Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to Multiple Lives Theory, a place for anyone who has ever wondered: “How many lives can I live within this lifetime?”
I write about unlived lives, identity, reinvention, and what happens when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits.
I’m writing from Japan at the moment, living as a digital nomad. A new essay lands every Sunday.
The short version: a pull toward my old life tells me what that life used to give me. It tells me less than I feared about where I’m meant to be.
I finish a project and I’m hungrier for the next one.
That part makes sense to me. It’s close to how I’m built.
The part that doesn’t make sense is what comes a little later.
I was walking through Sakae on my way to the gym, noticing the energy around me. It felt focused and responsible, calm and steady.
Maybe it was the sun, or maybe it was just how I was feeling that day. Whatever it was, it set off a wave of FOMO, and I started thinking about going back to a 9-5 and working for a company in Japan. I wanted the feeling of being needed again.
Valued, specifically, by an organisation, with a team and a title and a reason someone would notice if I wasn’t there.
Which is slightly ridiculous, because I left my corporate job in 2025 to build something else.
I’m living in Japan, working for myself — doing the thing I said I wanted. And in the middle of it, part of me was looking at other people’s ordinary working days and wanting one.
I didn’t do anything about it. I let it visit for a bit, went to the gym and focused on my workout, and somewhere in there I realised it was a fleeting thought.
I’ve tried a few explanations for why this happens. Maybe it’s FOMO, which would be unflattering but fair. Maybe I just want a quick hit of someone telling me I did a good job. I’ve gone back and forth between the two and neither one fully settles it.
What I have noticed is that the pull doesn’t come alone. The hunger for the next project, the wish to be needed and the attraction to that steady, responsible energy all seem to arrive from the same place.
I think of her as the career-builder. She didn’t leave when I did.
She’s still wanting the next thing, still wanting someone to notice she finished the last one, and still wanting a life that looks as settled as the one I was walking past.
She just doesn’t have an office to do it in anymore.
For years she ran most of my life. I chased promotions.
I worked out that changing companies doubled the salary faster than climbing one ladder did. I measured a day by what I produced in it. I’m not saying that to run her down. She was good at it, and she got me a long way.
What’s changed is that I can see her wanting things now. On that walk the pull arrived, I recognised it as a pull, I let it sit, and then I went and trained. She clearly hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s just someone else in the room now, watching her want things, and that someone has a bit more say than she used to.
The one who wants it and the one who notices it are both me. I find that more interesting than I expected. I just hadn’t thought of it as something that could happen on a walk to the gym.
There’s another version of me in here, and she’s the one I used to hate.
She isn’t the career-builder, exactly. She’s the one who made decisions in her twenties so she’d be seen. Chasing a promotion, chasing a status, doing things to prove to herself she could. I hated her for those decisions, and for the ones she didn’t make.
I still care about my career. It just looks different now.
It’s more playful, more aligned, and there’s more flow in it than there used to be.
And I don’t hate her anymore. I think that’s why the pull can get to me at all. If I still hated her, anything from her old life would be easy to dismiss, because I’d have every reason to want nothing to do with it.
Now that I don’t, the pull gets to sound fairly convincing. It’s also how I know I’m still outgrowing her, and not finished yet.
I only started feeling the pull toward that life once I stopped hating who I was in it.
For a long time I was rewarded in a particular way. Being relied on. Being the person people came to. A promotion, a bigger number, a title I could say out loud. The new life doesn’t hand that out the same way.
Nobody promotes you for finishing your own project, and nobody notices a good week unless you tell them. So when the hunger arrives after something’s done, my guess is that it goes looking for what I used to get, and the only place it knows to look is the old life.
That might also be why watching other people work sets it off, even though I couldn’t tell you a single thing about their actual jobs.
The steady part is harder to look at. In the old life, finishing something usually led somewhere visible. A review, a next role, a conversation about what came after. Now I finish something and the next thing is whatever I decide it is. I wanted that. It’s also less settled than I’m used to, so on a bright day, with a lot of calm, responsible energy around me, the old way of working looks attractive.
The easy way to read the pull is as a verdict on the new life, as if wanting the old thing means I made a mistake.
I try to read it as information instead. It doesn’t have to tell me what to do next.
When it gets loud, I remind myself that going back to a 9-5 right now would feel like going backwards.
I don’t think a 9-5 is a bad life, and if I ended up in one again that would be fine. It just isn’t what I want at the moment.
What I want is to live as a digital nomad, which is the thing I’m actually doing. I have more to say about going back, but that’s a different essay.
When I pulled mine apart, it turned out to be three requests arriving together:
To be needed. The old reward: being relied on, being the person people came to.
To look steady. The calm, responsible energy I walked past in Sakae.
To have something next. The hunger that shows up after a project ends.
Because they turn up together, they feel like one big request to go back. I’m not sure they are. Each one might have a smaller answer that doesn’t involve undoing anything.
Three questions I’m asking the next time it shows up:
What is it actually asking for? Being needed, looking steady, something next, or something I haven’t named yet.
Can the life I’m building give me some of that without going back? Even a small amount counts.
Is it still there once I’ve moved on to something else? In Sakae, by the time I was training, it had gone. If it keeps coming back, that’s worth paying attention to.
If you’re somewhere in this yourself, rebuilding after a life you’d already built, or starting again when the old one still fits on paper, I’d guess some version of this has shown up for you. It might have been a friend’s promotion, someone’s calm Monday, or a job ad you didn’t plan to open.
I don’t think it means you’re doing it wrong. It might just mean you’ve stopped hating the person you were when you had that life.
I still don’t know whether mine is FOMO or a quick hit of feeling valued. Some days it feels like one and some days the other, and I’m not convinced the difference matters as much as I’d like it to.
If you’ve felt the same pull, what do you think yours was asking for?
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Being self-employed means often sitting with yourself and your own decisions, which means you end up having to applaud yourself when nobody else will. You've got this Katie!