Make a Real Career Change and Stop Starting Over

If you’re stuck in a career restart cycle, constantly starting over in your 30s with new cities, new jobs, new plans, you’re not alone. I’ve restarted my life more times than I can count.

New city. New job. New plan. New version of myself that was definitely going to work out this time.

For years, I thought this was a feature, not a bug. I was adventurous. I was brave. I was refusing to settle.

Turns out, I was just really good at running away.

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The Career Restart Pattern: Why I Kept Starting Over

I remember the realization hitting me like a brick: I was building my castles out of sand. Or cards. Pick your metaphor, the point is the same. I kept building things up, and as soon as they had a foundation, I would move on to the next thing and abandon all my hard work.

The most recent time, I had decided to stop being nomadic and settle down back home in Chicago. I did all the heavy lifting; found an apartment to rent, found a roommate, bought furniture. I spent months struggling with unemployment and underemployment, then finally got a stable job. I started rebuilding my social life. I had a routine down. I had a girlfriend. I had successfully rebuilt a life.

I’m not sure when it started. Something started eating at me. Perhaps it was just the mundanity of the work-life routine that gets to everybody sometimes. It didn’t take long for the big city full of adventure to shrink down into a closed circuit that felt just as small and oppressive as my hometown.

I guess you could say I craved novelty, and it just felt like I had experienced everything. I had done all the work, and now all that was left was to go to work, come home, rinse and repeat.

The pattern always looked the same:

• Build something new with enthusiasm and passion
• Hit the first real obstacle or moment of boredom
• Convince myself its insurmountable
• Abandon everything and start over
• Repeat every 6-12 months

There used to be something addictive about starting life over.

When Starting Over Becomes an Addiction

In the beginning of my travels, I would hop around every couple of months into something completely new. A new place, with new people, and new quirks.

Something I grew to realize about nomadic life is that it enabled my tendency to leave as soon as I didn’t like something or thought I’d have better luck somewhere else.

This pattern has a name in psychology: novelty seeking. Research published in Frontiers in Neuroscience defines it as “the tendency to desire novel stimuli and environments” and shows that high novelty seekers are more prone to developing compulsive behaviors. The same brain reward systems that respond to drugs also activate when novelty seekers encounter new experiences, which helps explain why starting over can feel so compelling, even when it’s destructive.

When I first started going to Mexico City, I was trying out being a traveling artist. It was great fun, possibly the highlight of all my travels. I was commissioned to fully paint a room in what was to be an “artist’s hostel.” The concept was that every room would be designed by a different artist who would then make a small commission every time the room was booked.

I managed the hostel and kept it running while the owner would go out of town, sometimes for months. I learned the ins and outs of the hostel business. I would check guests in and out, restock drinks and food items we sold, and even clean the rooms sometimes.

I ended up finishing the room. But this was at the end of 2019 and the very beginning of 2020. You see where this is going.

I went back to the US to visit a friend in Las Vegas, and then COVID hit.

When Life Forces You to Start Over

I kept pursuing the path of a career artist. I did commissions and sold my music, but the money was abysmal. As much as I wanted to return to Mexico City, the hostel had shut down and the virus was causing huge problems. Mexico City suffered heavily during those early days of the pandemic; one friend of mine knew eight people who died from it.

I can say that that instance of life nuking wasn’t my fault. But it was the beginning of the cycle becoming truly compulsive.

COVID was a horrendous time for me. I wasn’t qualified for state unemployment due to my bouncing around, and I couldn’t get Federal unemployment either due to a strange loophole about earning money in two different zip codes that disqualified me. I went back to restaurant work, which at the time was constantly shutting down and reopening every time COVID cases would rise and fall.

I simply wasn’t making enough money. Despite all my best efforts, I was going broke. I decided the best move was to return to my parents’ house until things went back to “normal.”

During that time, I hatched a plan to learn how to code. I had the motivation, and I’d seen several of my friends do the same thing. So I started reading books and watching tutorials.

Unfortunately, I got stuck in tutorial hell. At the time, I didn’t realize the workbook I was using was outdated, or that I would have been better off going straight into making projects rather than watching video after video.

Why I Always Quit Right When Things Start Working

It all culminated in a burnout moment.

I saw the progress I had made, which didn’t feel like much considering the effort I’d put in. And I saw how much farther I had to go.

