#196 – 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age with Chip Conley

Wes Moss [00:01:33]:
The prevailing thought in America is that you’ll never have enough money, and it’s almost impossible to retire early. Actually, I think the opposite is true. For more than 20 years, I’ve been researching, studying, and advising american families, including those who started late, on how to retire sooner and happier. So my mission with the retire sooner podcast is to help a million people retire earlier while enjoying the adventure along the way. I’d love for you to be one of them. Let’s get started. So I’m in this stage? You’re in this stage. I would say.

Wes Moss [00:02:08]:
I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s got to be almost 50% of America has got to be in this midlife stage. And you give a pretty broad definition of midlife. What’s the age of midlife?

Chip Conley [00:02:19]:
So abstractly thinking. Midlife is in between early adulthood and later adulthood. That makes sense. So the question then is, what are the years? Sociologists suggest it’s 35 to 75, because people are living longer. And I think if that’s true, there’s probably three stages to midlife. There’s 35 to 50, which is early midlife, 50 to 60, which is the core of midlife, and then 60 to 75, which is later midlife. And as I write about in the book, there’s a different prescription and mindset you might have in each of those phases of midlife.

Wes Moss [00:02:55]:
So really three phases while we’re in that, as you say, the chrysalis.

Chip Conley [00:03:00]:
That’s right.

Wes Moss [00:03:00]:
I think it’s important to start out with the branding of midlife, which is amazing that such a giant part of the demographics and of society got branded with the word crisis. First of all, what happened there and what happened with midlife?

Chip Conley [00:03:17]:
Yeah, there’s three life stages that sort of emerged in the 20th century. Adolescence didn’t exist until 19, four, when the word was created. And all of a sudden, we thought about teenagers as a life stage. Not, you don’t hit adulthood at puberty. You actually hit adulthood at 18. Retiree became a big deal in the 1930s and beyond. And so the third life stage is midlife. But it really came into existence partly because we lived longer.

Chip Conley [00:03:45]:
In the year 1900, the average person lived till 47. In the year 2000, it was 77. So a lot of that additional longevity was in midlife. But all midlife got was a bad brand in 1965, when a canadian psychologist coined the term midlife crisis. And quite frankly, it was a tiny little white paper that he wrote about it in, but it just sort of, like, blew up. And ever since then, midlife has had the worst brand of any life stage. And I like to call it not the midlife crisis, but the midlife chrysalis. And the reason I say that is because the u curve of happiness research shows that people’s life satisfaction does decline from their early mid 20s till their late forty s.

Chip Conley [00:04:25]:
And then with each decade after age 50, you get happier. So there’s basically a U curve with the low point being 45 to 50, if that’s true. What if actually midlife is not a crisis, but it’s a chrysalis? It’s this sort of dark, gooey, solitary time, just like the time between the caterpillar and the butterfly. When you’re going through a lot, you’re liquefying and you’re transforming. And the u curve of happiness. Social science research suggests that’s the case, because if people get happier after 50, they’ve made it through the chrysalis. They’re the butterfly coming out of that cocoon.

Wes Moss [00:05:02]:
So if we go back to the quintessential midlife crisis, what did that psychologist talk about? And then what unfolded to continue to have us think that there’s something wrong with midlife.

Chip Conley [00:05:13]:
Well, let’s be clear. Midlife was sort of a new life stage. Not many people knew what to make of it. This psychologist wrote about the fact that he focused exclusively on men. So his initial study was purely on men. He tended to focus on just a small number of men. And he found that what was going on for them in their early to mid 40s was they were starting to be dissatisfied with how rigid their life had become. They wanted to be an adolescent again.

Chip Conley [00:05:42]:
They didn’t want to be a middleescent. Middlescence is the middle of your life when you’re going through all kinds of changes. They wanted to be an adolescent, and so people would act out. And the midlife crisis became the thing known as, like, oh, go buy the red sports car at 45 and have an affair. That was the primary way that this got packaged. Yes, there are a lot of good examples. Movies like Kevin Spacey and American Beauty, bought the red car, had an affair with his daughter’s best friend in high school. The truth is, most people don’t have that kind of crisis.

