i start feeling the age creeping up and wondering if i've really lived the life I want to live, and whether i should live it any differently now.

not really homesick ( i don't miss singapore all that much) but just generally feeling sian... feeling the same way as xp, if kena cut, then just pack and go...

also have been adjusting my own expectations a bit.. got this GQ insert on london's best restaurants... waah wah wah... but then started wondering how often can go and eat out at these restaurants and spend about 70quid a head... bleah..


Friend B:

i think this 'mid life crisis' thing is usually the catalyst for people taking a career break / gap year or finding work that they really enjoyed. Some time back I was discussing with a colleague of mine... most (not all) people in the office seem to be smart and capable, but there way fewer people over 30 in the bank than under 30 - obviously there is a pyramid of hierachy where its narrower at the top, but the question which begs to be answered is --- how many people decide enough banking is enough by the time they reach 30 and leave anyway? We thought the answer was : lots.

The environment we work in is probably not your average job - but then no average job would satisfy our personality traits (high achieving / ambitious / always planning the next career step) so it would only makes sense to us to:
a) work hard in an environment that you totally enjoy yourself - this means lower pay, higher job satisfaction, better social life
b) work hard in a bearable environment, rewarded by the holidays / material things that you can look forward to.

I think most of us start off at b) and transition to a) as we grow older. and that is because when we just graduated, money was hard to come by - so all else seemed secondary... now... you can actually eat a £70 meal which you could never dream off when you were a student. so once the material wealth box is ticked, its time to move on to other things i guess... dimishing marginal returns.

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All of these makes a lot of sense... Lets just see if I can stick it through...