I’m not sure I ever made a conscious decision on the matter. The vaccines rolled out, and a seasonal job I worked in California opened back up and asked if I was available. I eagerly took my job back, sold my belongings, packed a backpack, and went back to California.

Somewhere along the way, I just stopped coding. I didn’t even keep a toe in the water. I completely shut it out.

When I was in California, I kept dreaming about returning to Mexico. I’d been thinking about Mexico since the pandemic started. Now it was getting closer, and I was saving up money to live off of while I was there.

I felt miserable at my job in California. It wasn’t completely my own moral failing, it was the summer of the omicron variant. We were open for business but very limited in what we could do. Some disaster days, half our staff was out with COVID at the same time. There was even a forest fire that filled the air with smoke. The AQI was so high it was literally off the charts, and we eventually had to evacuate the area for three weeks while it raged.

I was so miserable by the time that job ended that I swore I’d never go back.

The Magnum Opus Fantasy

By the time I could go to Mexico again, I’d been nurturing my writing skills and dreamed of doing some kind of gonzo journalism thing. I wrote articles about my experience during Day of the Dead and life in Mexico in general. I worked for some crappy content mill making $100 a week and also taught English online for a semblance of income.

Again, my mentality at the time was that if I just made one magnum opus, one amazing piece of writing, everything would connect for me. Some media company mogul would reach his hand out of the sky and rain money down on me to keep traveling and doing things that interested me.

This is what’s sometimes called “Magnum Opus Syndrome”: the belief that one perfect creation will solve all your problems. As career coach Geoff Affleck notes, this perfectionist thinking often shows up in creative work when “you’re constantly rewriting each chapter, section and paragraph” rather than actually finishing and publishing anything.

Research backs this up. A study published in the British Journal of Psychology found that perfectionism (striving for impossibly high standards) actually hindered creative performance compared to what researchers call “excellencism,” which is pursuing high standards flexibly. The perfectionists in the study generated fewer original ideas and showed less openness to experience.

In other words, waiting for the perfect piece wasn’t a strategy. It was paralysis.

Needless to say, my magnum opus moment never happened. And I burned out.

I kept teaching English, but the money wasn’t enough to sustain me in the United States in any kind of real way. Eventually, I gave that up too. I couldn’t see a path forward besides starting my own teaching business, and I just didn’t have the gumption for it.

What Finally Made Me Stop

I think I always had this belief that I would just have good luck and things would work out for me because I was smart and tenacious.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that I was severely lacking in patience and consistency, which are vital for growth.

If you want to start a garden, it doesn’t necessarily matter how passionate and excited you are about it. If you water and prune your plants enthusiastically for three weeks and then stop, your plants are going to wither and die.

What brought me back to Chicago this last time was the simple fact that my seasonal job in California ended. I made a stop in Mexico for a week and a half to see my friends, then headed back here so I could spend the holidays with my friends and family.

This time is different because I’m not chasing excitement anymore. I knew coming back home during winter would mean a lot of time indoors. “Perfect,” I thought. A forced isolation for me to work on myself.

The idea that consistency beats motivation had been something I understood intellectually for a while but always struggled to put into practice.

I think the thing that finally made it click was when I decided to stop drinking alcohol.

How Quitting Drinking Taught Me Consistency

I started my sobriety journey mainly because I worked incredibly early in the morning as a breakfast chef and felt that even one alcoholic drink could ruin my sleep, which could then spiral out and ruin a week of sleep that I couldn’t catch up on until the weekend.

Not only that, but if I was hungover on my weekend, I couldn’t do anything productive with my free time. It felt like a waste. So I just decided to quit and see what would happen.

Obviously, any kind of journey or change isn’t going to be a linear path. Some days were better than others. Other days, I realized what a coping mechanism alcohol had become for me. Sometimes I’d indulge in eating more sweets than I’d like, but instead of beating myself up about it, I just told myself to do better the next day.

After a while, I just got used to not drinking, and my body stopped having cravings. Months went by, and I started noticing weight loss. Weight loss that wasn’t visible after the first two months. An older version of me would have given up after not seeing results two months in, but I learned to embrace the slow burn.

As long as you are making incremental progress, you will eventually get somewhere.

What Science Says about the Restart Cycle

This aligns with what psychologists have found about habit formation. Research published in the British Journal of General Practice shows that habits take an average of 66 days to form when repeated daily, much longer than the popular “21 days” myth. The researchers found that “motivation and attention wane” over time, but once a behavior becomes automatic through consistent repetition, it persists “even after conscious motivation or interest dissipates.”