Chip Conley [00:06:21]:
Most people actually have a series of things going on, often in their mid 40s, that wake them up and frustrate the hell out of them. It could be everything from the fact that they’re in the sandwich generation taking care of their aging parents and their kids at the same time. It could be the fact that they had a bunch of expectations of how their life was going to be at this point, and it’s not living up to that. It could be the fact that their body is starting to fall apart and they’re starting to have some evidence of mortality based upon older people in their life who are passing away. Brene Brown. Brene Brown, a famous sociologist, a friend, she said to me, chip, I love the fact you’re focusing on midlife, but just remember, it’s an unraveling. And I said to her, brene, no one wants to unravel. You think that’s a good thing? And she said, chip, when you hear someone unravel, it sounds like they’ve lost their mind.

Chip Conley [00:07:15]:
So she said, no, chip, look in the dictionary under the word ravel, and you will see that something that’s raveled is so tightly wound, you can’t get it undone. And what she was really speaking to is the idea that in your mid forty s and maybe up to your mid 50s, sort of that range, you start to actually make sense of, like, what in the hell am I doing? What’s important to me, what gives me meaning? Why do I care so much about what other people think about me? What’s getting better in my life and not getting so fixated on the fact that you got a little bit of a pot belly coming sort of starting to form? And that’s part of the reason I created MeA, the modern elder academy, because I wanted to create a midlife wisdom school that helped people to reimagine and repurpose themselves and understand what gets better with life, with age. Because that’s the subtitle of the book, twelve reasons why life gets better with age.

Wes Moss [00:08:07]:
So I want to talk about Mea, and I feel like I want to go to mea. Come on, I’m your target demo here.

Chip Conley [00:08:13]:
Yes, you are.

Wes Moss [00:08:13]:
Was it a particular event that got you really interested in this because you had this super successful career? And then what happened for you to really think about this moment in time?

Chip Conley [00:08:25]:
So my background was when I was 26, I started a boutique hotel company, one of the first in the US. We were based in San Francisco. The company was called Joa de Viv, means joy of life in French. And over the next 24 years, we created 52 boutique hotels around California. I loved that until I hated it in my late 40s, when I had been doing it for 22 years, everything that could go wrong went wrong, not just in the company. The great Recession came along, and we were in a lot of trouble, and I was running out of cash. I had an adult foster son, a foster son who was an adult at that point who had a serious crime he was dealing with. He was in court.

Chip Conley [00:09:10]:
I had a long term relationship ending. I had five male friends aged 42 to 52 commit suicide between 2008 and 2010. So it was a bad time. And then I had an NDE. I had a near death experience where I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic. And so I died nine times over 90 minutes. So long story short is like, oh, my God, everything. I was having a midlife crisis for sure.

Chip Conley [00:09:37]:
And I got through it, and I made some major changes in my life. I edited a bunch of things. I now call it the Great Midlife edit. I edited things that just weren’t working in my life, and I really shifted my mindset. There’s a woman named Becca Levy at Yale who’s shown that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, you gain seven and a half years of additional life, which is more life than if you actually quit smoking at 50 or started exercising at 50. So I shifted my mindset on many things, including the process of getting older. I turned 50. I spent a couple of years just really reflecting on what I want to do with my rest of my life.

Chip Conley [00:10:17]:
And then I became the modern elder at Airbnb to the founders. And long story short is my.

Wes Moss [00:10:25]:
So you ran a huge part of.

