Starting Over When You Think It’s Too Late

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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 howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. 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.

Rebecca Rashid: What’s your knee-jerk reaction to people telling you “You can change at any age; there’s hope!” How does that make you feel?

Olga Khazan: 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 “young person” anymore.

Rashid: You’re not old. Why do we want to explore midlife career changes specifically?

First of all, it’s the thing that youchange. You