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 mid-life 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
mid-life 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 mid-life can feel like a time of deep reflection and
sometimes even dissatisfaction.
Like if you talk to people about their mid-life 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 have 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, then you're dead.
We have the most holes of golf in any area in the United States.
Maybe the world.
They're always occupied.
They're always trying new things.
We are the nation's leader in pickleball.
What kind of ball?
Pickleball.
Oh, pickleball, okay.
We have courts.
Various clubs and sports and golf and cheerleading and water polo and what have you.
If it exists, there is a club in the villages of it.
It's 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 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?
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 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.
Civil 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.
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.
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 fine.
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,
OK, 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 home mom.
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 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.
Oh, wow.
OK, 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.
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.
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 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.
And 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 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 the 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 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, I kind of write.
Yeah, okay.
And I have a novel and it might be published or it is being published.
Wow.
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.
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.
I'm not a part of it, I'm not a part of it, I'm a part of it.
I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm
a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it,
I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I
I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part
of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I'm a part of it, I
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 and then the question comes up what's driving this pattern and what's particularly interesting is you find this pattern across all society so you find it for men 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 on 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 average is 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 is like your entire 40s or is there a certain starting at the end?
It depends a little bit of course like from countries that you look at the exact time period and of course I can also be let's say there's some there's a crisis happening to certain co-hardness certain period then this can mess up the whole pattern
but one question I found in a large German data set where like people have followed over time is not only people's current life satisfaction but also the expectations for the future
like in 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 the things are actually becoming even better
So what you see in the data is that in mid life 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 because 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 real fascinating thing is that this mid life 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's it's it might be something more like a second puberty
Rather than just something that is driven by people's super 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 mid life 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 mid life crisis because I think crisis is really this idea that's like that's a it's a dramatic thing that has to stop immediately
It's supposed to be short and we have to like you know get rid of it right if you will tell your teenagers who 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 mid life nadir or the mid life valley to tell them that's a crisis
So you know openly speaking about it not segmentizing 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 fifties in 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 a gosh there's a crisis
Let's throw everything away that I you know 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 shops
Is there a way to kind of try to see my life through the eyes of the older wiser happy or me and possibly without changing anything just just have a you know nicer perspective on my life
Often in mid life 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 might just make you more depressed right
And instead 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 you're 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 mid life as one of the more positive times
So when Hannis is characterizing these disappointments and expectations we experience in mid life 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 mid life
What specific factors would you have to take into consideration? I know Angie had a lot of the unspoken guilt and sins of obligation
What would that look like for you?
Well if I started to get that feeling you know as Hannis said if what happens in our forties 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 feel of expertise within law that you can grow in a mid-virt 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, you know, 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 Abade
Fact check by Anna Alvarez, our engineer is Matthew Simonson, special thanks to Adrienne La France, executive editor of The Atlantic
One of those papers comes out twice a month, 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 additional
Oh, wow
So