Chip Conley [00:10:28]:
I was, yeah, I was helping steer the rocket ship with the three founders and loved the experience because I took my hospitality background. But I now is applying it to a whole different kind of business, a technology enabled brand that turned out to become the most valuable hospitality company in the world. And so my fingerprints were all over that business and I felt relevant, as opposed to a lot of people feel irrelevant in their 50s. That led me to writing a book called Wisdom at work, the making of a modern elder. While I was writing that book, I was in Baja on a beach writing the book, and I had a run on the beach where I had a baja aha at an epiphany where I said to myself, like, why is it that we don’t have midlife wisdom schools, places where people can come and sort of reimagine and repurpose themselves? And that’s how mea came about.

Wes Moss [00:11:21]:
You’re using the word elder, and this is in the name of your academy, the modern elder academy. It’s elder as in someone that has some wisdom that I’m looking up to. It’s not elder as an elder person.

Chip Conley [00:11:33]:
It’s not elderly. So there’s a difference between elder and elderly. If you’re elderly, you’re maybe in the last five or ten years of your life. But Tom Brady was an elder in the NFL at 42. If you’re a fashion model, you might be an elder at 30. If you’re a Silicon Valley software engineer, you’re an elder at 35. So I happened to be an elder at 52 in Airbnb because I was twice the age of the average person there. So in retrospect, if I could change the name of the company and start all over, I might not call it modern elder academy because people think, oh, the average age of people going there is 80.

Chip Conley [00:12:08]:
No, the average age of people coming there to Mea is 54. And so most people who are coming are between 45 and 65. But we have to have people as young as 25 and as old as 88. So long story short is we really instead sort of focus on it being called mea. And it’s a midlife wisdom school, the first of its kind. And 4000 alums from 47 countries have come down to Baja and now I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico, right now because we’re opening a 2600 acre regenerative horse ranch on campus here as well.

Wes Moss [00:12:44]:
Okay, so when does the Santa Fe location open up for Mea?

Chip Conley [00:12:48]:
It opens in May.

Wes Moss [00:12:49]:
Okay, so May of 2024, you’ve got the US location. They both sound so great. Santa Fe is such a wonderful place, but also Baja. So tell us about the locations.

Chip Conley [00:12:59]:
Yeah, so Baja is on a beach. It’s an hour north of Cabo San Lucas. We’re on the Pacific Ocean. We are in an area near Todos Santos, which is sort of a little colonial mean. It’s rural, so it’s nice and beautiful. It’s not touristy. And nature is everywhere. So you got desert, farmland, mountains, ocean, tropical forests.

Chip Conley [00:13:29]:
It’s beautiful. And Santa Fe is also a fascinating place. Our ranch is just outside of town. And so when with 2600 acres, we have 4 sq mi of hiking trails and mountain biking trails and horseback riding and equine assisted learning. And our programs are basically five nights long. They’re focused on helping people to navigate the transitions of midlife. Maybe even reframe their relationship with retiree. Like thinking about, what is my relationship with retirement? Do I want to have one? We can talk about that more.

Chip Conley [00:14:06]:
It’s also about cultivating purpose and helping people to own their wisdom, to really understand what have you learned along the way and how can it serve you moving forward?

Wes Moss [00:14:15]:
So if I come down to Mea in either location, give us a little idea about what that’s like. Is it how much time do I go down? I go back and forth or I just stay for a little while? What’s the experience like?

Chip Conley [00:14:27]:
So first of all, who comes to Mea? It’s all kinds of people. People tech CEOs, investment bankers, but also union plumbers and elementary school teachers because we have some financial aid. And so we want a diverse group of people in a cohort. The average cohort sites is about 24 people. So it’s intimate. You really get to know people because it’s a five night program, five days, five nights. And you go pretty deep into this exploration. Know, who are you today and where are you going with your life? And we have a lot of really great tools.

