— At 44, quitting a job in Germany without another one lined up and switching from media technology to nursing—is it worth it?

By Jane Sonnenschein · First drafted March 16, 2026 · Postscript added September 10, 2026

Yesterday, I spoke with a friend on the phone.

The moment he answered, I could tell he was in a very low place. It did not sound like a bad mood that would pass in a day or two. It sounded more like someone who had been worn down by something for a long time, to the point where even his voice carried a kind of exhaustion.

This friend has never really had a bad life.

He studied media technology and later worked in the same field, creating landing pages and newsletter layouts for large companies. He had experience, and his income was not low. From the outside, at least, he was certainly not someone you would look at and think, “Things have gone terribly wrong for him.”

But he has never thought very highly of himself.

He would say he was just average, nothing particularly impressive.

And for years, one fear has been hanging over him:

Sooner or later, AI is going to replace the kind of work we do.

He has been saying this for years.

Even a few years ago, when AI was nowhere near as overwhelming a presence as it is now, he was already worried. He kept saying that many people would lose their jobs, AI would become more and more capable, and ordinary people’s work would gradually disappear.

On top of that, the work he was doing had become quite repetitive. After years of making the same kinds of pages over and over, a kind of professional fatigue naturally set in. It was not that any single day was unbearable. It was that tomorrow and the day after seemed likely to look exactly the same.

Over time, that kind of weariness grows.

So for years, he kept asking himself whether he should change careers.

Changing direction in midlife is never a small decision.

When you are twenty, you can try something new and the cost of getting it wrong is still relatively low. You have more physical energy, and somewhere inside you there is usually the feeling that, if it does not work out, you can always start again.

After forty, things are different. Energy, memory, concentration, and your tolerance for risk are not the same as they were at twenty.

And he was not simply moving sideways into another job within the same industry. He wanted to enter a completely different field.

After years of hesitation, he finally made the decision this year. He quit his job and began studying nursing.

The reasoning behind that decision was actually very practical.

When you live abroad and start getting older, you inevitably begin thinking about your parents aging, whether you might eventually return to care for them, and what kind of work you could do if you went back.

His thinking was simple: if he learned a practical skill like this, then even if he returned to China one day, he would at least have a way to make a living. And if his parents needed care, he would also have some real skills that could help them.

It was a sensible idea. Even a responsible one.

But something can make perfect sense on paper and still be completely wrong for the person who has to live it.

Yesterday, he told me that he thought he had overestimated himself.

Nursing, he discovered, was much harder for a middle-aged career changer than he had imagined.

It was not enough to simply be willing to work hard.

He had entered an entirely new language system, a new professional field, and a new way of learning. In Germany, nursing is closely connected to medicine, so there are also many technical terms with Latin roots.

Anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that everyday vocabulary and an entire system of medical, nursing, and academic terminology are not remotely the same thing.

And he was already in his forties.

Trying to learn a completely new profession through a foreign language at that age is exhausting in itself.

On top of that, he was doing a university degree.

That meant he was not simply learning practical procedures. There were serious academic demands as well: reports, papers, academic sources. You could not just write a few lines based on your own impressions and be done with it.

Alongside the theory, he also had to work in a hospital, get up early, do shifts, and function under pressure in real situations.

His mind was tired, and his body was tired too.

He put it very plainly.

He said it was not as though he wanted to die every day, but whenever he arrived at university or at the hospital, the first thought that came into his head was:

I want to go home.

That sentence actually felt heavier to me than “I want to die.”

Because “I want to go home” did not sound like a moment of collapse.

It sounded like a constant sense of rejection.

Like both his body and his mind were telling him:

I do not want to be here.

This was not simply fear of difficulty, and it did not feel like a temporary low point. It felt as though this path had never truly connected with him in the first place.

The longer we talked, the clearer it became.

He admitted that he did not actually like what he was studying.

He had not chosen it because he loved it, because he was curious about it, or because doing it gave him a sense of achievement.

He had chosen it mostly for practical reasons.

