How to Talk to People - How to Start Over: When You Think It's Too Late

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

A professional change in midlife can provide a much-needed reset—at least when you’re looking for a career that more closely aligns with your passion. But finding what you love, especially once you’ve gone down an entirely different path, can feel impossible. How do we redirect our efforts away from what we’re used to and toward what we want to do?   In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore what impacts our decision making in midlife, whether midlife malaise explains our need for change, and how to know if a professional change is worth it. Conversations with novelist Angie Kim and professor of human development and social policy Hannes Schwandt help us think through whether it’s ever too late to do what you really love.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by Matt Large (“Value Every Moment,” “The Marathon Will Continue [For Nipsey]”), FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), and Blue Steel (“Jaded”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's your knee-jerk reaction to people telling you, like, you can change at any age? There's hope. How does that make you feel? I mean, I think the optimistic side of me wants to believe that you can make a change at any age. And I definitely have tried to make lots of changes in my life, even though I'm not really a quote-unquote young person anymore. You're not old. Why do we want to explore midlife career changes specifically? What about career feels so hard to change?

First of all, it's the thing that you can change, right? You can't, you know, change your kids. You can't, I mean, you can change your spouse, but it involves lawyers and kind of like suing each other and money and tears. And you spend almost all of your time doing your career. I specifically spend all my time doing my job. Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. This is how to start over. Today, my producer Rebecca Rashid and I wanted to explore what it means to start over in midlife

and how to decide if a professional change is worth it. First, we're going to talk to someone who dared to take a professional leap later in life. It wasn't until after I went through this long process that I realized this part that I enjoy is like 5%. the career being a litigator, and I absolutely couldn't stand the rest of it. And then someone who can explain why midlife can feel like a time of deep reflection and sometimes even dissatisfaction. Like if you talk to people about their midlife dissatisfaction and about those periods, they often are really surprised that this is happening to them. And they're like, I thought I would be the person who wouldn't have those feelings.

It just seems to be something much more general and something that is maybe more related to biology. But first, how did we get to this topic? So a thing that kind of stuck with me, I did some reporting in the villages in Florida, which is this big retirement community. But it's actually a city. So it's not like a retirement home. It's people who live in individual homes. But you have to be 55 and over to live in this city. It's all considered one kind of place.

place full of senior citizens. I'm wondering how do people spend their time in the villages? Like, what do most people do all day? If you can't find something to do in the villages, then you're dead. We have the most holes of golf of any area in the United States. Maybe the world. They're kind of always occupied. They're kind of always trying new things.

We are the nation's leader in picklebone. What kind of ball? Pickleball. Oh, pickleball. We have courts. Various clubs and sports and golf and cheerleading and water polo and, you know, what have you. If it exists, there is a club in the villages of it. Something every day.

I mean, it's just fun. Like I said, it's living on a cruise ship. You can't find something to do here, then you don't want to do it. Yeah. You know, I was a little jealous of this retirement community, and I was like, is there a way to do that before you're retired? Is there a way to maybe try new things or learn new skills or meet new people while you still have, you know, both your hips and you don't use a walker? Like, you know, because that would be really great to spend more of your life living in a

way that you want instead of in a way that you're used to. One day when I was actually reading a book during a vacation by myself in a way that you're used to. an empty restaurant. It was that day that I sort of closed the book and thought, wow, that was such a great day that I had. I'm so happy. And I just thought I need to find something else that makes me happy on a day-to-day basis. Angie Kim is the author of the novel Miracle Creek. Her novel was a bestseller, but her path to writing was a long and unexpected one. For much of her career, Angie did the job she felt obligated to do, rather than do what she loved, which was writing. I think it's ironically because I was older, I felt a little more, okay, from a savings and

financial perspective, I feel better about where I am in my life, that I felt like I could just go ahead and leave everything else and try to find something that didn't necessarily. give me a paycheck. Novel writing is my fifth career. And I didn't actually start writing until I was in my 40s. So I was in my early 20s by the time that I graduated from law school and did a clerkship with a federal judge. And then from the one-year clerkship, I went straight to a law firm in D.C. And I became a litigator. And this is something that I thought I wanted to do and the reason why I went to law school. And I did love the part of the job that was actually in the courtroom. Unfortunately, it wasn't until after I went through this long process that I realized that this part that I enjoy is like