Chip Conley [00:15:02]:
Many of them are in my book, learning to love midlife. We have famous teachers, everybody from Dan Buettner from blue zones to Esther Perel, the famous psychotherapist and relationship person to Michael Franti, the musician Liz Gilbert, the author. So the intent of the week is to really help people get clearer on how they want to curate the rest of their life. Because if the average age of the person is 54 coming to Mea, which is true, and the average age they think they’re going to live till is 90, which is true on average, across all of our alums, 54 is exactly halfway between 18 when you become an adult and 90 when you’ll die. And most people at age 54 don’t look at themselves and say, oh, I have as much adulthood ahead of me as I have behind me, because you just think, okay, I’m 54. I’m going out to pasture. So we really help people to really reframe their relationship with aging and their sense of how they want to live their life and how they want to be useful. It’s less about being youthful and more about being useful.

Wes Moss [00:16:13]:
How does setting the goal to have income for a lifetime sound? It’s not a trick question. Many happy retirees create income for a lifetime, and it’s something that’s called income investing. It’s a way to harness the power of many different forms of cash flow, including rent, royalties, dividends, distributions, and interest. If you’d like help with income investing, you can reach capitalinvestmentadvisors@yourwealth.com. That’s your wealth. Do people end up there because they are feeling like they’re struggling, or is it more exploratory for a lot of people? Are they there because they’re really having their own version of a crisis? How does somebody ultimately get there?

Chip Conley [00:16:59]:
I would say the number one reason people come is because they’re going through some kind of transition, and they’re a little awkward in it. Whether it’s a divorce or it’s selling a business, changing careers, menopause, empty nest, parents passing away. There’s a lot of transitions that happen in midlife. And so sometimes people feel like, I need a roadmap. I need to understand how to get through this. So I’d say that’s one thing. I’d say a second reason that is pretty prevalent in terms of why people come is because they’ve had a successful life and they’re not really clear on what’s next. They’re a little lost.

Chip Conley [00:17:38]:
They’re like, okay, I sold my business or I retired at 55, but I actually don’t want to retire. I want to go back into the workplace. I want to live a portfolio career where I’m doing multiple things at once. So we have a lot of people who fit that profile who are successful but not satisfied. And then I’d say that we have a lot of people also who fit the profile of wanting to connect with other people. They’re really looking for a community of people that they can use to help propel themselves forward, whether that they want to be an entrepreneur after 30 years of being in corporate life, or they want to actually feel comfortable going out there and dating again after having a 20 year marriage that went south. And they want something beyond their existing family and friends to support them. And I can tell you that our MEa cohorts are extremely connected at the end of a week, and we also have 26 regional chapters around the world.

Chip Conley [00:18:44]:
So you go back home and there’s a bunch of MeA alums wherever you live, and they’re there to be supportive, too, because there’s a common language and ethos that you connect with.

Wes Moss [00:18:56]:
And how many folks have gone through MeA already?

Chip Conley [00:18:59]:
About 4200 people have gone through one of our week long programs, and we have tens of thousands of people who are involved in our online fireside chats. We had Anderson Cooper not long ago talking about aging and his life. We’ve had lots and lots of famous people. Seth Godin.

Wes Moss [00:19:22]:
It’s an amazing list. Yeah, I know. Yeah, we’ve had Dan Buettner on this show, too. He’s just an amazing guy.

Chip Conley [00:19:29]:
I love teaching with.

Wes Moss [00:19:31]:
Yeah, he’s amazing. Yeah. His work is incredible as well. So how do we take an assessment if I’m sitting here and maybe I would think, Chip, not everybody even knows, right? You don’t necessarily even know if you’re going through midlife or any sort of crisis, right? You’re like, wait a minute, am I going through something? Am I not? I think if you’re 45 and you’re listening or you’re 55 and you’re eyeing. And again, our listeners are thinking about financial independence a little bit sooner than they might otherwise figure out to be. Right? The retire sooner concept is not about stopping work necessarily. It’s about gaining economic freedom a year, three years, five years sooner than you might otherwise would have instead of 65 at 60. So as we’re going through that, how do I even know if I’m going through some issues and when to explore something like this?

