I just turned 40, parent of a young child, and I know what you mean. I think the below article, a cover story in <i>The Atlantic</i>, is really insightful and I found it helped adjust my thinking.<p>There are going to be things that I wanted to do, that I won&#x27;t do in my life. Some may never have happened no matter what, like winning the Super Bowl or becoming an astronaut. But some of them will be things that I could very plausibly have actually done--but instead I did other things. The challenge of happiness is acknowledging that I made those choices for reasons that seemed good at the time, and anyway I can&#x27;t go back and change the past. To be happy, I have to accept that it&#x27;s possible to be happy, even knowing that I gave some things up for other things.<p>Essentially I&#x27;m working on believing that goals and happiness are separate things, each of which can be achieved independently of the other.<p>The link:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-real-roots-of-midlife-crisis&#x2F;382235&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-real...</a><p>A quote:<p>&gt; Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.