Something Is Shifting: Why Are So Many of Us Rethinking the Lives We Built?

Careers we once wanted, milestones we assumed we’d reach, and ideas of success we rarely thought to question. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us seem to be asking whether the life we’ve been building is still one we actually want.

There’s a particular kind of conversation that seems to be happening more often lately. A friend is thinking about leaving the career they spent the better part of a decade building. Someone else wants to move out of the city, work less, start something of their own or take six months off without having a particularly impressive reason for doing so. People who once seemed certain about where they were headed are admitting that, actually, they’re not so sure anymore.

It’s easy to package all of this up as burnout or the inevitable crisis that apparently arrives somewhere around 30, but that feels a little too simple. For some people, burnout absolutely is the catalyst. For others, nothing has gone particularly wrong. Their life may look much the same as it did a few years ago; it just doesn’t feel the same to be inside it.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. We spend the first part of our lives following a fairly predictable sequence of next steps. School leads to further study or work, work becomes a career, careers are supposed to progress, and somewhere amongst all of that we form relationships, find somewhere to live and begin collecting the things that signify we’re doing adulthood properly.

What we don’t talk about quite as much is what happens when you reach some of those things and realise they don’t mean what you thought they would.

The person who chose your life isn't necessarily the person living it now

We make some fairly significant decisions about our lives when we’re very young. At 17 or 18, many of us are already being asked to choose what we want to study and, by extension, what kind of work we might spend the next several decades doing. Even if we change course along the way, there’s a strong cultural pull towards picking a lane and making progress within it.

The strange thing is that we don’t expect most other parts of ourselves to remain exactly the same.

Our relationships change. Our taste changes. The people we spend time with change. We become interested in things we once would have rolled our eyes at and lose interest in things that used to consume us. Life happens to us, and naturally our priorities shift with it.

Yet changing our minds about the bigger things can still feel strangely loaded. Leaving a career can look like throwing away years of work. Wanting a slower life can feel like losing ambition. Questioning a relationship, a city or a version of success can leave us wondering whether we’re simply being ungrateful for something we once wanted very badly.

But there’s a difference between regretting a choice and recognising that it belonged to an earlier version of you.

The accountant who becomes a DJ didn’t waste the years they spent in accounting. The person who leaves a successful corporate career to open a small studio hasn’t necessarily discovered that their previous life was a mistake. One thing can have been right for us once and not be right for us forever.

That seems obvious when written down. It can be much harder to accept when it’s your own life you’re considering changing.

The uncomfortable middle

Perhaps the more interesting part of this conversation isn't the dramatic career change or the person who sells everything and moves to the country. It's the period before any of that happens.

It’s the person sitting at their desk thinking, I don't know if I want to do this for another ten years.

It’s realising you’ve become very good at something you no longer particularly enjoy. It’s feeling restless despite having achieved much of what you once wanted, or noticing that the pace you used to thrive on now leaves you depleted. Sometimes it’s as vague as having the sense that you want something else, without having any idea what that something is.

That space can be uncomfortable because we're used to treating uncertainty as a problem to solve. If the job isn't right, find the new career. If the city doesn't fit, work out where to move. If you've lost your spark, apparently you need a five-step plan for getting it back.

In reality, there can be quite a long stretch between recognising that something has changed and understanding what you want to do about it.

And there’s value in that stretch.

Not every realisation requires a reinvention

There is, of course, another side to all of this. We live in a time where reinvention itself has become aspirational. Our feeds are full of people announcing that they quit their jobs, moved overseas, launched the business, found their purpose or finally started living on their own terms.

It can make an ordinary period of dissatisfaction feel like evidence that we need to overhaul our entire existence.

We probably don't.

Sometimes the job isn't wrong; the way we're working is. Sometimes we don't need a new life, we need more of one outside work. Sometimes we're lonely, exhausted, disconnected from our bodies, bored, grieving, under-stimulated or simply overdue for a holiday.

The useful part of questioning our lives isn't that it always leads to change. It's that it gives us an opportunity to look at the structures we've been living inside and ask whether they still make sense.

What would have to change for this to work for me again? What am I actually missing? What parts of my life still feel good? Where do I feel most like myself? What have I stopped making time for?

Those questions are less exciting than Should I quit my job and move to Bali?, but they're probably more useful.

Making room for curiosity

This is also where wellbeing becomes more interesting to us.

Not wellbeing as another list of things we're supposed to optimise, but the tools people use when they’re trying to understand themselves, move through something or simply feel a little more present in their own lives.

For one person that might be therapy. For someone else it’s journalling, walking without headphones, taking up ceramics or finally making time to see friends during the week. It might be meditation, breathwork or spending an hour lying on the floor at a sound bath. Someone else might find themselves curious about astrology, Reiki or a practice they would have dismissed as far too “woo” a few years earlier.

None of these things needs to become an identity, and none of them is going to hand us a neatly packaged answer about what to do with our lives. That isn't really the point.

Sometimes doing something outside our usual rhythm simply creates enough space to notice what the usual rhythm has been drowning out.

And curiosity is useful here because it doesn't require commitment. You can go to a sound bath without deciding you're now a sound-healing person. You can pull a tarot card because the question it prompts makes you think. You can learn about Reiki and decide it isn't for you. You can journal for three mornings and never do it again.

We’re allowed to explore things without immediately turning them into another version of ourselves we have to maintain.

We get more than one go at this

There’s something reassuring about meeting people who have changed direction several times. The person who had one career at 25, another at 38 and started something completely unexpected at 52 makes the pressure to have everything sorted by 30 look a little absurd.

We tend to talk about these changes as starting over, but that isn't quite right either. We don't return to the beginning every time we change direction. We take our experience, relationships, mistakes, skills and previous versions of ourselves with us.

A life can hold a lot.

You can be ambitious and later decide you want less. You can spend years being practical and become interested in something you can't quite explain. You can love where you live and eventually want to leave. You can become someone you never would have predicted ten years ago and, ten years from now, surprise yourself again.

Perhaps that's what feels interesting about this moment. It isn't simply that people are changing careers or rejecting traditional ideas of success. It's that more of us seem willing to question the assumption that once we've built a life, our job is to keep maintaining it.

There doesn't have to be anything wrong with your life for you to become curious about it.

And you don't need to know exactly what comes next to start paying attention to what is asking to change.

At Sondera, that's a conversation we're interested in following — not only the big reinventions, but the quieter moments that come before them, and the people, practices, places and ideas we turn to when we're trying to hear ourselves a little more clearly.

Because perhaps the goal isn't to find the one version of ourselves we're meant to be.

It's to leave enough room to keep meeting who we become.