And underneath those practical reasons was something else:

fear driven by anxiety about AI.

In other words, he was not actively choosing a path he genuinely wanted to take.

He was running away from an old path he was afraid of losing.

Those are two very different things.

I told him that I did not entirely agree with his belief that AI would inevitably replace ordinary people’s jobs.

Of course I know that AI has developed extremely quickly over the past few years, and it is already reshaping many industries.

But I have always seen it more as a tool than as some monster that will automatically swallow everyone’s livelihood.

When Excel and Word first became widely used, people also worried: Would accountants no longer be needed? Would people who kept the books lose their jobs?

That was not what happened.

Accounting did not disappear. Accountants learned to use new tools. They could calculate faster, work more accurately, and become more efficient.

AI is similar.

It will certainly change the way many jobs are done.

But it cannot replace human agency and judgment.

AI is good at working with huge amounts of data, finding patterns, and producing the answer that is statistically most likely to make sense.

But the questions—What do I want to use this tool for? Where do I want to apply it? What problem am I actually trying to solve?—still belong to us.

As long as we are still thinking for ourselves, AI is more like an amplifier than something that simply replaces us.

But I also gradually realized that his problem could not be solved by telling him, “AI isn’t that scary.”

Because his real problem was not simply that he had misjudged AI.

It was that fear had pushed him onto a path that gave him no energy.

And that was what stayed with me after our phone call.

When you choose a new direction in midlife, you really cannot look only at which field seems safer, which choice seems more practical, or which job seems most likely to keep food on the table.

Of course those things matter.

We all have to live in the real world.

But if the path you choose makes you want to leave every single day, if you feel as though you are constantly forcing yourself through it, if it drains you day after day, then no matter how sensible it looks on paper, it may still not be the path you should take.

At twenty, you can sometimes brute-force your way through things simply because you are young.

You can grit your teeth.

You can push yourself.

You can tell yourself, “Just hang on a little longer.”

But after forty, many people are already carrying real life on their backs: family responsibilities, physical limitations, financial pressure, psychological strain.

If on top of all that you force yourself into something you feel no connection to, something that empties you a little more every day, the pain can multiply very quickly.

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this because I have never been someone with extraordinary willpower myself.

Starting things has always been difficult for me.

I am also very capable of being enthusiastic for three days and then losing momentum.

Over the years I have tried many things. It is not as though I never found possible paths, but there are not many things I have truly managed to keep doing for a long time.

Writing is different.

Writing makes me excited.

I can be tired. I can be anxious. I can spend the day packing boxes at work and not get home until midnight.

But writing does not feel like one more thing draining me.

In some strange way, it gives something back.

That was why, while I was trying to advise him yesterday, I also found myself looking at my own life.

At this age, perhaps the most important question when starting again is no longer:

Can I push myself harder?

Maybe it is:

When I am exhausted, will I still want to come back to this?

A path that can carry you a long way does not have to be easy every day.

It does not have to be painless.

It does not have to make money immediately.

But it should give you at least a little energy to keep going.

It should leave you feeling that, even if today was difficult, tomorrow you are still willing to try again.

Rather than waking up every morning and immediately wanting to escape.

So after that phone call yesterday, one sentence kept circling in my mind:

After midlife, stop forcing yourself down a path that gives you no energy.

That does not mean people in midlife should no longer endure hardship.

It means that, at this age, the hardship should be worth something.

Ideally, after going through it, something inside you should still have grown.

The road can be hard, but it should not leave you emptier the farther you walk.

You should not want to run away more and more with every passing day.

You should gradually understand why, despite everything, you are still willing to stay.

If that is missing, then no matter how practical, safe, or “good according to everyone else” the choice may look, it is worth being careful.

Because after forty, the greatest danger in starting over is not moving too slowly.

It is putting yourself on a path that drains you every day—and mistaking that for maturity. 

Postscript: Half a Year Later, He Is Still Standing at the Crossroads

More than half a year has passed since I wrote this essay.

