As a teenager, I remember staring out the window at our neighbours’ house and feeling a cold wave of fear wash over me. There was the dad, heading out every single morning to the same office job, driving the same company car along the same route, most likely to greet the same colleagues, enduring the same awkward Christmas party, and taking the exact same two weeks of holiday every summer. It was the perfect nuclear family; a stay-at-home Mum, Dad going to work and two children (one boy, one girl).
“Is that it?” I thought. “Is that what adulthood looks like? Repetition on repeat until retirement?”
That proposition terrified me. It felt like a slow suffocation wrapped up in the illusion of security. I knew, even then, that I didn’t fit that mould. I couldn’t imagine chaining myself to one path, one title, one ladder forever.
Fast-forward decades, and I’ve lived exactly the opposite. I’ve tried my hand at a variety of careers: Retail Manager, IT Systems Analyst, Field Sales (automotive, telecoms, healthcare), Superyacht Crew, Personal Trainer, and many more. I land in a new role, master it in 6-12 months, feel the rush of competence… then the boredom hits hard. “Is this it? This isn’t even challenging anymore.” I move on. Interviewers have even mocked me for it (“We had to see what a yoga teacher/superyacht crew/marine engineer looks like in one person”). Recruiters and employers have raised eyebrows at my resume. For years, I internalised that judgment. I felt faulty—uncommitted, unserious, unfinished. Like I should have “figured it out” by now.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the fault isn’t in me. The world changed mid-game, and the old script we were all handed is decomposing. What looks like ‘flakiness’ to some, is my brain’s wiring; rapid learning, dopamine from novelty, and a quick drop-off when things become routine.
For much of the 20th century, there has been a legitimate path to adulthood. You finish education, land a stable job that pays more than survival, find a partner and marry or cohabit, take on housing debt, have 1–3 kids inside that container, climb income brackets incrementally, accumulate stuff and status markers, and then retire with a pension cushion. The script gave structure, shame, pride, and relief, something concrete to latch onto. Even rebels defined themselves against it.
That ladder still exists for some, but the destination has changed for most of us. Housing exploded relative to wages. Job security shifted to gigs, contracts, and precarity. Childcare became prohibitively expensive. Dual incomes became mandatory, just to tread water. The promise of ‘one good job sustains a family + home + stability’ broke somewhere between the late ’90s and now. So people delay marriage, skip kids, opt for childfree or one-and-done, build chosen families, prioritise mobility over roots, and stack skills across pivots.
We’re in a massive, quiet phase shift and the death of legible adulthood. No new universal script has replaced the old one. Instead, there’s a combinatorial explosion of micro-scripts—shorter, context-specific, often incompatible, rarely legible to educators, parents or peers.
Younger generations are openly testing modular lives, portfolio careers, location-independent work, and creative pursuits blended with corporate stints. Critics call it immaturity or entitlement. I see adaptation to reality.
Those of us in our 40s and 50s are straddling the change. We grew up with the tail end of the old promise, maybe checked some boxes, then watched the sequel get rewritten without us. We speak fluent ‘responsible provider/career climber/homeowner,’ but the emerging dialect is ‘optimisation + authenticity + optionality.‘ Neither fully captures our experience. We feel caught between being too old to fully embrace the new experiments without fear, and too changed by the shifts to return to the old default.
The result is a subtle, distributed existential illegibility. Not always depression or burnout, but a continuous low hum of “Is this allowed to be the plot now?” We cope by hyper-focusing on legible loops (fitness, money, followers), nostalgia for impossible scripts, or defensive “my weird path is the right one” signalling.
But the deepest need isn’t more hacks, it’s permission infrastructure. Environments that say, without panic or demotion: “Yeah… that tracks. Your life can look like this in 2026. You don’t have to retrofit it to 1996 standards to be valid.”
If you’re like me, a rapid learner with quick mastery until boredom when routine sets in, you’re not broken. Your brain thrives on novelty, challenge, and cycles of intense acquisition → mastery → release → next. (Many of us have undiagnosed or late-diagnosed ADHD wiring that amplifies this.) What looks like “flakiness” is serial mastery. What feels scattered is multipotentialite (shoutout to Emilie Wapnick’s work, in particular, her book How to Be Everything).
Your range isn’t a liability; it’s adaptability, idea synthesis, and rapid learning. In a world of constant change, those are superpowers. The old script rewarded conformity with security; the emerging one trades certainty for optionality. Neither is perfect, but shaming ourselves for not fitting the outdated one just leaks energy.
To anyone feeling this mismatch. Whether 25 and rejecting the script, 35 pivoting again, or 50+ quietly reassessing: You’re not behind. You’re not defective. You’re honest to a shifted reality. You’re allowed to ask what you want without apology, even late in the game. The permission is building. More people own “I’ve had six careers and I’m proud,” or “I’m built for mastery cycles, not linear climbs.”
I’d love to connect with others straddling this. If this resonates, if you’ve felt the dread of repetition, the thrill-then-boredom pattern, the in-between isolation, comment your story, share a piece of your path, or DM me.
Maybe we spark conversations, or even start a small LinkedIn community for multipotentialites, portfolio career folks, and those who don’t fit the old mould. No judgment, just “Yeah… that tracks.”
#Multipotentialite #PortfolioCareer #ADHD #CareerChange #Adulting #Midlife #Neurodiversity #FutureOfWork #Puttylike #NonLinearCareer
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