5% of the career being a litigator. And I absolutely couldn't stand the rest of it. it. Wow. And so this was kind of, yeah, I just didn't like the day-to-dayness of it. And unfortunately, by the time I realized this, I had already been through law school, you know, whoops. And I just thought I need to find something else that makes me happy on a day-to-day basis as well as fulfilling and satisfying. And my husband was like, that's ridiculous because the reason why you have a job and why it's called a job and why people pay you for a job is that it's not all, you know, fun and joy and all of that. Because if it were that, then they wouldn't need to pay you. But I didn't agree with that. So I went from that to being a management consultant.

I sort of thought I would hate for my law degree and this very expensive education that I went through to have been for nothing. So it would be great if I could find something. something that's different and that allows me to explore a different side of myself. And it was just such a fun way for me to sort of feel like, okay, I still have a job. I still have a salary. I have health insurance. I have all of these things. And then I left that to become a dot-com entrepreneur. This is back in the 1990s. Wow. And then when my first child was born, I actually became a stay-at-home mom. Some of my kids had medical issues, so I was at home dealing with that for a long time. And then writing sort of grew out of that, that experience of being at home and wanting to explore

some of these, you know, emotions that I was feeling. And so it was sort of a very winding journey to go from one thing to the last thing that I did, which was actually writing a novel. that was based in the courtroom, a courtroom drama. Oh, wow. Okay, so how many years went by between when you were reading that book and you were like, this is a great day. I've read a book and I feel relaxed to like when you actually wrote your first book?

It was probably 20, no, 15 years? Something like that. Yeah. What I was trying to do for the longest time was trying to be. was trying to be as practical as possible. I think I became a litigator because I wanted to have that performative aspect of being in the courtroom and telling a story to the judge or to the jury, which was sort of something that I loved as a teenager. I was an acting. I was a theater major. And so that was sort of my passion.

And I didn't think that that was a practical thing, especially for an Asian-American woman to go into at that time. I went into the law thinking that, well, at least in the courtroom, I can sort of act in a way. That can be sort of my stage. And I also don't know that even if I did love it and had discovered writing early, I'm not sure that I would have had the courage to step into it immediately without trying other more practical things first. Yeah, I mean, you've mentioned practicality several times and why was practicality so important to you? Was there something, I guess, deeper within you, kind of urging you toward practicality? It's funny because a lot of people ask me now, like,

did your parents sort of push you to be, you know, more academic or more practical? I think my parents actually would have been pretty understanding. But I do think that there was something to this idea of they sacrificed a lot to send me to this private college. I went to Stanford, which is very expensive. And same thing with law school. And I think that I felt this guilt, the sense of I owe it to my parents. to make back what they put in from a financial perspective. Yeah, I totally hear that.

What were some of the steps that you took to get there from like doing Mommy and Me yoga to actually having a bestseller? What were some of the steps that you took? I started with just personal essays. I kind of built up my writing resume and taking it seriously in that way, sort of proving to myself that I could do this before saying, okay, I'm going to just sit down and actually start writing a novel. And then once I started writing, that's when I sort of fell in love with it.

And ironically, it's also because my husband, he sort of had this very cool moment where he was like, well, why not fiction? And I remember I was like fiction, creating. And it really didn't dawn on me until after I started writing fiction, how much of a connection there is to acting, you know, which was sort of what I always wanted to do and was my dream from the outset. In that you are telling stories, you're creating a character, you're trying to inhabit this character. My first novel, Miracle Creek, it has seven different point of view characters that tell

the story in kind of a Roshamong kind of way. Once I realized that I loved it, I sort of thought, this is what I've been like looking for my whole life. I've been going from, you know, career to career, job to job. And I finally found it, this thing that I love. I'm wondering like, okay, so you're... working on a novel. It's a serious endeavor for you. Did you have any concerns or worries about what people would say or think about someone who's had this very different career trying to become a novelist?