In other words: you don’t need to stay motivated forever. You just need to repeat the action consistently until it becomes automatic.

I’ve adopted this mindset to many things in my life now. For instance, I started to notice I was getting addicted to my phone, and I very slowly started replacing screen time with reading books. Of course, some days I really don’t want to read and want the easy dopamine of short-form content. But little by little, a habit is built. And while I wish my short-form content consumption was zero, it is now much better and I’m consistently finishing books.

I also do the same thing with exercise. I stopped working off that fiery passion that I thought for so long was my strongest asset. I don’t try to pump myself up or anything like that. I focus on consistency. My goal isn’t to get a six-pack in two months. My goal is for exercising to become habit.

The mindsets are very different, and one gets results while the other leads to burnout every time.

Why Passion-Driven Approaches Fail

This isn’t just my personal experience: research confirms it. A study on work passion and burnout published in Social Sciences distinguished between two types of passion: “harmonious passion” (where work is integrated into your life flexibly) and “obsessive passion” (where you feel compelled to work and can’t disconnect).

The researchers found that obsessive passion, the kind that sounds like “follow your passion!” motivation, actually predicted higher levels of work-family conflict and burnout. Meanwhile, harmonious passion, which is more about consistent, balanced engagement, protected against burnout.

In other words, approaching work with fiery, all-consuming passion sets you up to crash. Approaching it with steady, sustainable consistency keeps you going.

Breaking the Cycle for Good

Of course there’s a fear that I haven’t truly conquered this cycle. But I have noticed a largely diminished attraction to my usual distractions and preoccupations.

Perhaps it’s just my age and having ridden the carousel enough times to realize there is no end to this cycle without a mental shift.

I don’t really dream of adventure anymore, because there isn’t anything out there. What I mean is that boredom, depression, whatever problems you have can find you anywhere. Even on top of Everest, or on the back of a motorcycle speeding down a highway in Mexico.

Fulfillment can find you anywhere as well, even in unsexy places, doing average things and living a “normal” life.

So here I am at 34, making another attempt at a career change. But this time, I’m not looking for the exciting path. I’m not waiting for someone to discover my magnum opus. I’m not chasing the next adventure.

I’m choosing digital marketing not because it’s thrilling, but because it’s practical. It offers remote work and financial stability. It’s a skill I can build slowly and consistently.

And when it gets boring, because it will, I won’t nuke it and start over. I’ll take a break. I’ll go for a walk. I’ll come back the next day and keep building.

Because that’s what gardens need. Not passion. Not excitement. Just consistent watering, day after day, until something finally grows.

Some Questions I Had When Breaking This Pattern

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

For the longest time, I thought I was just “free-spirited” or “noncommittal.” Turns out there’s actual research on this, it’s called novelty-seeking behavior, and the same brain systems that drive addiction also light up when you chase new experiences. The pattern usually involves pursuing excitement over stability, then abandoning things once the initial thrill fades. Understanding that this is a recognized psychological pattern and not a personal failing was the first step toward breaking it.

How do I actually stop starting over?

The shift that worked for me was moving from motivation-based thinking to consistency-based habits. Instead of relying on passion or excitement to drive me forward, I started building routines that I could maintain over 66+ days until they became automatic. This meant choosing practical goals over exciting ones, embracing boredom as part of the process, and committing to slow progress even when I couldn’t see results yet. The key is recognizing when you’re about to nuke your progress and consciously choosing to persist through the discomfort instead.

Is this normal, or am I just broken?

A lot of people go through multiple career restarts in their 30s, especially if you spent your 20s pursuing passion-driven paths or living unconventionally. The difference between healthy pivoting and destructive patterns is whether you’re moving toward something sustainable or running away from discomfort. If you find yourself repeatedly abandoning projects just as they start gaining traction, you’re probably caught in a restart cycle. Some experimentation is normal, chronic restarting usually indicates deeper patterns around novelty-seeking or fear of commitment.

How long until this urge to start over goes away?

The research on habit formation says it takes about 66 days of consistent daily behavior to form automatic habits. But breaking the full restart cycle took me longer, more like 3-6 months of consistent action before the urge to “nuke it all” significantly diminished. The hardest period is days 30-60, when your initial motivation fades but the habits haven’t solidified yet. That’s when you have to consciously choose consistency over novelty. For me, the shift became noticeable around the 2-3 month mark.