Running out of fuel
Jets appear to float in the sky, long after fuel has run out. To an observer far apart, everything looks orderly, but only the pilot knows that downward is the only way from here. That is how life feels sometimes. Your foot is off the pedal, hovering over the brakes. The speed you've accumulated will carry you far in the future, possibly even decades, but it will never be a rocketship.
This feeling is captured extremely well in the book "How to live safely in a science fictional universe" -
Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.
Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you're not looking, it's there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it's the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it's not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don't get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice.
Hitting the peak of your life's trajectory is not the painful part. The painful day comes earlier, comes before things start going downhill, comes when things are still good, still pretty good, still just fine. It comes when you think you are still on your way up, but you can feel that the velocity isn't there anymore, the push behind you is gone, it's all inertia from here, it's all coasting, it's all momentum, and there will be more, there will be higher days, but for the first time, it's in sight. The top. The best day of your life. There it is. Not as high as you thought it was going to be, and earlier in your life, and also closer to where you are now, startling in its closeness. That there's a ceiling to this, there's a cap, there's a best-case scenario and you are living it right now. To see that look in your parents' faces at the dinner table at ten, and not recognize it, then to see it again at eighteen and recognize it as something to recognize, and then to see it at twenty-five and to recognize it for what it is.
The constant negging of everyday trifles pulls you into a vortex that leaves you tired, frustrated, and even depressed. Every day, the sound of ticking is louder, and the weight of unfulfilled desires even harder to carry. There's heaviness in simply being. You get the urge to uproot everything and start again on an empty easel. Oh, how sweet it would be if the real painting resembled the imagery in your head.
It's Monday again, and you have a newborn motivation. You wake up on time, go to the gym once, and the world is bright again. You turn to a motivational video or watch Carlos Alcaraz's comeback from 4 match points, and you're so back. You've got this momentum, until you don't. You're back in the slump. It's day 500 of starting over.
Most efforts don't materialise. There is a chasm to cross, and it takes a Herculean effort. Anything less than that goes to zero.
When you are younger, you look at someone and think, maybe I can be like that. Then, at a certain age, you stop feeling that way. You look at them the same way as those whose lives have passed look at them. They are privileged or at the right place at the right time, you think. You turn cynical.
Reality doesn't care about how you feel; it only cares about what you do. What you do is the only evidence that can bring a future into truth. Otherwise, it's all a dialogue you keep having with yourself.
A psychology research I read drew parallels between plants and startups' growth. Everything has a natural pace of growth. When startups receive more capital than they can productively absorb, they often hollow out into shell companies. Likewise, plants given artificial supplements may grow larger in the short term, but the accelerated growth ruptures their core. They cannot grow beyond.
Maybe one should stick to their organic speed.