The Re-Awakening

A midlife story about closing doors and what opened them again

There’s a shape to a life that nobody tells you about when you’re young. You figure it out on your own, usually too late to do anything about the first part.

In your teens and twenties, the world expands. Every year you can do more than you could the year before. You learn a new language. You pick up a skill. You get a degree, then a job, then a better job. The menu of what’s possible for you gets longer every year. You don’t think about this while it’s happening. You just feel it. The feeling is momentum. The curve only goes up.

Nobody tells you about the turn.

Torschlusspanik (Gate-Closing Panic)

It happens at different ages for different people. But at some point, the expansion stops. The menu stops getting longer. And then, quietly, it starts getting shorter.

Every choice you make through your life is also a sacrifice. You took this job, so you didn’t take that one. You spend your time with these people, so you don’t spend it with others. You had kids, so the vacations changed. You bought a house here, so you didn’t buy one there. You picked these hobbies, these projects, these books. Which means you didn’t pick the others. Every decision narrows the path. By the time you’re in your mid-forties, you look back and realize that the life you’re living, the one you chose, is also the graveyard of every life you didn’t.

Some people call this a midlife crisis. I think that’s a label that makes it easy to dismiss. It’s not a crisis. It’s a recognition. Hope has buoyancy. And when the doors start closing, that sensation reverses. It’s just a slow deflation.

That’s the shape. Expansion, peak, contraction. Everyone goes through it. Nobody prepares you for it.

Re-Awakening

In Solo Leveling, there’s a concept called re-awakening. A hunter gets ranked once, early on, and that rank is supposed to be permanent. You’re an E-rank, you stay an E-rank. The system measured you, and that’s it. Your ceiling is set. Everyone accepts it. You accept it.

And then, for reasons nobody can explain, the system re-evaluates. The rank changes. The ceiling breaks. The person who was written off becomes something else entirely. Not because they trained harder or got lucky. Because something fundamental shifted in what was possible for them.

For me, and many like me, that was AI happening.

When I started using AI tools and developing AI tools daily, something happened that I did not expect to happen at this point in my life. Doors started opening again. Actual capabilities I didn’t have before. Not because I suddenly got smarter or learned a new stack. Because the barrier between “I can imagine this” and “I can build this” dropped by an order of magnitude.

I started writing software in domains I’d never touched. I built things in languages I’d never learned. I shipped projects in a weekend that would have taken me months, if I’d attempted them at all. And the list of things I wanted to build, the list that had been slowly shrinking for years as I accepted my own limitations, started growing again.

I started growing again. Growing. At forty-six.

That is not how the curve is supposed to work.

What It Feels Like

The re-awakening is the opposite. You don’t wake up one morning and think “everything is possible again.” You just notice, over weeks and months, that you’re attempting things you would have dismissed a year ago. The voice in your head that used to say “you don’t know enough to build that” gets quieter. Your project list starts getting longer instead of shorter. Saturday afternoons start to feel like they used to feel, like there’s something exciting you could be working on.

It’s the same sensation you had in your twenties. Momentum. The menu getting longer. Except you’re not twenty. You’re forty-six, and you’ve already been through the turn, and you know what the contraction feels like. Which makes the expansion feel different this time.

It feels like a gift.

I don’t use that word casually. I’m not a grateful-for-everything type. But I had resigned myself to things. I was never going to know mobile app or web development the way I knew embedded systems and firmware. There was a whole world of software I could see but only scratch the surface on, and I had accepted that. Made peace with it, even. And then something broke that acceptance open. It’s a combination of disbelief, relief, and joy. It’s this turn of fate for us.

I know this sounds like I’m overselling it. The models aren’t perfect. The tools break. The dependency is real and sometimes uncomfortable. I wrote about that too. But the core thing is true. Something that was contracting is expanding again. And it’s happening at a time in my life when I had fully accepted the contraction as permanent.

I suspect I’m not the only one feeling it.

The Part That Makes Me Uncomfortable

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

Maybe the contraction was supposed to happen. Maybe it’s not a bug. Maybe it’s how this is supposed to work.

There’s a natural order to things. You get older, you get less familiar with the new technology, you fall a step behind, then two steps, then three. And gradually, without anyone forcing it, the world gets inherited by the next generation. Young people take over not because they staged a coup, but because they grew up in the water you’re still learning to swim in. That handoff is how society keeps moving.

Think about what happens if that handoff stops. If the older generation finds a fountain of youth, gets their powers back, stays productive and competitive indefinitely. On the surface that sounds great. But follow the thread.

Wealth compounds. Power compounds. Experience compounds. The only reason those things don’t accumulate into permanent dynasties is that people age out. They slow down. They step aside, willingly or not, and the space they occupied becomes available for someone younger. Someone with fresh ideas and fewer assumptions and the kind of energy you can only have when you haven’t been doing this for thirty years.

If AI breaks that cycle, if it keeps the older generation operating at full capacity for another twenty or thirty years, then when do the young people get their chance? When do they get to lead? When do they get the opportunities that we got, not because someone handed them to us, but because the people above us eventually moved on?

I don’t have a clear answer for this. I also have a kid. And I want that kid to inherit a world where there’s room for them. Not a world where every seat is occupied by someone from my generation or an A.G.I., crowding out young people from participating meaningfully in society.

Maybe the re-awakening isn’t meant to be held onto forever. Maybe the right thing to do is to use it, and then, when the time comes, step aside anyway. Not because you have to. Because the people coming up behind you need you to.

Hopefully my generation knows when to step aside and let the next one save the world from the mess we created.