How many professional lives should we be expected to live?

It’s not especially fashionable to talk about getting older in relation to our working lives.

We’re encouraged to celebrate experience, of course. Years of it, preferably. Decades, even. Just not necessarily to draw attention to the corresponding age of the person who accumulated it.

But in June, I turned 42.

And since Douglas Adams famously identified 42 as the answer to life, the universe and everything, it seemed worth taking stock.

I regret to inform you that I still have questions.

One of them is this: how many professional lives should we now expect to have?

I spent roughly the first 10 years of my career working in magazine journalism, and the next 10 in the charity sector.

Two decades. Two industries. Both of which looked reasonably stable when I entered them and considerably less so by the time I’d settled in.

Since taking redundancy in 2024, I’ve found myself wondering whether a third chapter is approaching.

Not because I’m desperate to leave the work I do now. I’m not. But because I’m increasingly unsure that any of us can assume the kind of work we do today will still exist, in recognisable form, 10 years from now.

The model of working life I grew up with looked very different.

My dad had two jobs in a career that lasted the best part of 40 years. Not two industries, or two professional identities. Two employers.

I don’t think I ever consciously expected to replicate that. Jobs for life were already disappearing by the time I entered the workforce in 2007.

But I’m not sure I expected the alternative to involve quite so much uncertainty either.

Almost everyone I know has experienced, or come uncomfortably close to, redundancy in recent years. We’ve been restructured, outsourced, made redundant, rehired, made redundant again, or watched our jobs quietly absorb the responsibilities of several others.

Even those of us who are currently employed seem to carry a low-level awareness that the ground beneath modern working life is less solid than it once appeared.

Perhaps the biggest difference isn’t that we expect to change jobs.

It’s that we increasingly expect to have to change who we are professionally.

And I’m not sure previous generations spent quite so much of their working lives wondering what they might have to become next.

For a long time, I found the idea of transferable skills reassuring.

I still do, to an extent.

I’ve changed industries once already. I know that the things I learned in magazines came with me when I moved into charities: understanding audiences, finding the human story underneath the noise, shaping narratives, communicating emotion, building trust.

In some ways, I’ve spent the last 10 years proving to myself that reinvention is possible.

But more recently I’ve started wondering about the phrase itself.

Transferable to where, exactly?

Because adaptability is only useful if there’s somewhere to adapt to.

Many of the industries that have traditionally employed people with skills like mine are themselves under pressure. Publishing. Media. Charities. The arts. The creative industries more broadly.

Teams are shrinking. Budgets are tighter. Content is increasingly abundant and cheap to produce. AI is changing the perceived value of some forms of creative work before any of us fully understand where that process ends.

Twenty years into my career, I know what I’m good at.

I can understand audiences. Find the human story underneath a complicated subject. Work out what matters and what doesn’t. Turn ambiguity into something people can understand. Make people care.

I’m better at those things than I was at 22. Considerably better.

But are those skills meaningfully transferable into the parts of the economy where jobs are actually growing?

I don’t know.

And I suspect that question is sitting quietly underneath the working lives of a lot of experienced people at the moment.

Not “what do I want to be when I grow up?”

Not even “what should I do next?”

But something more unsettling.

Where do the things I’m good at still have value?

There’s a strange expectation that by midlife, we’ll have certainty in our lives.

We’ll know who we are. What we do. Where we belong professionally.

Instead, I increasingly think many of us have gathered decades of experience without necessarily gathering any kind of security.

At 42, I’m better at my job than I’ve ever been. I understand more about people, about work, about what I value and what I’m willing to tolerate.

And yet I’m less certain than I was at 22 about what the next 20 years of my working life might look like.

Maybe this is simply what modern careers are now.

Less like ladders and more like a series of temporary professional hats we wear until the world shifts beneath us again.

I don’t know whether I’m approaching a third professional chapter, or simply becoming more aware of how provisional most careers have become.

Every time I’ve changed direction so far, I’ve carried more of my previous working life with me than I expected.

Skills, certainly. But also instincts, relationships, ways of seeing people and understanding what matters to them.

Perhaps there’s some comfort in that.

The jobs change. Industries contract. New tech arrives. The language we use to describe what we do becomes old fashioned and is replaced by something else.

But we're not starting again from scratch every time.

We carry the previous versions of ourselves with us.

Which isn’t quite the answer to life, the universe and everything.

But at 42, it’s the best one I have.