Why we should keep doing things later in life even when we have no idea what we’re doing
People say you never forget your first time. That sounds romantic, but it isn’t always true. I don’t remember my first dentist appointment, for example. Or the first tax return I ever filled out. My brain has probably erased a few items out of self‑preservation.
Other firsts do stick: the first kiss, the first job, the first apartment, the first solo trip. And of course the first time you pretended in a meeting that you’d followed the complicated presentation.
Firsts are part of life—at least at the beginning. Later, they mysteriously show up less often.
At some point, we know the script
At twenty, almost everything is new: work, relationships, cities, mistakes. You wake up in the morning and have no idea whether by evening you’ll have a new job, a new love, or at least a new haircut.
At fifty, you often know how the day will go before it starts.
You know the route to the supermarket. At the restaurant you order the dish you always order.
You vacation in a place where you already know which lounge chair by the pool wobbles the least. That’s pleasant. Experience is a wonderful thing, after all.
It keeps us from overanalyzing every message, buying every special offer, and assuming a man is mysterious just because he doesn’t say much.
Experience makes life easier. It can also make it quite predictable.
The trouble with the comfort zone
The comfort zone has a bad reputation. In truth, it’s wonderful. It’s warm, it knows our Wi-Fi password, and our favorite shoes live there.
So why leave it?
Because over time it can shrink to a surprising degree. Not suddenly—gradually. First we stop driving at night. Then we avoid unfamiliar cities. Then we stop going alone. Eventually we even avoid a new gym because no one there knows that we are, in fact, highly competent people.
New things are uncomfortable because they turn us back into beginners. And beginners can’t do things.
You fall off the surfboard. In an online course you click the wrong button. At the pottery wheel you can’t fathom why the vase has once again turned into an ashtray.
Adult women are used to having things under control. We run projects, families, companies, doctor’s appointments, birthdays—and, if necessary, other people’s lives. Then suddenly we’re standing on a paddleboard and don’t even know which way the paddle is supposed to face.
Humbling. And oddly liberating.
The first time after the first life
Maybe we need a new category later in life: the first time after the first life. The first time eating out alone, traveling to an unfamiliar place, or dancing at a concert while everyone your age is still glued to their seats. The first time surfing, quitting, founding something, or saying out loud:
“I don’t want this anymore.” And maybe even more important: “This is what I want now.”
Not every first has to be spectacular. We don’t have to jump out of a plane, emigrate to Peru, or launch a career as a DJ—though there would be nothing fundamentally wrong with the last one. Sometimes it’s enough to go to the movies alone, take a class where you don’t know anyone, or walk up to a woman who seems interesting.
What matters isn’t the size of the plan. What matters is that brief jolt when your brain notes, slightly alarmed: This isn’t what we usually do.
“Too old” often just means “not good yet”
Of course, starting something new doesn’t always feel fantastic. Many firsts are a mix of euphoria, mild panic, and the thought that maybe you could sneak back home unnoticed. That’s precisely their value: when you do something for the first time, you can’t just run on autopilot. You have to watch, ask, try things, improvise.
The sentence “I’m too old for this” sounds reasonable. Often it simply means: I would rather not be bad at something again. Adult women have spent a lot of time becoming competent. Voluntarily returning to a state where you don’t even know how to turn the device on doesn’t sound appealing at first.
Maybe it isn’t too late to start a business—you’ll just do it with more experience and far less patience for being lectured on entrepreneurship by a man with a podcast microphone. And maybe it isn’t too late to fall in love again either. You’ve simply learned by now that emotional unavailability is not an intriguing personality trait.
Experience doesn’t make a fresh start impossible. It makes it less naive—and often much more interesting.
A list without an expiration date
We keep lists for everything: groceries, tasks, travel packing, passwords, and the books we’ll get to someday. Maybe we need another one—a list of firsts still ahead of us.
Not as an optimized bucket list with performance pressure. No one has to visit ten countries in ten months before the knee officially gives out. It’s also not about turning every weekend into a personal development project. Sometimes a Sunday on the sofa is a perfectly sensible decision.
The list is only there to remind us that life doesn’t have to be a loop of reruns.
What have you always wanted to try? Where would you actually like to be a beginner again? And when was the last time you did something without knowing in advance that you could do it?
The list of firsts doesn’t end at 25. If anything, it may get better later on: less shaped by expectations, less focused on appearances, and much closer to what we actually want to experience. You just have to add something new now and then.