6 months to go
I’m 36 years old and I’ve dedicated 2019 to changing my career. Now that the year is half-over and little progress has been made, I’ve started to 1) bite my fingernails and 2) blog.
Yesterday, my friend sent me a short article from The Onion which kindly explains to me that,
“After years of observing people in their late 30s to early 40s, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have determined that once an individual reaches 38 years of age it is too late to make any meaningful life changes.”
So this leaves me — a true believer in The Onion — with a race against time, 1.5 years to go. But the longer I stay out of my industry (international development), the harder it’ll be to get back in, so I’m giving myself until the end of 2019 — only 6 more months.
Yesterday, I also spoke to an alumnus from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He graduated in 1973 (I graduated in 2012) and in his retirement he coaches and encourages young professionals in local government. He started explaining his career trajectory by recounting his time in the Vietnam War. So this man — bless his heart — still considers me young.
But the Silicon Valley, where much of my career exploration leads (I’m currently interested in urban and new mobility, more on that later) does not consider me young. I’m told I’ll have bosses that are in their early 20s. I’m told that a big career switch means starting from the bottom. Neither of these things really bother me.
What gets to me is potentially a more systematic bias, albeit collected from indirect, anecdotal data via another mid-30s career switcher:
“I talked to a friend at Google yesterday who works in HR. And she said a lot of companies are risk averse at our age/stage of career.”
I want to say — look at me! I’m Asian! I don’t look a day over 25 (okay, 30). But then most of the people working in Silicon Valley are also Asian so this doesn’t really help.
Yesterday after the call with Vietnam War man, I started looking at international development jobs again. Briefly. I felt dirty doing it like I was watching some kind of illicit late-night porn. Completely different from the virtuous feeling I got from reading Dave Evan’s and Bill Burnett’s book, Designing Your Life, struggling through an online computer science blockchain course, or any variety of self-help things I’ve tried like other women in their 30s (yoga! meditation! wellness!)
The thing about exploring new careers (versus searching for a defined job) is that it is wholly nonlinear. Progress is a challenge to measure because, definitionally, what is progress? Can we anticipate what function it will follow, what complete set of variables are needed, and the ways in which these variables interact? I spent two months in early 2019 interested in landscape architecture. Then I realized that it wasn’t for me: progress of some sort but it left me where I started.
Today I started this blog because it seems to be a fairly linear activity that is completely in my domain of control. It forces me to create, to be productive in an otherwise unproductive period of my life. It forces an imaginary audience, indeed companionship, in what is otherwise a fairly solitary journey from Istanbul.