Or did you face any other kind of mental barriers as you were working through all of that? Well, definitely mental barriers for sure. I remember telling my agent, I was like, do you think that I should get an MFA? And she was like, what is it matter with you? Why are you asking? And I was like, because I just feel like, you know, it's this whole imposter syndrome. And I think it's this sense of like, oh, do I have the right to be doing this? Teaching some of these workshops and classes on writing and sort of thinking to myself, like, why am I teaching this? Because what do I know? It took a really long time for me to say when people ask me, what do you do to say I'm a writer or I'm an author? I think I was like, well,

I'm kind of, I don't know. I'm a stay-at-home mom and I used to be a lawyer and I, you know, and I, I kind of write. Yeah. Okay. And I have a novel and it might be published or it is being published. But it wasn't until it was actually out in the bookstore that I was like, okay, maybe I can actually say I'm a writer. To the extent you're willing to share, I was wondering you could talk a little bit about the economic situation that you were in or what some of the economic concerns that your family had to make adjustments toward, just because I think a lot of people would say, I would love to write a novel and quit my job too, but I really can't afford to do that. And I'm wondering kind of how you made that part work. You know, it is really fraught.

Unfortunately, that is one of the practical realities that you just have to face it. up to. I think I was really lucky in that my husband and I both, we met in law school, were both ex-lawyer, former lawyers. I consider him to have made the sacrifice. Because of that, we were able to save a lot of money and have that sort of comfort cushion so that when we wanted to do other things, we felt like, okay, we actually have the ability to do that. And And we had sort of worked out financially very early on, like when we were in our 30s, I think, how much money we needed to spend and what our budgeting would be. And we were very, very careful about that.

But what advice would you have for people who feel like they're on the wrong professional path, aren't really passionate about what they're doing, have some idea of what that would be but are scared to take the leap? Do you have any words of wisdom for folks in that situation? I think that what I did, which is to sort of dive in full time to something like this, is actually pretty rare. And I consider myself very lucky to have the support and my husband and things like that. But I've definitely heard so many stories of people doing similar things with full-time jobs. It's harder, obviously.

but I think that one thing that you can do is start with something that is smaller. So like, for example, try writing a short story, learn about it, to read literary magazines, making sure that you actually love the process of it. And it's not just the idea of having written something that you're sort of imagining that you're liking. I'm from an immigrant family like you are too, or people who maybe even just grew. up low income, I think a lot of them struggle with that tension between pursuing their dreams and like doing exactly what it is they want to do and feeling like ungrateful or they wasted their parents' investment or maybe unlike you, like maybe they are facing a lot of family pressure to do

a certain kind of practical thing. Is there any kind of takeaway advice on how to balance those two pressures. I felt that so acutely. I felt that sort of guilt and this sense, this fear that I was wasting what they had invested in me. And I'm an immigrant too, but of course I came here when I was 11, so I'm that in-between generation. Now, having published a book, it was just in the last, you know, month or so that my book was published in Korea. And so my parents are now hearing from my relatives back home and newspaper articles in Seoul and things like that that are coming out. And I can't tell you how proud they are that I did leave the law and that I did write about an immigrant family that's similar to ours. And so sort of telling our story in this fictionalized lens, people are really seeing that sometimes when,

you do the sort of more unconventional thing that that can lead to these moments that are very cool for the whole community and for the whole family. But of course, it's risky because it could have gone nowhere. And I guess from a mom's perspective, I would hate to feel like that my kids wanted to do something. And because I paid for their college that they would feel like their obligation to me that they didn't do something that they were passionate about. We have three boys. All three are incredibly talented musically. And I really hope that one of them, at least, does actually go and sort of says, you know what? I'm going to college can wait, career or whatever can wait. and I want to go be impractical

and I want to move to L.A. Or I want to move to New York. And I want to try to join bands. And I want to compose music. And I want to try to make a go of it and not wait until I'm 50, you know, like mom and dad did. From the creative team behind the Brutelist

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0% alcohol and a source of vitamin D. Corona Serro, the official non-alcoholic beer of Milano Cortina 2026. Angie's roundabout career trajectory made me realize how circumstance and a sense of obligation to our families can hold us back from following our passion.