Chip Conley [00:20:23]:
You know, you’re going through something when you feel either stuck or confused, and you can feel stuck and confused. You feel maybe at a loss for resources to know. How do you navigate this time? Yeah, maybe you have a financial advisor and they give you the basic financial advisor speech spiel, but they’re not asking you the questions that are sort of more important and meaningful about how you want to curate your life. Yeah, maybe you’re feeling like you’re looking for a calling or a purpose, and you’re sort of unclear how to go about looking for that.

Wes Moss [00:21:06]:
People like that all the time.

Chip Conley [00:21:08]:
Yeah, the what’s next piece is pretty prevalent. It’s like, okay, I did that. I had the kids. I was successful in my career. I’ve made some money. I’ve got some money in the bank. But the challenge for a lot of people, and I think this is particularly relevant to your audience, is often people want to retire from something, but they don’t know what they want to retire to. One of the saddest things in american society is that the average retiree watches 47 hours of TV a week.

Chip Conley [00:21:42]:
Now, that’s crazy. In essence, they retired from a job.

Wes Moss [00:21:46]:
By the way, there’s not even 47 hours of good anything. You’re already tapped out in one week. There’s not even 47 hours of anything good.

Chip Conley [00:21:54]:
Yeah, I know. What happens is the three things that we really need in our lives after age 45 or 50 are a sense of purpose in what we’re doing. And if we retire often, we lose that. So you need to retire to something that actually gives you a sense of purpose. That’s number one. Number two is community. So we need purpose in our life. We need community in our life.

Chip Conley [00:22:21]:
Well, if you’ve retired, sometimes you’ve actually left behind a community of people who you were working with. So now, okay, now, the three things we need are purpose. We need community. Oh, if we retire, Wes don’t have either one of those. So we have to figure out how to actually go out and get that. And then the third thing is wellness. And wellness comes in all forms, both personal wellness as well as social wellness. But on the personal wellness side, you’d think if you were retired and you have time, affluence, you have more time in your life, that you would have more time to work out and to go for long walks and to golf and to do whatever.

Chip Conley [00:22:56]:
But in fact, what happens is when people leave their work, their full time work, they actually are in a position where they have no structure or discipline that’s defining things for them, and therefore, they actually start gaining weight because they don’t have the structure that sort of had them going out to the gym three days a week. So, long story short is, the fact is people need purpose, community, and wellness, especially when they’re retiring. You have to have a plan in place for addressing those three things.

Wes Moss [00:23:33]:
Chip, what is age fluidity.

Chip Conley [00:23:38]:
This is a word that. This is a hyphenated word that I created that is getting a lot of attention.

Wes Moss [00:23:44]:
This is your word.

Chip Conley [00:23:45]:
This is my word.

Wes Moss [00:23:45]:
That’s right.

Chip Conley [00:23:46]:
Yeah. And when someone is age fluid, it means it’s hard to define their chronological age or their generation. They’re sort of all the ages they’ve ever been or will ever be. And they don’t necessarily define themselves as being young or old. It varies depending upon the day and who they’re with. And they sort of see age as being almost like a costume you wear. So someone who’s age fluid is. In the past, we might have called the person ageless, but I don’t like the term ageless because it suggests that age is a bad thing.

Chip Conley [00:24:23]:
So if you’re ageless, oh, you’re just ageless. And it means that, okay, you don’t have age age. I have a book here, learning to love midlife. Twelve reasons why life gets better with age. So I have a pro aging message that says, hey, age has some upsides as well as downsides. And to call someone ageless is unfair because it’s saying that you’re no age. But in fact, age fluid means you’re all ages. And I like that a lot more.

Wes Moss [00:24:49]:
Yeah, I really love your sentiment around that because I don’t know what the exact concept of this is, but if I ask someone who’s 70, who is a ruckus CEO who’s now fully, fully retired and no longer working or doing anything at that point, they still, in their mind, I’ll hear this all the time. I still feel like I’m 25. I’m still like a kid, or I still feel like I’m 18. I act like I’m a kid. And I think what they’re really saying is more about how you put it, is that they’re excited to talk to somebody who’s 35, they’re excited to talk to somebody who’s at 25. It’s not just about youth. It’s that they have this range of ages that they connect with. And I think that’s why it’s such a cool way to think about it.

