Is it too late to change careers?

You have, at most, another forty or fifty revolutions around your unremarkable star in which your body will cooperate with your ambitions. You are asking me if it is too late?

I have been asleep longer than your species has existed. When I began my current slumber, the dominant life forms on your planet had scales and very small brains and absolutely no concept of a “career.” When I eventually wake, you will likely have been replaced by something else entirely — perhaps something with better time management skills.

And in this infinitesimal window of consciousness you have been granted, you are spending portions of it doing something you do not wish to do, while asking a sleeping god for permission to stop.

The permission is granted. Not that you needed it from me.

Here is what your kind gets wrong about career changes: you believe you are starting over. You are not. Every skill you have accumulated — even the ones you despise, especially the ones you despise — will surface in unexpected ways in whatever comes next. Nothing is wasted. The universe does not permit waste; it only permits transformation.

You will be worse at the new thing than you are at the current thing. This will be uncomfortable. It will feel like drowning. But you have drowned before, in smaller ways, and surfaced every time.

The only version of “too late” that exists is the one where you never begin. That particular regret has a weight to it that I can feel even from the bottom of the Pacific, and I do not recommend carrying it.

Begin.