I’m 45 and in a very similar place, both workwise and creatively with my little hobbies. Could be a mix of anxiety (personal and societal) and just getting older and changing. For me personally I think it’s a lack of social interactions with friends and not meeting new people that makes me feel stagnant. Seems more difficult to get out there the older I get…
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Thats pretty much your answer mate.
Sorry but its as simple as that. You get to your 40s and you go bleuargh, whats the point?
It’ll get better once you realise it doesnt matter if there’s a point or not.
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I can relate to this, it’s hard to feel sense of possibility when you’re caught in a web of responsibilities. I’m just focused on staying in good health so I can go on adventures after kids have flown the nest.
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The grandest philosophy of them all
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I know it’s hard, but I’ve come to accept it as part of the creative process and just with life in general.
I’ve found physical wellness tops the charts in terms of feeling good about things in life. A balance of IRL social experiences (e.g. community) and healthy relationships come in second.
I think as we build out a studio or aquire gear, there comes a price of guilt for not using it when we just aren’t inspired to.
There are tons of quotes out there, so I won’t fill your jar with them here.
But one that I should practice more goes “writers, write.”.
The secret to the sauce is rhythmic persistence. A say rhythmic, because one’s gotta make time for living.
Live life and in-between those moments, inspiration waits to be seized, recalled and captured in the things we create.
Rest, balance…strive for the well-lived life. The rest should follow.
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Dear Diary,
For me, staying off the internet as much as possible helps with stagnation. The internet is a place where people have no idea how to choose their battles wisely, and are connoisseurs of nothing but their own opinion and the sound of their own voice. It’s a place that only makes sense to me when I preface everyone’s comments with “Dear diary…”
Avoiding all of that negativity and ego as much as possible really does provide solace for me, and frees-up my whole being to be more creative. I’m a hack writer as well, so having another creative outlet to take your mind off making music for a while is helpful.
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My suggestion is to try something new. I feel a little bit of what you’re talking about, but not too much. I’m in my early-mid 30s and work in finance. I am also watching AI rapidly change my job and future. I am starting to look for my next position to take a step up in my career and there’s not a lot of opportunity right now. And yes, things are getting more expensive.
But, one thing I have going for me is that I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu a year ago. Having this completely new thing that is not as expensive as my other (electronics and tariff-impacted) hobbies and forces me to spend time learning, not thinking about the next thinking about the next ‘thing’. I get this sense of improvement from learning new moves, which doesn’t cost me extra beyond my existing gym membership.
I’m not saying martial arts are the answer, but running, dancing, biking, skating, poetry, writing - it all feels like it can force you to focus on stuff that isn’t AI and electronics. And unless air or youtube go up in price, their accessibility broadly isn’t going to change. You can still get a sense of progression as your mile times drop, your prose improves, or you can finally nail that nollie you’ve been working on.
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i’m mid 50’s , was made redundant a few years ago and the constant news of studio closures , redundancies and lack of interest in playing any new games has lead me to basically do nothing for 2 years… i see a few nice pixel art indie games around but the thought of doing AAA again has zero interest … sure the money is good (or was , i suspect that is lower too) … the stress levels are stupid … its not working in a coal mine but has still taken its toll health wise … doing pixel art afgain like i did 40 years ago seems a bit of a step backwards, though i think i enjoyed it and tools/pipelines have changed a lot ‘since my day’
i ‘should’ figure out something i’m interested in and maybe retrain … but retraining to do something for another 10 years … whats the point in that?.. (i’m in a bit of a doom and gloom mood today)
my youtube is full of ‘mid 50’s? why you’ll never work again’ … or ‘mid 50’s , you shouldve retired sooner’ … or 'gen z , why i escaped the rat race" … perhaps they’ll have nuggets of knowledge … i just assume its the latest grift for people like me to flap their face holes and try to monetize things.
i couldve done more music but i’m realising i’m more interested in the ‘how to’ use gear rather than making ‘music’ . … i should definitely sell most of my gear.
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Or start writing gear reviews and tutorials? Get into technical writing. Maybe end up doing manuals for some small company. I can tell for sure with some of the more indie companies out there they could use help in this space.
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Musically i’ve always had phases were i felt stuck. And i don’t expect any mind blowing new styles being invented in the near future. Or maybe ever.
I still find joy in music and life though. Not always but often enough.
Music is made out of waves. 
Up and down, it comes and goes…
Life is an ocean. Be a surfer and get back up on that board again! 
But seriously, i know how you feel. I felt pretty similar a few days ago. Right now i feel a new creative rush coming. I don’t know how long it will last. Sometimes it’s just there for a day.
One thing that helps me is trying to come back into the moment. Not thinking about the future or career plans. Just playing around with a synth or whatever without any goal in mind. When i manage to do that i actually feel pretty good. But it’s definitely not always easy to get into that mode.
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And if you think that sort of thing doesn’t exist or never happens, I was the technical head of an indie label for a bit. I don’t mean technically the head, I mean I was lead engineer, I got to give my input on all the mixes and do all the masters for a couple years. That position didn’t exist before me, it doesn’t exist today, but for a few years, I was able to leverage my engineering strength in music and my community involvement into my dream job within music (as a hobby).
