Notes from: The Myth of the Second Chance by Janan Ganesh
FT Article: https://ft.pressreader.com/article/282557318242321

The sur­prise of middle age, and the ter­ror of it, is how much of a per­son’s fate can boil down to one mis­judge­ment.
     ...If you marry badly — or marry at all, when it isn’t for you — don’t assume the dam­age is recov­er­able. If you make the wrong career choice, and real­ise it as early as age 30, don’t count on a way back. Even the decision to go down a sci­ence track at school... can mangle a life. None of these errors need con­sign a per­son to eternal and acute dis­tress. But life is path-depend­ent: each mis­take nar­rows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can fore­close all hope of the life you wanted.
     There should be more cand­our about this from the people who are looked to (and paid) for guid­ance. The rise of the advice-indus­trial com­plex — the self-help pod­casts, the chief exec­ut­ive coaches, the men’s con­fer­ences — has been mostly benign. But much of the con­tent is Amer­ican, and reflects the optim­ism of that coun­try. The notion of an unsalvage­able mis­take is almost trans­gress­ive in the land of second chances.

...a per­son’s life at 40 isn’t the sum of most decisions. It is skewed by a dis­pro­por­tion­ately import­ant few: some­times pro­fes­sional, often romantic. Get these wrong, and the scope for retriev­ing the situ­ation is, if not zero, then over­blown by a cul­ture that struggles to impart bad news.

I feel... amazement at the cas­u­al­ness with which people entered into big life choices. Per­haps this is what hap­pens when ideas of redemp­tion and resur­rec­tion — the ulti­mate second chance — are encoded into the his­toric faith of a cul­ture. It takes a more pro­fane cast of mind to see through it.