I can relate to that. I'm 38 and I've been working as a programmer for like 10 years and now I feel I'm becoming a workaholic because there's nothing else to do in my life.

It started as an exciting hobby (or as an escape from reality into the "computer world"). I didn't become a gamer - I actually don't like when my adrenaline gets high. But I like the feeling of control and order of things in the computer. And sometimes, when some software bug creeps in, I feel excited and can spend hours hunting it down and fixing.

But all of that had led me to nothing. I would like to change something, but the problem is that I have no idea what do I actually want. At school, I was equally good at many subjects but I didn't feel enough eagerness to pursue any of it. I'm somewhat good at writing and sometimes I write some short absurd fantasy stories with some philosophical metaphors, but I don't have enough life experience and contact with people to become a good writer and I don't really want it to become a routine.

I also share my poems with my friends and on social networks, and people like them, but still I don't want to become a poet. I also can sing and play a clarinet, but I don't feel strong passion for music.

So, I often feel like "jack of all trades, master of none" who has enough skills and patience to achieve average results at everything he tries but who doesn't have enough intellect and experience, and desire to excel at anything in particular.

I see my classmates having married or having a successful carrier or having written some books or becoming widely known for something they do. I also want that... except that I don't really know why, and I have no idea what would I do with that because I'm an introverted person who most often wants to be left alone and enjoy a peaceful life.

Maybe my introverted nature is sabotaging me - as soon as I try something that I might become very successful at, I get scared of popularity and so I pull back. Or maybe the problem is that I can't choose one area and become excellent at that while giving up everything else. I have to have a reliable job to pay my bills, so I can't give up my job. But I can't also give up my creativity and stop writing poems and short stories and playing a clarinet. So, my energy gets scattered among different things and that's why I'm just average at all of them, and not excellent at some of them.

Some years I received a prize for being the best employee in our company of 30 people. It brought me some sense of achievement and satisfaction. But at the same time my deeper subconscious feeling was - hey, what's it worth if I'm good in this small company who mostly is just a cog in a big machine that produces software for large enterprises? I want real recognition from real people; the sense that I'm doing something globally important ... yeah, Napoleon syndrome, I guess. Or a midlife crisis.