Why We Keep Starting Over

There’s a strange comfort in beginning again.In rewriting goals, changing cities, opening yet another blank notebook even though the last one still has empty pages. We treat “new beginnings” like small lifelines, as if each fresh start might finally reveal the version of ourselves we’ve been trying to reach.

And maybe that’s the truth behind it:we keep starting over because we’re still trying to understand what it means to be here at all.

Humans don’t move in straight lines.

We move in loops, returning to old questions with new eyes, revisiting dreams that once felt impossible, rediscovering desires we thought we outgrew.

We shed versions of ourselves the way seasons shift, quietly, without warning.

And every time we feel the slightest disconnect from the life we’re living, our instinct is to begin again, hoping the next attempt will feel more like us.

It’s not restlessness.It’s meaning-seeking.

The search for coherence:

Why am I here?

What does a good life look like?

Why does having “everything” still leave a quiet ache?

We chase new jobs, new cities, new faces, not because we’re ungrateful, but because part of the human experience is the need to expand. To grow out of our own skin.

To outgrow even the dreams that once held us together.

We don’t start over because our old life was wrong; we start over because we’re evolving faster than we can explain.

There is psychology behind this:our brains anchor growth to moments of “beginning.”

A clean slate tells the mind, this time you can be different. It signals possibility.

It makes change feel real, even if the change is still internal and unfinished.

And maybe that’s why we crave it, the thrill of the unmarked page, the anonymity of a new city, the daring idea that you can reinvent your life simply by deciding to.

But beneath all of that lives a deeper truth:

We start over because we are searching for a life that feels undeniably ours.

One that matches our inner world.One that makes sense of the longing we carry.One where the days don’t just pass, they mean something.

So we try again.And again.

Not because we’re lost, but because we’re alive enough to want more.

Because every beginning holds a quiet promise: somewhere in the next version of ourselves, clarity is waiting.