Am I Too Old to Change My Life?

During the so-called afternoon of life, we often shift our focus from what has been called the “résumé” qualities of our youth (what we do) to “eulogy” qualities (who we are), said Chip Conley, author of “Learning to Love Midlife.” But making that shift isn’t always automatic, so Conley suggested an exercise.

**List old identities that no longer ref

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When we orient so much of our lives around a certain kind of life — whatever version of that we thought we wanted — it can be startling to realize we may not actually want that anymore. It’s another life transition, another means of becoming ourselves.

We only get to live one life. Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir dreamt of something beyond that when she said, “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, i... See more

Often, there’s a desire to cling onto how we thought life should go, sometimes until it outweighs the reality of how it is going — what makes us happy, versus what we feel should; what is truly stimulating or fulfilling, versus what we’ve been told should be chased and sacrificed for. A question I ponder is: How do we untether ourselves from the pe... See more

Bruce Feiler. Or, as one of my favorite comics says: “It takes about seven years to master something. If you live to be 88, after age 11, you have 11 opportunities to be great at something. Those are your lifetimes. Use them.” Do not fall prey to the self-consistency fallacy. Learn something new. Change careers. Take a risk. Reimagine your identity

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But here’s what we do know as we age: we come to realise that ‘out there’ is not a place in the world- it is a place in our heads. It’s an emotional state of mind that requires risk, vulnerability and the timid hope that what you dream of doing might just be of value to the world. Those are hard things to reconcile as you get older. Risk can seem f... See more

The idea that you can reinvent yourself each hour of the day is liberating. We get stuck in ruts and tell ourselves that we cannot change because we are too old, too young, too poor, too tied down. These are only excuses. They absolve us from responsibility.