I have begun to distrust people who say they planned their lives.
Not because they are dishonest. Memory has an extraordinary talent for editing chaos into strategy. Looking backwards, our lives begin to resemble carefully laid plans. Looking forwards, they never did.
Middle age performs a rather inconvenient service. It gently dismantles the comforting fiction that we were always in charge.
Think about your own life for a moment.
Did you really know, at twenty-one, where you would eventually live? Did you know which city would become home, which profession would define you or which people would quietly become indispensable? Most of us did not. The job that shaped us probably started as a temporary assignment. The city we reluctantly moved to became the place we never wished to leave. A dinner we almost declined introduced us to someone who altered the direction of our lives. A delayed flight produced a conversation that lasted far longer than the delay itself. A book picked up absent-mindedly at an airport stayed with us for decades.
Looking backwards, life resembles less like a carefully written business plan than a remarkable collection of fortunate interruptions.
Perhaps that is why middle age slowly changes the way we think about certainty.
When we are younger, we believe successful people make better plans. Somewhere after forty, we begin to suspect they also recognised better accidents.
The older I become, the less convinced I am that the important moments in life announce themselves properly. They rarely appear wearing significance. They look surprisingly ordinary at the time. They appear as a wrong turn, a cancelled meeting, an unexpected transfer, a stranger sitting beside us on a train or a friend insisting that we attend an event we had every intention of avoiding.
Life has always possessed a mischievous habit of hiding its biggest decisions inside its smallest moments.
That may explain why the stories middle-aged people tell at reunions rarely begin with, “According to my five-year plan…” They begin with, “You’ll never believe what happened…” Somewhere deep down, we know that the architecture of our lives was often designed by interruption rather than intention.
Yet, modern life seems increasingly uncomfortable with that possibility.
We plan holidays with military precision. Restaurants are chosen after reading hundreds of reviews. We know the fastest route before starting the car. Books arrive recommended before we even know they exist. Music finds us before we search for it. Professional networking has become deliberate rather than accidental. Even leisure tours increasingly arrive with an itinerary.
There is obvious wisdom in much of this. Progress has made life easier, safer and infinitely more convenient. Few sensible people would exchange digital maps for unfolding paper atlases on the bonnet of a car, or spend an afternoon wandering through a city simply because they took the wrong exit.
The question is whether, in removing so much uncertainty from our lives, we have also removed some of the quiet spaces where surprise once lived.
We compare, verify, rate and research almost everything before committing ourselves. Somewhere between caution and convenience, we have developed an understandable desire to minimise uncertainty. It has made us more informed consumers and more efficient decision-makers. I only wonder whether it has also made us slightly less willing to leave room for the unexpected.
Middle-aged Indians probably belong to the last generation that remembers wandering without feeling unproductive. We entered bookshops not always looking for a particular title. We spent entire afternoons in libraries because we had nowhere urgent to be. We discovered locations because we were lost, not because somebody had rated them 4.8 stars. We met people because another friend said, “Come along,” not because an app concluded we shared similar interests.
None of those experiences could have been scheduled.
That was precisely their charm.
Looking back, it is striking how many of the people who mattered most entered our lives without an appointment. Mentors rarely appeared because we searched for one. Neighbours became family because proximity quietly became affection. Some of our best conversations happened because somebody had time to waste rather than time to optimise.
There is an old temptation, particularly among people of my generation, to romanticise those years. We should resist it. Every generation imagines its youth possessed a special authenticity. Most are mistaken.
What is different today is not that life has become less interesting.
It is that we increasingly expect it to become more predictable.
Perhaps that is why the word “serendipity” itself has begun to sound slightly old-fashioned. It belongs to an age when people accepted that some of life’s finest discoveries arrived uninvited. Today, we are encouraged to believe that the best restaurant, the best investment, the best career move and perhaps even the best relationship can all be identified in advance, provided we gather enough information.
Middle age quietly argues otherwise.
It reminds us that the people who shaped us were often the ones we were never looking for. The opportunities that transformed us rarely appeared at the right time. The conversations we remember most were almost never on the agenda.
Life is the only project whose most successful outcomes were often never part of the original plan.
Or perhaps, more truthfully, the finest chapters of our lives were written by circumstances that never consulted us.
We speak a great deal about life choices.
Middle age introduces another idea.
Life chances.
The train we almost missed.
The invitation we almost declined.
The transfer we initially resented.
The neighbour who became family.
The colleague who became a business partner.
The stranger who became a spouse.
The book we picked up only because the one we wanted had sold out.
They are our lives.
We spend our youth believing life rewards those who make the best decisions. Middle age introduces a gentler possibility. Perhaps life has always rewarded those who remained open to the unexpected ones.
Progress should continue making life easier. We should welcome every invention that saves time, reduces friction and expands opportunity. But perhaps we should also leave a few afternoons unscheduled, occasionally take the longer route, accept an invitation that doesn’t fit neatly into the calendar and remain open to conversations whose purpose is not immediately obvious.
The most important moments of our lives usually arrive looking like ordinary days.
Only years later do we recognise them as the days on which everything quietly changed.
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