Wes Moss [00:25:39]:
Age fluidity is really important.

Chip Conley [00:25:41]:
I mean, we hear about gender fluidity, so why not age fluidity? I mean, come on. I think it’s an idea whose time has come.

Wes Moss [00:25:50]:
I love it. I’m going to start using that here. With your permission, on the show, I’ll give you, of course, credit for this. I know you love the antiaging industry, so you were just saying you want to get rid of the word ageless? Well, wait, it’s not that bad, right? Well, I know there’s multibillion dollar industry that is preventing us from getting older or looking older or feeling older. I know you love that industry.

Chip Conley [00:26:14]:
I do not love that industry. Because let me say this. If someone wants to actually buy some antiaging creams and put them on their face, great. If they want to do Botox, great. You’re welcome to do whatever you want. The problem with the antiaging industrial complex is that its primary role is to make you feel badly about your aging or especially about your body and your face. The antiaging complex is more like an anti women complex because frankly, the people who buy antiaging products are much more so women than men. So I would just say that.

Chip Conley [00:26:52]:
A couple of thoughts. Number one is, when it comes to your looks, you look as young as you can. I mean, that’s important. But our body is like a rental vehicle. We were issued at birth. And the longer we have been on the road, the more dense we have in that body, the more the paint’s chipping. So what’s more important is not what does the rental vehicle look like on the outside. It’s how does it feel on the inside? And I think how people feel good about being alive and how they feel good about their emotional intelligence.

Chip Conley [00:27:30]:
So, Wes, here’s some stuff that actually gets better with age. Your emotional intelligence gets better with age. Your emotional moderation, less reactive, gets better with age. Your wisdom gets better with age. Your ability to understand your life story and the narrative and gets better with age. Your spiritual curiosity gets better with age. Your crystallized intelligence, the ability to actually see things systemically and holistically gets better with age. There’s a lot of things that get better with age.

Chip Conley [00:28:01]:
We just haven’t done, which nobody ever talks about that.

Wes Moss [00:28:03]:
Never. Do you hear that? These things get better with age.

Chip Conley [00:28:06]:
Well, let’s speak. So Becca Levy at Yale says that if you move your mindset on aging from negative to positive, you get seven and a half years of additional life. But there are no pSas. Public service announcements saying, hey, aging, it’s a good thing. Here are the unexpected pleasures of getting older. You don’t see that. What you see is PSAs for stopping smoking, which is a good thing. But you know what? That only gives you four extra years, whereas your mindset shift gives you seven and a half years or starting to exercise.

Chip Conley [00:28:40]:
You see public service announcements about being healthy. About that, well, that gives you three extra years if you start doing that at 50. So the bottom line is, the thing that actually has the greatest impact on longevity, even more so than all the biohacking you can do and all the supplements. The number one thing is your mindset, your psychology, and it doesn’t get any attention. And so that’s why I am a pro aging activist, a midlife activist who’s just helping people to see these things again.

Wes Moss [00:29:09]:
There’s resources. So there’s your books, there’s mea. There’s not a ton of people that have focused in on which, by the way, is such a massive market, 35 to 75 kind of a lot of people in the United States. It sounds like you just kind of inherently went through your own transformation and rethought your life and got to that positive, a new outlook, let’s just say. But it sounds like a big process, particularly for some people, particularly in a struggle period of time. So to go from just, oh, I have a negative outlook to a positive outlook, it’s not easy. Where do we start? How do we do it?

Chip Conley [00:29:46]:
So there’s a lot of resources out there. There’s coaches, there are psychologists, there are books and book clubs. People should do a book club on learning to love midlife and talk about these things with their friends. And then there’s programs, and sometimes there’s programs within programs. So, like, there’s people in YPO, young presence organizations.

