Fitzgerald wasn't merely lamenting that Americans get only one chance—he was diagnosing a peculiar cultural impatience, a hunger for novelty that makes us discard our former selves rather than build upon them. We don't gracefully age into new chapters; we scrap the manuscript and start fresh, whether by changing careers at forty, reinventing our image on social media, or abandoning old friends when we move to a new city. A banker who becomes a novelist isn't continuing a story—he's erasing the first act entirely, unable to imagine how his ledgers might have prepared him for fiction. The tragedy isn't that life offers limited opportunities, but that we've constructed a society where redemption and growth require amnesia.