The Fresh Start Archives - understand-culture

The Platonic Conception of Himself

In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald explains where Jay Gatsby came from. “James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career.”

His parents were farm people, “shiftless and unsuccessful.” Fitzgerald writes that Gatsby’s imagination “had never really accepted them as his parents at all.” Then he gives the line that readers remember: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”

Go West, Young Man

“Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” The advice is often credited to the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Nobody has proven who first used the phrase in print.

One story names John B. L. Soule and an 1851 editorial in the Terre Haute Express. The phrase does not appear in any 1851 edition of that paper, and the Soule story goes back to a satirical account from 1890. Greeley himself denied giving the advice.

Fewer Americans Move

In 1948, the first year the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey asked the question, 20.2 percent of Americans had moved in the past year. In 2021 the figure was 8.4 percent. The Census Bureau called it “a new historical low.”

The share of Americans who move each year has fallen by more than half.

Almost Thirteen Jobs

Since 1979, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey has followed the same group of Americans. When first interviewed, the 9,964 men and women were ages 14 to 22. By age 58, they had held an average of 12.9 jobs. For the survey, a job is “an uninterrupted period of work with a particular employer.”

Much of the changing happened early. Over 40 percent of these jobs were held from ages 18 to 24.

Two Weeks’ Notice

An American who quits a job is expected to give two weeks’ notice. Yet in most cases no law requires it. The employment nonprofit Legal Aid at Work says “there is no legal requirement that you do so.”

The custom rests on other reasons. Minnesota’s labor department says: “Courtesy and time to collect accrued benefits are reasons why notice is given.”

No Second Acts

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” The line comes from his working notes for The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, after his death. Americans often quote it only to disprove it. In 2013, NPR used it in a report on politicians who had “fallen from grace only to rise again and disprove the line”: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford.

Fitzgerald had used the phrase earlier, around 1932, in the essay “My Lost City.” There he wrote: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”

The First Company Failed

Henry J. Heinz started a company that bottled horseradish. It went bankrupt in 1875. The next year he founded another company with his brother and a cousin.

Henry Ford’s first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went out of business in January 1901 because “it offered a poor vehicle.” His second company became Cadillac after he left. He founded Ford Motor Company in June 1903.

Walt Disney’s animation studio in Kansas City, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in 1923. He moved to California “for a new start.” Milton Hershey’s first candy business went bankrupt in 1882. His second, in New York, also failed. In 1900 he sold his third, the Lancaster Caramel Company, for $1 million.

A Clear Field for Future Effort

In 1934 the Supreme Court explained what personal bankruptcy is for. In Local Loan Co. v. Hunt, it said that bankruptcy gives “the honest but unfortunate debtor” a “new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of pre-existing debt.”

The federal courts still describe it in the same terms: “Bankruptcy can provide a fresh financial start for consumers who cannot pay their debts…” In 2025, Americans filed 540,603 consumer bankruptcy cases.

At-will employment

The default rule across almost all US states is that either party may end the employment relationship at any time, for any reason that is not illegal, without notice. Whatever else it does, it makes staffing decisions fast. A manager who wants to change a team can change it this week.

The career change

Americans change fields, not only employers, and the career-change is a recognised genre with its own advice literature, bootcamps and retraining programmes. Arriving from outside a field is treated as a credential of adaptability.