The myth of the second chance

As someone well into middle age, I hoped that there would be more insight in this article than there is. The author makes some assertions that there are unrecoverable mistakes one can make, but doesn't really support those assertions in any way. I would like to know how the author would respond to any assertion that he is simply wrong, but from the text I have no idea.

For my own part, I feel that the picture painted in the essay is too bleak. Of course there are some unrecoverable mistakes one can make, but really not that many. We are each born into a situation that is the result of decisions made by others over which we have no control, and we have to play the cards we've been dealt and try to make some joy out of what we've got. Later in life, the cards are dealt to us by younger, less experienced versions of ourselves, and we still have to play those cards and try to make what we can of it.

On top of that, the theme of the article seems to be that life is a minefield that one should proceed through with extreme caution, less you fuck everything up with one misstep. But adopting that worldview is itself a choice, and one I think that is more likely to lead to unhappiness than taking a moderate amount of risk.

Life isn't an RPG where you read the gamefaqs and do an ULTIMATE BUILD. Your sense of self is a story, it's a narrative we tell ourselves, something we've evolved so that we can simulate our environment over and over and over and over in our heads without losing the thread. The idea that you're a meat machine being steered through the world by some disembodied entity - that you happen to identify with - is an illusion.

I'm going to feel like a real tool for quoting this, but I like the line they added to the new Dune movie: "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."

Now, this could be due to the fact that I've hed singular, terrible moments of energetically bad luck. Lots of them. And this sci-fi pseudo-dao is just a part of my personal narrative that keeps me from racking a slide on just the one bullet. But everyone, everyone everyone is going to have one of these moments. Dao isn't the solution, but resilience is part of one.

Despite being someone who's had several "do-overs", or "start-overs" in my life, I agree with the author's proposition. I hope I'm allowed to like both Proust and Amis, though!

To take the point a little bit further, the number (and value) of the chances (even first ones) anyone gets directly correlate with the social class into which they are born. (There are exceptions, at both ends of the distribution, but it's still generally true.) Choose your parents wisely!

My statistics teacher in high school once told me, "No one remembers their best game of poker, but everyone has a bad beat story." I suspect something similar is true for the author and their friends. Most people make many, many compounding mistakes over the course of their life. If the author's circle of acquaintances are in a place where one or two different choices are all it would take for them to live their best lives, then it's fair to assume that they're already near the upper end of the bell curve.

“Bro thought he would respawn” may have been a more concise thesis. I also won’t get my time back from reading and responding to it.

"If you are still a junior (manager) by the age of 40, you will probably always be a junior".

The US military is explicit about this, with an "up or out" policy. That was mandated by Congress. Law firms and academia also do that.

Nonsense.

Your life will resemble the game of American football only if you choose to live it by the rules of American football.

A mistake is irrecoverable only if you are betting everything on that wrong decision, with no Plan B and resources to pivot.

Bad choice if major is far less likely to ruin your life if you're getting two of them at the same time, and have a wide scope of classes in your curriculum (which is what differentiates universities from trade schools).

One bad relationship isn't ruining your life if you have many relationships of many kinds.

A bad investment isn't going to ruin you if you aren't putting everything into that basket.

There is always a second chance if you're not planning to get it right on the first try.

Learn how to fall, and your falls are far less likely to be irrecoverable.

And failure is an opportunity — if you plan for it.