My friend did not leave the program immediately.

He kept going for a while, and because of that, he came to understand much more clearly why this path was making him so miserable.

What he was doing was not a simple vocational training program. It was a university degree. Part of his time was spent studying theory at university, and part of it was spent doing practical training in a hospital.

For someone in their early twenties, that may simply feel like part of university life.

For someone in his forties who has moved from media technology into an entirely different field, it can feel much more like starting a demanding full-time job from scratch.

Most of the people around him were much younger.

The subject matter itself was closely related to medicine and involved a large amount of technical vocabulary, including Latin terminology.

And because he was studying for a degree rather than simply training in a practical occupation, the expectations went beyond learning how to perform certain tasks. There was theory, reports, academic papers, professional literature. He told me that the university even had formal requirements related to publishing academic work.

For someone already living and studying in a foreign language, this was no longer simply a matter of “learning a new profession.”

He had come from media technology and was now entering an almost completely unfamiliar system of knowledge.

He went to the hospital during the day and still had theory to study afterward. The people around him were younger, their learning rhythms were different, and he himself was already in his forties.

Not long ago, he finally told me:

“I’ll finish this semester, and then I’m leaving.”

But once he made that decision, the real problem did not disappear.

He immediately found himself wondering what to do next.

His parents and siblings back in China still believe that, at his age, he should learn a “useful skill”—something practical and secure.

Physiotherapy, for example, sounds stable. It also sounds like the kind of work that would be difficult to replace.

He had thought about that too.

But then he began asking himself whether physiotherapy was really just a matter of “learning a trade.”

You need a strong understanding of bones, muscles, and the way the body moves. The work itself also requires a certain level of physical fitness and stamina.

If you are already in your forties, do not exercise much, and choose another unfamiliar profession simply because it sounds “safe,” then the same problem may eventually repeat itself in a different form.

There is also one anxiety he has never really let go of over the years.

AI.

Almost every time we talk, he brings up another piece of news he has seen: another job being replaced by AI, another industry cutting positions, another company reducing its workforce.

The more of this news he reads, the more dangerous the future begins to feel.

That fear was also one of the main reasons he started thinking about changing careers years ago.

The first question he asked was never:

“What do I still want to do?”

It was:

“What kind of job won’t be taken away by AI?”

Those two questions may look similar.

They point in completely different directions.

A few days ago, I told him again that what he may really need to change is not only his profession.

It is the way he sees the problem.

AI will certainly change the job market. Some tasks that used to be done by people will disappear or shrink.

There is no reason to deny that.

But technological development has never had only one side—the side where somebody loses.

The same tool can produce two completely different reactions.

One person looks at it every day and thinks:

I’m finished. It is going to take my job.

Another person asks:

Can I use this to turn three hours of work into one?

Can I let it handle the repetitive parts, so that I can spend my time on the work that still requires judgment, experience, and creativity?

I keep telling him:

Why does AI have to be your competitor?

Why can’t it first be your tool?

If a tool makes you more efficient, allows you to do more, or makes something possible that you could not do before, that too is part of what technological progress brings.

Of course, saying this is much easier than living it.

When someone is already lost in their career and is surrounded every day by headlines about “job losses,” “replacement,” and “being left behind,” fear can easily outrun judgment.

And all of this reminded me of a story I read many years ago.

Someone once got into a taxi and started talking to the driver.

During the conversation, he discovered that the driver actually owned a small company. He was the boss. He simply drove a taxi in his spare time to earn some extra money alongside running his business.

The man’s wife had graduated from a 985 university¹ and later became a schoolteacher.

By the usual standards, she had followed a very recognizable “good student” path: an elite university, followed by a stable job.

Yet she remained extremely anxious about her own child.

In her mind, her child also had to study hard, enter an elite university, and ideally get into another 985 university.

She was willing to spend heavily on tutoring and even buy property in a desirable school district if that was what it took.

Her husband had tried to persuade her otherwise.

They had argued.

They had fought about it.

