How to Talk to People - Starting 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

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Experience the next dimension of snacking with Jacklinks Doritos and Flamin' Hot. 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 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 Rider at The Atlantic. This is how to start over. 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. We have to be 55 and over to live in this city. People that tell the stories. It's all considered one kind of place full of senior citizens. I'm wondering how do people spend their time in the villages?

What do most people do all day? You can't find something to do in the villages. You're dead. We have the most holes of golf in 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 pickleball.

What's a golf? Pickleball. Oh, pickleball, okay. 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 fun. Like I said it's a little bit on a cruise ship. You can't find something to do here then you don't want to do it.

You know I was a little jealous of this retirement community and I was like is there a way to do here than 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 both your hips and you don't use a walker? 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 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 the best seller, 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 DC 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. 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 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.com entrepreneur. This is back in the 1990s. Wow.

And then when my first child was born, I actually became a state-owned 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 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. So. 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.

Wow. Yeah. What I was trying to do for the longest time 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 enacting, 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 earlier, I'm not sure that I would have had the courage to step into it immediately without trying other more practical things first. 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 the ones 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, 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 roshamone 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 to 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 the matter with you? Why, 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 the 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 don't know, I'm a say-it-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 if 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 up to. I think I was really lucky in that my husband and I both, we met in law school, we're 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 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 learn 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 doing exactly what it is they want to do, and feeling like ungrateful or they wasted their parents' investment, or maybe unlike you, 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, the sphere 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 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 gonna college can wait career or whatever I can wait and I want to go be impractical

and I want to move to LA 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. Uber won't save you, Uber won't save you, on all your eats. The savings can't be beat, up to 10% off your orders. Join Uber 1, members save up to 10% on Uber Eats. Get that stuck in your head. Zero dollar delivery fee and percentage off discount

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Because next level moments need the next level network. With the security, reliability, and expertise to take your business further, AT&T Business, the network you can rely on. 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 leave 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 get rid of it, right? Honest Shwant is an assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. One of his many areas of 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 tend to decline during adulthood and then bottom out in middle age between the mid-40s to the mid-50s, and then afterwards they increase again. So we have this U-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

our society. So you find it for man and for woman 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 live, 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 the crisis of like a few months or so. It is really this friend that happens over the whole life course, essentially. So it happens in your 40s, basically. Is that like your entire 40s or is there a certain starting-up day? Yeah, it depends a little bit, of course, like from countries that you look at the time period. And of course, I 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 people have followed over time is not only people's current life satisfaction,

but also the expectations for the future. They're 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, and 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 they thought things would be better than they are, right? think 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, 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 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 real fascinating thing is that this midlife dissatisfaction is often really unrelated

to successes or lack of successes in different domains of life. So you hear people are like, hey, they say they have the job they want always wanted to have. They have their family is doing well, everything is great. And still they feel like dissatisfied and you know, empty and like depressed and so on. It just seems to be something much more general and months, 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 that idea that it's a dramatic thing that has to stop immediately, it has to be short, and we have to get rid of it. If you would tell teenagers who are going through puberty that this is like the crisis, that would certainly not be helpful. And to the same extent, it might not be helpful to tell people in their midlife and their dear, or the midlife valley to tell them that's a crisis. So openly speaking about it, not segmentizing it,

not making it sound like a crisis. Also, often we think of it as something like ridiculous or we don't take it seriously, right? Like this picture of this man in the mid-50s, in red sports car, we don't take that very seriously, right? The only important thing with one should probably avoid is just to say, oh 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, you know, if you studied law and you're a lawyer, you know, you know, moving to Indonesia and starting a self-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. The general idea is that changes are always good. There's actually research, you know, economic 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 say, 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 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. As 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 Hannis is characterizing these disappointments and expectations we experience in midlife, he's

referring to General Trends. Your mileage may vary. But the U-shape 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 Hana 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 state. 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 learn 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 self-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 AC Valdez and Claudine Abadeh. Fact check by Anna Alvarez. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. it comes out twice a month. Okay. So it's all the same. Oh, okay. But it doesn't show all of them. Because there's so many, they can't put them in one at the end. Oh, wow. So. So.