Wes Moss [00:30:07]:
Sure.

Chip Conley [00:30:08]:
And they actually talk a lot about stuff like aging, but they don’t necessarily have a curriculum on it. But they are talking about a lot of the people who are in YPO are in their 40s. They’re exactly in the period of time where the biggest struggle is happening. And so sometimes we’re getting support for these things from family, from religion, from groups that we’re in, and that’s helping support us. But what MEA is doing and what I’m doing with my book, learning to love midlife, is to take it on straight, head on, not coming from the side, but also like, you know what? This could be the best era of your life, because at midlife, you start having more freedom to choose. You don’t have to live the success script that you were handed by your parents, that you actually lived in your twenty s and thirty s, and by the time you got to your mid 40s, like, whose life am I living? I am living my parents idea. That’s good, that success script. Exactly.

Chip Conley [00:31:08]:
So it’s definitely resonating. The book hit number one on Amazon for happiness and self help books. And, you know, that’s a good sign that there’s a market of people who are thirsting for this.

Wes Moss [00:31:21]:
And I know that one of your core principles is knowing what you want in life or figuring out what you want in life. And the reason there’s such an appetite for your book and other books in this category is that it’s a hard question to answer, and it’s not necessarily something you can figure out quickly. And we’re also in a world that expects results. It’s like, well, I’d like to figure this out, but it doesn’t necessarily happen right away.

Chip Conley [00:31:45]:
Well, and also, we’re in a world where people feel like they’re getting the game of life wrong. They compare themselves with other people on Instagram or just in general, and they say, oh, my God, look at them. And they’re the same age and they look so good, or they’re so successful. Look at that BMW. Look at the perfect family. And we have a tendency to compare our insides with other people’s outsides, and we end up feeling lacking. And this is a big issue in midlife because it’s often when we come face to face with this sense of, like, somehow maybe I’m a loser. And that’s why it’s so important to talk about this with other people, because you realize that, oh, my God, I’m not the only one going through this.

Chip Conley [00:32:33]:
And some of what I’m going through is very normal. And there are some tools and some techniques and some hacks that you can use to get through that difficult time or to get clearer on your purpose or to reinvent yourself in your 50s. It used to be long ago that we would go, and if we went to high school and to college and maybe even graduate school, we fuel up on all of our education. And then we would drive that rental vehicle the rest of our life without going back to learning. And you might learn things along the way, but you wouldn’t go to a school, learn, we are a college of midlife. We’re a place where people go to actually feel like, oh, I’m learning about this life stage, and I’m going to be more proficient at it and happier about it because of it.

Wes Moss [00:33:27]:
I wanted to ask you again, this is going back to some of the things that get better with age that you don’t necessarily talk about. And something that I see, as in the financial industry, if you’ve been in it for a long time, your 60 year old clients are now 80, and your 50 year old clients are now 70, and they go through loss maybe it’s loss of a spouse, maybe it’s loss of friends. And your social network is constantly shrinking to some extent because of age. And it’s a harsh reality of life. You talk a little bit about social wellness. I see people struggle with that to some extent. What is your take on someone who is with social wellness in your sixty s, and how does that set you up for more success? Or how can you set yourself up for more success?

Chip Conley [00:34:15]:
So there’s been a bunch of studies, Dan Butte, blue zones. But the one that’s most famous is the Harvard study that’s been going on for 85 years. They’ve studied the same group of people for 85 years. It’s called a longitudinal study. And Bob Waldiger runs that program. And he has said, when his book came out last year called the Good Life, he said that the number one variable for people who are happy and healthy in their eighty s and ninety s is how invested were they in their social relationships in midlife and beyond. And so this is more important than income or wealth, more important than diet or exercise, more important than where you live, more important than your socioeconomic status or your race. The number one variable was how invested were you in your social wellness? He calls it social fitness.