But her story only provides one explanation for why it takes many of us so long, to find a job we love. Her story did lead me wondering, why and when do we feel compelled to make career changes? I try to avoid the term midlife crisis because I think crisis is really this idea

that it's a dramatic thing that has to stop immediately, it has to be short, and we have to like get rid of it, right? Hanes Schwant is an assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. One of his many areas

research is the concept of the midlife crisis. He helped me understand how midlife dissatisfaction might be one cause of big career changes. And why midlife crisis isn't always the right way to think about it. One fact that has been observed in a lot of big data sets across a lot of different countries, the different time periods is that life satisfaction and other measures of subjective well-being, they tend to decline during adulthood and then bottom-out in middle-old. age between like the mid-40s to the mid-50s and then afterwards they increase again. So we have like this huge shape in life satisfaction. Then the question comes up, what's driving

this pattern? And what's particularly interesting is you find this pattern across all of society. So you find it for man and for women. You find it for like people with high paying jobs, with low-paying jobs, people with kids without kids. So we don't see any significant differences in these like forecast errors. So it's very, very stable across all kind of like cuts in the data set. So you start out life, everything's great, you're excited, you're happy,

you're in your early 20s, you're going clubbing, you don't get hangovers, you're like just love in life. And then there's like a dip and you have what is known as a midlife crisis and then it sounds like toward the end of your life

after you become a senior citizen, it actually recovers a little bit and you start to feel pretty good again. Am I getting that right? Exactly. These are just like averages across many people. So for any given individual or like, you know, listener to the show, we tend to see this U-shape in life satisfaction.

You know, it's not really just a crisis of like a few months or so. It is really this trend that happens over the whole life course, essentially. So it happens in your 40s, basically. Is it like your entire 40s or is there a certain starting ending? It depends a little bit, of course, like from countries that you look at the exact time period. And of course, there can also be, let's say, there's a crisis happening to a certain cohort in a certain period, then this can mess up the whole pattern. But one question I found in a large German data set where, like, people are followed over

time, is not only people's current life satisfaction, but also the expectations for the future. Like five years' time. And what's happening is that when people are young, they are not anticipating the decline in their life satisfaction. they actually expect an increase, right? So they're optimistic about their future. They think that things are actually becoming even better. So what you see in the data is that in midlife,

people on the one hand have accumulated a whole bunch of disappointments over the past because, you know, they thought things would be better than they are, right? They didn't anticipate that. At the same time, because people adjust their expectations, they also lose the rosy outlook for the future. So if you know this intellectually, like these unmet expectations are setting you up for disappointment. Is there a way to combat that? You could say, well, just have lower expectations, but that's really hard to do.

High expectations is why we, you know, get married and have kids and go to job interviews. It's really hard to just tell people, you know, don't have expectations. So the really fascinating thing is that this midlight dissatisfaction is often really unrelated to successes or lack of successes. in different domains of life. So you hear people about like, hey, they say they have the job they always wanted to have. They have their family is doing well. Everything is great. And still they feel like dissatisfied and, you know, an empty and like depressed and so on.

It just seems to be something much more general and something that is maybe more related to biology. It might be something more like a second puberty rather than just something that is driven by people's specific. circumstances. Well, yeah, so first, like, what are some recommendations for getting out of that valley if you happen to find yourself in it? One really important aspect is just to tell people that this phenomenon of midlife dissatisfaction is not something exceptional. It's not something that is happening just like as a personal crisis. It might be just a normal developmental stage. I try to avoid the term midlife crisis because I think crisis is really this idea that's like it's a dramatic thing that has to stop immediately, it has to be short, and we have to like,

you know, get rid of it, right? If you would tell your teenagers who are going through puberty that this is like the crisis, that would certainly not be helpful, right? And to the same extent, it might not be helpful to tell people in their midlife nadir or the midlife valley to tell them that's a crisis. So, you know, openly speaking about it, not stigmatizing it, not making it sound like a Crisis also often it's, you know, we think of it as something like ridiculous or we don't take it seriously, right? Like this picture of like this man in this mid-50s, in a red sports car.

