I have started over more than once, and never with any kind of grand plan. In 2004 I stepped down from a directorship at a property company, mostly to spend more time with two small humans before they stopped finding me interesting. Later I built a marketing business helping small businesses make sense of the internet, then sold it in 2019 to attempt the one thing I’d never quite dared: writing books for a living.
So I know the pull of the clean slate reasonably well. And here’s the bit nobody mentions when you turn the page: whichever door you walk through, you carry the same person over the threshold. The job changes. The postcode changes. The character doing the changing turns up in the new life exactly as he left the old one, still misplacing his keys and still certain this time will be different.
The trouble is, starting over sounds simple. Wipe the slate, walk out the door, become someone new by Tuesday. Reality tends to send a forwarding address, and everything you tried to leave behind turns up in the post a week later, slightly dog-eared but very much yours.
The Clean Slate That Never Quite Comes Clean
Psychologists have a name for the little jolt of motivation you feel at the start of something: the fresh start effect. Researchers Katy Milkman, Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis coined it, and the findings are oddly reassuring. People sign up for the gym not only in January, but at the start of a new week, after a birthday, at the beginning of a term. One study found people were 33% more likely to head to the gym at the start of a week, and 47% more likely at the start of a new semester.
A temporal landmark, the academics call it. The rest of us call it Monday. There’s something genuinely useful in it too: a clean line drawn between the old you who raids the fridge at midnight and the new you who absolutely will not. The mind loves a border. Give it a fresh page, and it briefly believes anything is possible.
People Who Genuinely Pulled It Off
Plenty have, and later than you’d dare. Colonel Sanders reached 65 with a failed roadside restaurant, a new motorway that rerouted every last customer away from his door, and a Social Security cheque for $105 a month. Most men would have read that as the universe’s polite suggestion to sit down and wait for the end. Sanders loaded a pressure cooker into a 1946 Ford and drove round America frying chicken for anyone who’d let him near a kitchen. By 1964, at the age of 73, he had signed up more than 600 franchised outlets and sold the business for two million dollars. The white suit came later.
Or Mary Wesley, who published her first grown-up novel, Jumping the Queue, in 1983, at the age of 70. Widowed, nearly penniless, cut out of her own parents’ wills for the crime of marrying the wrong man. At seventy, she then produced ten bestsellers and shifted three million books before she died. Seventy. Most people at seventy accept that they’ve earned the right to argue with a self-service checkout and call it a full day. Mary Wesley invented a whole new career.
The Bit They Leave Off the Motivational Poster
Here’s the part the fridge magnets skip. The same line of research found fresh starts can backfire. Set the bar too high, promise yourself the ‘New You’ will meditate, run, learn Mandarin and become a nicer human by February, and you walk straight into something psychologists call false hope syndrome. The ‘New Me’ feels invincible. The ‘New Me’ overestimates its willpower and quietly forgets that the old kitchen, the old commute and the old habits will all still be sitting there on day two, exactly where you left them.
Because that’s the catch missing from the motivational poster. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. You can move to a different town, change your name, buy the running trainers in a bolder colour, and on the far side of all of it sits the same person carrying the same worries, albeit better dressed. Expecting a new postcode to fix you is a bit like repainting the car and expecting it to sail through its MOT. I’ve written before about the roads not taken, and the version of me who stayed in the property business and drives something German and expensive; the honest truth is he’d still be me, but with higher insurance premiums.
Starting over, then, isn’t a factory reset. It’s redecorating a house you still have to live in, while the neighbours watch through the window and the boiler continues to make that deathly groaning sound whenever you take a shower.
The Kind of Starting Over That Actually Sticks
So maybe the honest answer to whether you can ever really start over is: not the way the adverts promise. There’s no blank page. Nobody hands you one. What you have is the next page, with every previous chapter still firmly attached, typos and all.
There’s a gentler version that genuinely works, though, and it’s the one the fresh-start research quietly points at. Not becoming someone else. Becoming more yourself, minus a few things you’d outgrown. Sanders didn’t reinvent himself at 65; he finally backed the one thing he’d always been good at. Mary Wesley didn’t magically transform into a novelist at 70; she just stopped waiting for permission to write like one.
That’s the trick, I think. You can’t outrun yourself. You can absolutely stop apologising for the bits worth keeping, and put down the bits that have been quietly ruining your posture for years. Same person. Better balance. It’s a good deal less romantic than a clean slate, and it has one enormous advantage over most New Year’s resolutions: it survives contact with February.
Where My Novels Come Into It
If the whole business of starting over, second chances and the person you might have become given one clean shot at it is your kind of question, it runs right through my books.
In The ’86 Fix, Craig Pelling lands exactly the do-over most of us fantasise about: a weekend back in 1986 to repair the life he wishes he’d led, with consequences not remotely on the menu he ordered from. The Last Stop Video Shop hands Kevin Kershaw, divorced and quietly running out of road on the wrong side of fifty, a VHS tape of a memory that never happened, and a choice about whether to keep replaying his life or press eject. And in In Lieu of You, Gary Kirk travels back to 1996 to un-meet the wife he’s about to divorce, only to learn the life you didn’t live might not be the upgrade you’d assumed.
Three ordinary blokes, three second chances, and not a single clean slate between them. Funny how that keeps happening.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you ever really start over in life?
Not in the clean-slate sense the adverts sell. You can’t delete your past or leave yourself behind at the county line. What you can do is change direction, drop the habits you’ve outgrown and build on the parts worth keeping. It’s less a factory reset and more a thoughtful redecoration of a house you still have to live in.
What is the fresh start effect?
It’s a term coined by researchers Katy Milkman, Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis for the surge of motivation people feel around temporal landmarks: the start of a week, a new month, a birthday or the New Year. One study found people 33% more likely to exercise at the start of a week and 47% more likely at the start of a new semester. The clean mental line between “old me” and “new me” makes fresh goals feel more achievable.
Is it too late to start over at 50, 60 or 70?
The evidence says no. Colonel Sanders franchised KFC at 65 after his restaurant failed, working from a $105 Social Security cheque. Mary Wesley published her first major novel at 70 and went on to write ten bestsellers. Reinvention tends to reward stubbornness far more than youth.
Why do so many fresh starts fail?
Often because of what psychologists call false hope syndrome: we set too many goals, aim unrealistically high and overestimate our willpower, while forgetting that the old environment and habits are still there the next morning. The fresh starts that succeed tend to be smaller, more specific and built around who you already are rather than a fantasy replacement.
Do Keith A Pearson’s novels explore starting over?
Frequently. The ’86 Fix, The Last Stop Video Shop and In Lieu of You all hand ordinary people a second chance at a life they’d change if they could, then explore what actually happens when they take it. The clean slate, it turns out, is rarely as clean as anyone hopes.