LA is the city of reinvention

Ask anyone what comes to mind when they think of Los Angeles, and they’ll probably say something about people chasing their dreams. But the real virtue of this city might be our willingness to let people give them up. 

While other places may see a change in direction as the consequence of failure, Los Angeles sees reinvention. It’s what happens when you live with enough openness to let life surprise you. And I can’t imagine any other way to live. 

Growing up in the Midwest, I was always taught that successful people have a plan for their lives. At some point, I started hearing a lot about the “five-year plan.” Or even more terrifying, the 10-year plan.

Both strike me as an unsettling number of years over which to presume you have any control.

But I didn’t see many alternatives to this mindset until I moved here nine years ago and started seeing them everywhere. 

Allow me to tell a very LA story. 

This year my gym closed. It was a special place, a small business run by a performance coach who was also a DJ, and he had a DJ booth set up in the gym. It had a cult following of people who were disappointed by the closure. When I saw him at an event, I asked what happened.

Leaning against a bar on a hotel rooftop, he sipped a drink and sighed theatrically. “Mary, do you know how much work it is to run a business?”

While my midwestern mind assumed the gym was failing, the truth was just that he was tired of running it. 

At 40, he decided he would rather be a DJ for a while. 

I told you it was a very LA story. 

In the suburbs of Chicago where I grew up, people were a lot less likely to become a DJ at any age. Many people chose a career and stuck with it. My brother continues to work at the same company where he started after college. My sister has been in the same industry for years. 

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I can’t help suspecting that if my gym owner lived in Illinois rather than Los Angeles, he might have spent another 10 years running a business he no longer enjoyed, held captive by the idea that quitting something, even voluntarily, amounted to failure.

Commitment and perseverance are virtues, and I don’t mean to throw them out completely. The trouble is that they can become masks we wear to please other people. And we can hide behind these virtues, forgetting that refusal to change is a vice. 

In Los Angeles, reinvention is an ordinary feature of life, almost an inevitability. Spending 20 years doing the same thing can look like a failure of imagination. Where other places might see commitment, we might question whether that person is really growing. 

In my mid-20s, I committed pretty hard. I went to graduate school for secondary education and became a high school English teacher, thinking this would be my whole career. After just two years, I already felt that my soul had left my body. After three, I quit. 

No one east of Los Angeles thought that was a good idea. 

At first I did feel like a failure. But driving north from Pico Union into Hollywood, I watched the palm trees sway over the streets, the mountains hazy in the distance. And I felt a vague sense of possibility. 

It sounds painfully cheesy, but it was the city itself that comforted me.

Some people think it’s the weather that makes us crave novelty. Unlike the Midwest where you hunker down against the cold, Los Angeles offers endless summer and with it, a feeling that life is always just beginning. 

But I think it goes deeper. Long before Hollywood, Los Angeles attracted people looking for a second chance. Failed Gold Rush prospectors drifted south from San Francisco, joining bankrupt speculators, drifters and debtors in a frontier city where reputations could be shed and identities remade.

Before reinvention became glamorous, it was simply what people came here to do. 

The entertainment industry turned that old impulse into a mythology. We love a star with a second act. And that spirit trickles down to the rest of us, even lowly teachers who have no intention of becoming movie stars.

Of course, reinvention isn’t always a luxury people can afford. There are mortgages to pay, children to raise, and all sorts of practical reasons to remain where we are. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone ought to abandon their careers and become a DJ.

But we do live on the forever-shifting edge of the continent. And it’s worth saying.

You never know what might happen next. 

Mary Dahm is a writer and medical technology publicist based in Los Angeles.