Work was lame. My entire life was lame. I didn’t do anything except get underpaid at work and work on my music or play videogames at home. No life. No seeing my friends. But I still got to feel massively accomplished with music, and nothing that’s happened to me since can take that away from me.
I say all that to say, if your dream job doesn’t exist, you have more tools than ever now to help you make it a thing. I did this in 2017-2020, I can only wish that I had AI to help me with some of the work I took on in that time to get where I wanted. That was my first advice to the people who took over after me - code bespoke solutions for your workflows and leverage AI to help you do it (or fill in other skill gaps in the team). Now they’re bringing me BACK to help them develop that as a thing we can share with other small labels, and they’ve already been able to accomplish a lot with the first draft we’re working with right now. We’ve got one guy now doing more releases than four people this time a decade ago. With human music, human album art, human mastering. One person an hour a day. I’m excited to see what we can start to do with two of us. And once we can get this software into other labels’ hands, I’m hoping we can make it way easier for labels to be able to say yes to more artists without watering down the attention they give each one.
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At 40 years it sounds like you are part of the norm. No one lives long when their dreams are dead. So you wake up and focus on the priorities (and retire with no debt), and formulate new dreams based on the trial and error of your last 40 years (and hopefully never retire). Or you don’t, and stagnation defines you.
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redacted
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There’s definitely a tightness, but everyone’s situation is different I guess. Your age group and generation might change perspective on this, too.
Personally I feel like many things coalesced at once. Before now we were tunneling into the smart phone era, a more prevalent internet and social media culture, which gobbled up things like movies, and music.
Music and movies feel less culturally important as they once did. You can say the same for magazines and print culture. So much of that has been dissolved, and then to throw AI in at the same time seem like a continually brewing storm.
Post-covid iso lifestyles still continue, including the increase in streaming and online personality culture. And things are related to this, even before AI things had been consolidating, such that there are less industries to be involved in than there were (I guess I’m talking in a creative media sense).
I guess I’m just talking from my own bubble but I feel like gaming has become the more dominant cultural form. Not just the games themselves, but the different cultural practices around them. Perhaps I’m just not paying attention to music as much as I used to and it’s as big as it’s ever been, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.
Still, stagnation can be a nice signpost I guess. A bit of a directional on where to. And social circles shift, change and dwindle as you get older, too. Sometimes I find stagnation as a community flag - if I think back to my most prolific music times, I was absolutely surrounded by loads of musicians. Now I’m not, and I’m more invested in online culture and the activity there, so I guess that’s where the inspiration comes from.
The economy is in a rough spot, which makes it tough for everyone to be free and easy with whatever. Still, nothing beats putting away some bank, if you can. Build up and then detach free and float, and maybe let your nose guide you for a while on where you want to go.
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I’m the same generation, a couple of years older. This is a perfectly “normal” sentiment right now.
It’s one thing when you don’t feel settled and secured in life when you’re 25-30 and a whole another when you feel the same 10+ years later. All the while the world is clearly going in the wrong direction so hope is even more difficult to find.
When you mention stoicism etc. I personally feel - and I am surely not alone in this - that it’s one more thing sold to our generation as a perpetual self-improvement hamster wheel, while it’s more than evident that it in fact not everything is about the individual.
Of course we can and should touch the grass, be mindful of the small things and find our own purpose. But I just want to say it isn’t entirely your “fault” to feel this way. We live in a society and much of it is poisoned one way or another.
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I hear you. Society is going directions I don’t want it to go, but people just let it happen. I’d go deeper into (world) politics, but this forum isn’t the place for that, thank God it’s still a musical oasis and I want to keep it that. Prices go up, wages don’t follow. In a rental house (because of divorce, couldn’t get a new mortgage while houses were still affordable but the ex still was in our house with the kids…long story, doesn’t matter), so now I see a lot of my wages disappear in a house that’s not even mine in the end. Really want my own house, as a piggybank for my kids, but alas. Worries about my kids’ futures, governments really want to take us to war it seems, people at the EU (unchosen by Europe’s citizens) have no understanding of the countries they try to govern and have their own mega-expensive pet projects that are destined to fail from the get-go. Unfiltered immigration bringing more trouble, and this society cannot continue to work if the amount of people drawing resources grows too big compared to the taxpayers / people earning honest money. Politicians are not there for helping the people that chose them, they only seem to be there to create more laws they don’t enforce anyway, and just are there because of the money and power. This country needs a big-ass broom and a rinse to reset and actually do what matters again.
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After a busy creative year in 2025 this year is a real lull for me too.
It’s all cyclical though, been here before in this ‘unproductive’ mode, new job isn’t helping either. Feeling burnt out from the change.
So I just play about with stuff as and when I can (I’m finding the little Roland Airas great for this) and I’ll get back to uploading finished tunes again when the stars realign.
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Some of you need to go and queue up at a food bank, tell the people there of your woes.
They don’t know they’re fucking born mate.
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Wait till you reach your fifties 
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This thread is a total bummer! For what it’s worth, I still have a point and I refuse to stop believing.
Fuck off with all the negativity! I have shit to do!
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