If you need to start over at 45, it can only mean that you messed up royally before then. The normal progression is that at every age you enjoy the fruits of what you lived and did before. The need to erase your previous life is not a good sign.
So no, don’t normalize treating your life like a series of discreet, unconnected episodes. Your life is a whole.
I don’t know, Clarissa. I think it’s a *needed* message for the West who didn’t live through ’90s Eastern Europe.
No, you don’t start from zero. But your cushy sinecure will be replaced by AI and you need to find within yourself that dawg you had at 20 when you were starting up. Count your blessings, rally yourself up and reinvent yourself.
This sort of stuff, and the fact that it can be done, is instinctively obvious to you who have prospered through it. It’s theoretically obvious to me who was a child through it. The Americans, however, are sitting ducks.
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I don’t believe that everybody can successfully neoliberalize themselves. Most people can’t do it. Standing over them and reciting “Just move!” and “just learn to code!” is not going to make this transformation any likelier.
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I think you’re taking an inspirational post too literally in this case. Of course a life is a whole, and no one expects anyone to erase life chunks. Our royal mess-ups serve us in our later endeavors. The start-overs tend to be pretty basic–dust off and update resumes and cv’s; go back to school; face rounds of interviews…
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Ideology always masks itself as an innocent manifestation of the common sense.
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I’m finding the amount of tech involved in accomplishing anything new to be daunting. Navigating multiple websites with passwords and new email addresses and a thousand forms to print and upload is truly exhausting and I wish I could opt out but I force myself to plod through it.
Amanda
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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