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

05/30/22 • 33 min

11 Listeners

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 [email protected]. 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

Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [email protected]. 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

Previous Episode

Trailer: How To Start Over

In this series, Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan analyzes what it takes to change our relationships, our work, and our perspective—with a practical approach to one of life’s greatest mysteries: how to start over.

Change can be really hard. Inertia is powerful, mortgages and marriages are long-term, and personality traits can feel pretty hardwired. But we’re in an era characterized by change. This series is your guide to starting over in the ways you’ve always wanted, why change is so hard, and whether it is, sometimes, overrated.

This series was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Matthew Simonson.

If you have any questions, stories, or feedback, please email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 925-967-2091.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Next Episode

How to Start Over: 'Parents Are Not All Good and All Bad'

Some families have the frictionless ease of unconditional love and understanding, but for many the stalemate of family tensions can be insurmountable.

In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore what can be done to evaluate the dynamics in lifelong family relationships, find ways to manage our emotional response when tensions boil over, and analyze what it means to change a parent-child relationship as an adult.

Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [email protected]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”).

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