Nothing changed.

Because in her understanding of life, there were only a handful of roads that led to a “promising future.”

She herself had come through one of those roads, which only strengthened her belief that her child had to take it too.

Eventually, her husband gave up trying to change her mind.

He said all he could really do was keep building his business and earn a little more whenever he had time.

At least then, if his child one day needed help, he might have enough resources to provide it.

I read that story many years ago, but for some reason it came back to me recently.

Sometimes, having personally succeeded along a certain path makes a person even less able to question that path.

There is nothing wrong with attending an elite university.

There is nothing wrong with going to university at all.

There is nothing wrong with learning a practical skill.

The problem begins when we slowly turn one particular choice into the only possible answer.

Someone may have graduated from a 985 university herself and still earn a fairly ordinary salary, yet remain convinced that her child must repeat the same path in order to have a secure future.

Someone in his forties may be so afraid of AI that he keeps searching for an occupation that AI will “never be able to replace”—first nursing, then physiotherapy, then whatever comes next.

On the surface, these fears seem completely different.

Underneath, they are surprisingly similar.

Both are attempts to find one guaranteed safe road in a world that is changing very quickly.

But perhaps the real problem is that the world increasingly offers no such road.

An industry that looks safe today may change dramatically ten years from now.

A degree that seems full of promise today may lead into a completely different job market by the time a child graduates.

If we keep trying to make the future completely predictable by choosing the right degree, the right certificate, or the right supposedly secure skill, we may only make ourselves more anxious.

Looking back at this essay half a year later, I find myself thinking about something new.

Perhaps the most important question when changing careers in midlife is not simply:

“Which industry should I move into?”

Perhaps it is:

“Am I still using an old idea of safety, work, and success to deal with a world that has already changed?”

If that does not change, your anxiety may follow you into the next profession.

Today you are afraid AI will replace media technology, so you study nursing.

Tomorrow nursing feels too exhausting, so you start thinking about physiotherapy.

The day after that, you read an article saying robots are beginning to assist in rehabilitation therapy, and the fear starts all over again.

If this keeps going, you are always running away.

But you rarely stop and ask yourself:

What do I already have?

What can I still learn?

Which parts of my experience can continue to grow rather than be thrown away?

Which new technologies can I actually use, rather than seeing them only as a threat?

What kind of work genuinely fits my body, my age, my personality, and the reality of my life?

And perhaps most importantly:

Am I actually willing to walk this road for many years?

The older I get, the more I feel that starting again in midlife does not mean wiping the past clean and searching for whichever new path other people say has the “best prospects.”

Often, it is almost the opposite.

You have to bring everything you have accumulated over the past few decades with you—your experience, your abilities, your personality, your physical limits, even the things that did not work out.

Then you look again at the new tools, the new industries, and the new possibilities in front of you.

AI cannot do that for you.

A degree cannot do it for you.

Neither can a supposedly “future-proof” skill.

They are all just tools.

What ultimately shapes the next part of a person’s life is still how they understand themselves—and how they understand the world that is changing around them.

So half a year later, I still agree with the sentence I wrote when this essay first began:

After midlife, stop forcing yourself down a path that drains you.

But now I want to add one more:

And don’t let fear of the future drive you into a path simply because it looks safe.

Because perhaps real security was never about finding a profession that will never disappear.

Perhaps it is knowing that when the world changes, you are still capable of understanding it again—and of finding your place in it again.

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Notes

1. “985 university” (985大学)
“Project 985” was a Chinese government initiative launched in the late 1990s to support a selected group of leading universities and strengthen their research and international competitiveness. Although the formal project has since been replaced by newer higher-education policies, “985 university” remains a widely used expression in China. In everyday conversation, it usually refers to a small group of prestigious elite universities and carries strong associations with academic achievement, social status, employment prospects, and educational competition.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 中年之后，别再逼自己走一条没有能量的路

German version: Nach der Lebensmitte: Zwing dich nicht mehr auf einen Weg, der dir jede Energie nimmt