“A lot of guys hit a brick wall in their forties,” a friend shared with me as we sat in a courtyard in San Francisco. Our conversation moved from career disapointment to irritations with our denomination. We both conceded. We had hit some brick walls.
I felt like I was staring at mine over the compacted hood of my car with smoke and the smell of warm antifreeze billowing through the windows. My amibtion carried me all the way to the crash site. Now what?
If you’re my age-ish — still well over a decade from any realistic conversation about retirement planning, still trying to prove your competence in meetings, knocking out projects with gusto, still showing up — but the thing that used to drive you just isn’t there anymore, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Researchers have starting to call it PAPR: Post Ambition, Pre Retirement.
This is the long gap between hitting your professional stride and no longer needing to set an alarm clock. Not that you’ll need one. The older you get, the harder it is to stay awake to watch a movie in the evening and the more impossible it is to sleep past 6:30 in the morning.
As an aside, my bladder wakes me up every morning around 5AM. It’s always like, “Hey! I’m up. Are you up? Let’s mosey on into that bathroom over there, shall we?”
I digress.
Here’s what nobody warns you about amibition. It’s a fuel source. And like all fuel sources, it runs out.
For me it looked like wondering why I was working so hard to get another book contract, trying to win the approval of people I really didn’t even like that much, or hoping to get invited to speak at another conference — but a bigger one this time. Why?
For a long stretch of my working life, I felt inexhaustible. The next promotion, the next project, the next problem worth solving — there was always something pulling or pushing me forward. I was good at it. I cared about it.
But then I hit a brick wall.
And the particularly cruel part? Nobody notices. You’re still delivering. You’re still competent. The machinery keeps running. But inside, something has gone quiet that you thought would always be loud.
That’s PAPR. And it is a quietly devastating place to live.
Maybe it’s a leadership scandal and coverup at your workplace that makes it difficult to trust, and therefore difficult to put your whole heart into things. Maybe it’s a new job that was wildly misrepresented when you were recruited. Maybe your convictions are no longer in lockstep with your employer.
These kinds of things hit a lot harder in your mid to late forties. At an earlier stage, pivoting feels effortless. But experiences like these at middle age make it far easier to relate to King Solomon when he said, “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me” (Ecclesiastes 2:18).
Solomon was not retired. He was not done. He was still the king. And he hated it.
What’s remarkable is that the Bible doesn’t treat this as spiritual failure. It doesn’t offer Solomon a quick fix or a new vision statement. Ecclesiastes sits in this holy discomfort for over thirty chapters before asking one of the hardest questions of all: What were you building for, exactly?
Becasue here’s the thing, the loss of ambition is often less a problem than it is a diagnosis. The ambition that drove you for forty years was almost certainly, at least in part, built on a foundation you are now shifting away from. For me, I was building on the need to prove something. On the dopamine of approval and achievement. On a self that needed to be justified by performance.
I want to say something carefully here, because I don’t want to spiritually bypass what is genuinely hard. PAPR isn’t easy. It involves real grief, for the version of yourself that was energized, for the sense of purpose that felt clear, for the years that now feel lost, and in part wasted, and for the road ahead that looks a bit less certain than before.
Underneath the fog of PAPR, there are usually a few questions that the noise of ambition was keeping at bay.
Is this all there is? Not a question of despair. It’s honest. The answer the gospel gives is a thunderous no. The new creation is coming. The labor that feels like vapor is, in the end, actually meaningful if done out of love for God and neighbor. The present chapter is real but isn’t final.
Was any of it worth it? This one requires honesty about what you were building and for whom. Not all of it is going to pan out in a positive way. You’ll face some regrets trying to answer this one. But some of it will have been genuinely good, work done faithfully, people served well, something true, and beautiful built into the world.
Let yourself receive that. And let the rest go.
Who am I without the drive? This is one of the most important questions of the PAPR season.
And the answer the gospel gives is the one your ambition was always trying to earn but never could: you are a child of God. Completely accepted. Secure. Significant, not because of what you produce, but because of what God says about you.
You have an identity that doesn’t require ambition to sustain it. It predates your career peak, your platform, and your promotions . . . and it will outlast them all.
What I’ve found isn’t a reignited ambition. It’s something better. A quieter, more rooted, less frantic sense of purpose. Work done not to prove anything but to offer something. A self that no longer needs the fuel of approval because it’s finally standing on something solid.
The truth is, I’m not writing this on the other side of PAPR with sage advice to pass along to readers. This is penned from the eye of the hurricane. I’m in the thick of it still, I suppose.
But I still believe in the one who can calm storms, walk on water, and lead scared disciples to step out of the boat.
So, no, I’m not motivated to get another book deal or secure another speaking invitation. What I can get excited about is following Jesus into something uncertain and unknown with the goal of making a lasting difference in the world — not so much to gain acceptance but because I’m learning to rest in the acceptance that matters most of all.