This is utterly mysterious to me. It came out of nowhere. Nobody warned me. It affects everything.

I’ve lost my drive.

Not all my drive. Maybe 20%. Or maybe 50%. It’s hard to say exactly because it’s invisible. I’m the same person I was before, and I still care about the same menu of concerns. It’s just: I don’t care as much.

The change is most noticeable in my work. I’ve always loved to write. After I got out of college I worked for a small magazine. There, I would compete to write more of the content than anybody else. My energy for writing was boundless. Overworked? That was a meaningless concept to me.

I wanted to be the best. I wanted to build a reputation for excellence. Riches didn’t drive me, but I sought the admiration of my peers. Writing was the engine that drove my life.

Then came the Internet. At first it was purely a benefit to my work, enabling quicker and better research, opening up blogs and other free publishing opportunities, and making my work more accessible to readers. What I didn’t see—and nobody did, I think—was that the Internet would undermine magazine revenue streams. A lot of magazines went out of business, and those that survived didn’t have the money to pay journalists for travel or deep research. Book publishing also changed so that bookstores closed and non-bestsellers sold fewer copies. Publishers became more selective, and the selection criteria circled around self-promotion. In essence, publishers wanted to know whether you had a million Facebook followers before they would look at your manuscript.

I was slow to realize that I needed to adapt. I needed to seriously invest in a social media presence, building up followers. New channels for my writing needed to be found and explored. I should hustle and charm and pitch myself to a whole new set of people who had never heard of me.

But something else had changed. I’d lost my drive. I saw what I needed to do, but I didn’t want to. Self-promotion was distasteful to me. My life didn’t depend on it. I would have liked to be on top of those worlds, but I didn’t have to be. What I’d already accomplished was okay. I could still write, I could still publish; I didn’t need to have a huge audience.

And actually, it is okay. I like what I do. I really don’t want to hustle and self-promote. But if I were still 25, I would feel different. I would have to feel different.

I see my loss of drive in other areas. My garden, which I enjoy immensely, gets neglected. A list of tasks needs doing, and I’ll get to them eventually—but I’m not too worried about them.  Home repairs, same thing.

Life goes on at a more relaxed pace, meandering through the days without much in the way of deadlines. Is this the best way to live? I’m not proclaiming it as such. People who are determined to get things done do, and I appreciate their productivity. Just as surely, though, I know I’m no longer one of them. I’m living in a different world.

Some people never had much drive to begin with, so it’s hard to say that aging has changed them. Some had so much drive that it’s hard to say that they have lost any. However, many of my friends seem to relate to my lost drive. They are ready to retire. They could continue functioning at a high level if they had to, but they don’t want to. At one time they were driven to fix whatever went wrong in their house; now they would rather call a plumber. Researching which insurance company will save them money would take too much out of them, so they stay with what they know. They don’t mind paying a little more for the sake of convenience.

Losing your drive is not all bad. Life may be easier for all concerned. Whatever you say about it, though, it’s a different world.