A mid-life career change is as good as a rest

The writer is the author of ‘Extra Time: 10 Lessons for Living Longer Better’

This year, a Christmas card arrived from an old friend telling us she’s had a bit-part on TV. Formerly a teacher, she enrolled in drama school in her fifties, which didn’t augur well. Her parents had warned her against taking such a big risk when she was starting out. But after her mother died and left her a small legacy she took the leap — watching her on stage, you’d think she’d been doing it all her life.

I’ve interviewed lots of people who’ve made career shifts in mid-life. The lucky ones talk with a sparkle that makes them seem younger. They achieve, often for the first time, the happiness that comes from what the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “flow state”: being completely absorbed in the task. When you’re in flow, nothing else seems to matter. And you don’t have to be an artist to feel it. One friend migrated from journalist to mindfulness instructor after taking up meditation as a sideline; another has enrolled on a plumbing course. At this year’s FT Weekend Festival, I met Ana Baillie, who is studying to be a midwife after 23 years as a lawyer with blue-chip firms. She had realised she might be only halfway through a long life, so why not switch to using a different part of her brain?

This sense of having extra time to play with can be very empowering. I have met people in their forties and fifties committing to years of training: in psychology, teaching, even medicine. They clearly expect a return on their investment by working into their seventies.

Naturally this is an elite group, buffered by professional earnings and/or supportive spouses. But they may be bellwethers. The Great Resignation of the pandemic removed many over-50s from the workforce, to general alarm. But we are only just beginning to map the Great Reshuffle, which saw workers of all ages job-hop, upskill, or return. In the UK and US, self-employment is…