Now or Never: The Urgency of Midlife Career Change
You wake up one day and you realize that the life you live is not the one you wanted. Is not the one you dreamed of in your 20s. On a superficial level, everything looks great. You have a good career, a satisfactory role, a solid salary, a conventional life. But something is missing…. You are not the person living it. Or at least that is how it feels like. You feel as if you are playing a role in an act. It feels inauthentic, it feels fake. You feel as if you have betrayed your ideals, your dreams. You start to question your values. You start to look for a meaning, but guess what… you find none. This is when you realize that you need to change. You don’t know what you want, the only thing you know is what you don’t want, and that is the life that you are living now. And then you become frustrated, depressed and angry. You start to blame others, as you don’t have the courage to blame yourself. You don’t have the energy, you are absolutely drained. You want someone to tell you that it is a nightmare and it will be soon be over, everything will be fine. You want someone to wave a magic wand and ask you “what do you want your life to look like?” You want different scenarios, options and alternatives. You want someone to tell you “don’t you worry now, everything will get back to how you want it to be”. But how do you want it to be?
When we are a child we grow up in a family in which our parents dictate to us the working identities (Ibarra, 2004) that we should pursue rather than the working identities that we want to pursue. In addition to our family dictating our academic and professional choices, our society tells us which working identities are socially acceptable and which aren’t. Social conditioning may be subtle, but it is extremely powerful. It starts as early as from the belly of our mother, as parents talk with a different voice tonality to baby boys and girls. The gender is another predetermining factor of working identity which again dictates the repertoire of working identities that we can choose from. All these factors, the gender, the family, the society, constitute the social self, the self that society wants us to be (Higgins, 1987). For example, a young woman may pursue an MBA in Harvard University in order to become a consultant in Boston Consulting Group, a working identity that her father wanted her to pursue as it is prestigious. She never wanted to be a consultant, she wanted to be a writer, but she was always told that she would never make any money following this working identity. Apart from the social self which largely determines our choice of working identity, we have our ideal self, the self that we want to be (Higgins, 1987). The ideal self is the person we aspire to be, this heroic, adventurous and inspirational character that does not settle for anything less. Last but not least, we have our real self, the self that we really are (Higgins, 1987) . In midlife career change we feel an unrgency to shed off our social self as much as we can, and pursue our most realistic version of an ideal self. Anyone who has been through this process of midlife career change knows how challenging it can be as the balance of our whole life system and relationships -homeostasis- is at stake. All three selves are so deeply ingrained within us that the process basically involves deconstructing and reconstructing ourselves all over again from the very beginning, asking ourselves fundamental questions like “Who am I?” “What do I want” and “Why now?” and “What’s next?”.
Carl Jung talked about the first part of our life as the ‘morning’ and the second part as the ‘afternoon’ (Jung, 1933). He argued that in the morning of our life, we base our decisions on external criteria like approval, recognition and status while in the afternoon of our life we base our decisions on internal criteria like search for meaning, purpose, creativity and self-actualisation. As Jung distinctively said “But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie” (Jung, 1933).
It seems that in the afternoon of our life, the voices that we heard about doing something that we love can no longer be ignored. We want to become the person that we want to be, we want to look ourselves in the mirror and feel proud of our life and our achievements. We want to remember and to be reminded of our potential and stretch ourselves to fulfil it. We want to realize our dreams that have been dormant all this time. This sense of urgency is very real and can no longer be ignored. We need to change or else we will walk though our life rather than live our life. We need to change in order to be happy. We need to change in order to find meaning and purpose in a previously meaningless and purposeless existence. It’s now or never.
References
Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94(3), 319–340.
Jung, C. G. (1933). The stages of life (W. S. Dell & C. F. Baynes, Trans.). In C. G. Jung, Modern man in search for a soul (pp. 19–114). New York, NY: Harcourt. (Original work published 1930–1931)
Ibarra, H. (2004). Working Identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