You know, we don't take that very seriously, right? The only important thing with one should probably avoid is just to say, gosh, there's a crisis. Let's throw everything away that I have grown over time and just do something completely different just for the sake of doing something different. So, for example, if you studied law and you're a lawyer, you know, moving to Indonesia and starting a surf shop is maybe not the best, most productive thing for you to do, right? But maybe you find a different feel of expertise within law that you can, you know, grow in a different area that might be more interesting. The general idea is that changes are always good. There's actually research, you know, in economics, showing that people in general are too hesitant. to make life changes. In general, it is beneficial for people to change jobs.

Is there a way to kind of try to see my life through the eyes of the older, wiser, happier me, and possibly without changing anything, just have a nicer perspective on my life? Often in midlife, people, you know, say like, oh, take responsibility for younger people. Maybe you can become a mentor for somebody younger. But this might be exactly the wrong approach. because focusing on young people and looking at them and how youthful and optimistic they are, I might just make you more depressed, right? And instead of mentoring people in that phase, you might be in need of a mentor, right? If you feel, you know, without energy, without drive, without hope, feeling depressed, then talking to older people, to the wise,

people who came out on the wise part of life, that will certainly be a very good idea. With everything in the social sciences, there's some conflicting evidence here. The U-shaped happiness curve isn't endorsed by all researchers, and it kind of depends on the way you ask the survey question and on the population being studied. Some studies found that when older people are asked to reflect on their lives, they actually thought of midlife as one of the more positive times. So when Hannes is characterizing these disappointments and expectations we experience in midlife, he's referring to general trends.

Your mileage may vary. But the U-shaped curve is still an interesting way of explaining why so many of us do face a slump in midlife. What specific factors would you have to take into consideration? I know Angie had a lot of the unspoken guilt and sons of obligation. What would that look like for you? Well, if I started to get that feeling, you know, as Hannah said, if what happens in our 40s is actually like a second puberty, then I probably would try not to be too hard on myself because, you know, I would realize it was just a natural part of life.

It's not something that is happening just like as a personal crisis. It might be just a normal developmental stage. I think first I would try to make small changes in my day-to-day work that might help and then evaluate if a bigger change might be in order. Try writing a short story. Learn about it, to read literary magazines, making sure that you actually love the, process of it, and it's not just the idea of having written something that you're sort of

imagining that you're liking. I mean, I think a lot of people romanticize other types of jobs, but it really helps to get a sense of what you would actually be doing day to day and whether those are things that you enjoy doing rather than whether you're attached to the identity of that thing. How would you advise people to feel a little more confident in the current industry that they're in? You kind of don't want to throw everything away just for the sake of temporarily managing this midlife malaise. If you studied law and you're a lawyer, you know, moving to Indonesia and starting a surf shop is maybe not the best most productive thing for you to do, right? But maybe you find a different field of expertise within law that you can, you know, grow in a different area that might be more interesting. It really didn't dawn on me until after I started writing fiction.

how much of a connection there is to acting, which was sort of what I always wanted to do and was my dream from the outset. I think it all relates back to the villages in Florida and how there's kind of an infinite number of things that you can do, and it's important to just try out as many things as you possibly can. That's something I really liked about the villages is that they really had these opportunities for lifelong learning.

In some ways, it was like a chance for people to try out things that they didn't get to do before they retired. So, you know, maybe you can take a cue from them and just try a bunch of activities until you figure out what it is you love. We have swimming pools in every village, and a lot of them have water, you know, where you exercise in the water and all that stuff. That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Abade. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.

Special thanks to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic. He gives one of those papers, they comes out twice a month. Okay. It shows all the gloves. Oh, okay. But it doesn't show all of them because there's so many. they came from them and watch a dish. Oh, wow.