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

May 30, 2022·33 min·2 clips

Angie Kim realized she loved just 5% of being a litigator and couldn't stand the rest.

1. How to Start Over is an Atlantic podcast hosted by Olga Hazan, with producer Rebecca Rashid; this episode explores midlife career changes and whether it is ever too late to start over professionally. 2. The episode features novelist Angie Kim, author of the bestseller Miracle Creek, and Hannes Schwandt, an assistant professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University who researches midlife dissatisfaction. 3. The episode's core question is whether the timing of career changes is driven by personal circumstance, by biology, or by the structural conditions of midlife, and what people should actually do when they feel professionally stuck. 4. Hazan opens by describing her visit to the Villages, a Florida retirement community of 55-plus residents, where she observed people constantly trying new sports, clubs, and activities — prompting her to ask whether that kind of exploratory energy is available before retirement. 5. Angie Kim graduated from Stanford, completed a federal clerkship, became a litigator, and then discovered that courtroom work she loved constituted only 5% of the job; she found the remaining 95% intolerable. 6. Kim then became a management consultant, then a dot-com entrepreneur in the 1990s, then a stay-at-home mother when her first child was born and some of her children had medical issues, before finally turning to fiction writing — her fifth career, not begun until her 40s. 7. Kim describes her creative pivot as rooted in the connection between fiction writing and the theatre work she loved as a teenager: inhabiting multiple characters, each with their own perspective, mirrors the actor's craft she originally wanted to pursue. 8. Her novel Miracle Creek has seven point-of-view characters told in a Rashomon structure, a direct expression of the theatre-derived skills she spent decades not using professionally. 9. Kim cites imposter syndrome as a significant barrier: she asked her agent whether she needed an MFA and could not describe herself as 'a writer' until the book was physically in bookstores. 10. On the economic realities of career change, Kim acknowledges she was fortunate: both she and her husband had worked as lawyers, saved extensively, and had a financial cushion that made the risk manageable — she describes this as relatively rare. 11. Schwandt explains the U-shaped happiness curve: life satisfaction consistently declines from early adulthood, bottoms out between the mid-40s and mid-50s across every demographic studied — income, gender, parental status — then rises again in later life. 12. A particularly striking feature Schwandt identifies from German longitudinal data is that young people do not anticipate this decline: they expect future satisfaction to increase, meaning that by midlife they have accumulated both unmet expectations from the past and lost their optimistic outlook for the future simultaneously. 13. Schwandt argues that midlife dissatisfaction is often unrelated to objective success: people report having the job they always wanted, healthy families, and every marker of achievement, and still feeling empty and depressed. 14. He frames midlife dissatisfaction as potentially biological — 'something more like a second puberty' — rather than a reaction to specific failures, arguing it is a predictable developmental stage rather than a personal crisis. 15. Schwandt recommends against dramatic reinvention ('moving to Indonesia to open a surf shop') and instead suggests finding a new domain within one's existing field, and seeking mentorship from older rather than younger people during the valley. 16. Kim addresses the immigrant family obligation dynamic directly: she felt acute guilt that leaving law was wasting what her immigrant parents had invested in sending her to Stanford and law school. 17. The resolution came unexpectedly: when Miracle Creek was published in Korean, Seoul newspaper articles ran, her parents received calls from relatives back home, and they became prouder of her unconventional path than they ever were of her legal career. 18. Hazan's interview style is conversational and self-disclosing — she volunteers her own reactions throughout and describes the episode as motivated by personal curiosity about living more intentionally before retirement age. 19. People who are questioning their current career path in midlife, especially immigrants or first-generation professionals, will find this episode directly relevant. 20. Those expecting specific financial planning guidance or a step-by-step framework for career change will find the episode light on actionable structure.

As heard by us

A grounded look at reinvention when practical limits shape what change can actually look like.

The episode treats midlife career change as less of a dramatic leap than a series of hard choices. Olga Hazan keeps the focus on the parts people usually skim past: kids, spouses, money, and the simple fact that time does not wait.

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Why you'd press play

If you are wondering whether a midlife career reset is still on the table, start here.

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