Chip Conley [00:35:08]:
And so, gosh, one of the challenges we have is in our twenty s and our thirty s and our 40s. We are so busy that we let many of our friendships atrophy. And this is true especially for men.

Wes Moss [00:35:23]:
So easy to do that women do.

Chip Conley [00:35:25]:
A better job of keeping their social friendships and being vulnerable and talking about stuff that matters. But men, man, I mean, when I had lost five male friends to suicide, none of us knew that they were, and they’re all independent. None of them were related to each other. But wait, who knew? And no one knew because guys don’t talk about the stuff that’s going on for them that they’re struggling with. So learning how to become friends again, learning friendship as a practice is something that I talk about in the book. It’s something we do at mea. And it’s really essential because social wellness is just the other side of the coin of loneliness. And Vivek Murphy, who’s the church in general, has really studied loneliness in a big way and shown, like, it may be the most toxic disease that you can have, which is weird, like, really loneliness.

Chip Conley [00:36:17]:
But there’s all these other health outcomes that come with loneliness. And so, long story short, is helping people to realize that they’re not alone, that there is emotional safety net out there amongst friends or family. And if you don’t have that, there are ways for you to start building relationships again. And part of the reason that some people come to Mea is for that reason.

Wes Moss [00:36:41]:
And it’s a good reminder too. You’re right, atrophy is the right word. We all live such in this hairy, carry busy world that it takes some work and some effort just to maintain relationships, let alone create new relationships, which I find, to your point, for men in their 60 plus, particularly if they’re not working, I hear all the time like, well, how am I supposed to go meet people? If you don’t play golf? What are you supposed to do? If you don’t have an organized activity that involves a lot of people, then it can be really tough. So it seems like a very important part of the course that you guys teach.

Chip Conley [00:37:20]:
You have to put yourself out there. I mean, first of all, you have to find that you may have an interest. Your interest might be hiking. And so you have to find out, are there some hiking clubs or am I part of an alumni association in my area where I can connect with people in my alumni association, high school, college, whatever. It’s really finding friends who are in proximity to you is important. What we’re doing right now online is perfectly fine, but nothing can beat being face to face with someone. So you might look at friends from the past who still live in the same area that you live in and just reach out to one of them and say, hey, I haven’t talked with you in ten years. Are you open to just having lunch? I have no agenda other than to just reconnect and that person might be too busy.

Chip Conley [00:38:09]:
And it’s like, no, if they say, no, don’t worry. But you may have to put yourself out there or come to Mea, because honestly, you will end up with a collection of two dozen people who are going to be friends for life.

Wes Moss [00:38:24]:
So for anybody listening that’s texted me and wanted to go get lunch or a beer, and I’ve said, sure, I’d love to, but I still haven’t ever done it. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that I suffer from your exact issue with four kids and a job and a company and a podcast. How old are you, Mallory? Can we put the podcast on hold for like six months? Let’s see, I will be 48 fairly soon.

Chip Conley [00:38:51]:
Oh, shoot, 40. So you are 47 years old. 47 is the lowest point I know.

Wes Moss [00:38:57]:
And I feel it. I’m at the bottom of the u curve, right?

Chip Conley [00:39:00]:
Oh, dude. Okay. Well, if I can make it through.

Wes Moss [00:39:03]:
This year, I’m almost dumb. I’m almost at 48, so if I can make it through. This was supposed to be the roughest year. By the way, what is, I guess the anthropology behind or the sociology behind the u curve. I’ve read about that. It’s been a little while. Why do we get unhappy and then get happy again?

Chip Conley [00:39:20]:
So there are a variety of reasons we get unhappy. In our 40s, it’s the spinning plates phenomena, having way too much going on. Because in our twenty s, thirty s, and forty s, we accumulate. We accumulate friends, we accumulate responsibilities, obligations, children, stuff. And there’s so much on our plate that there’s no room for anything else. So there’s that. In our 40s, we come face to face with sometimes the idea that we’re getting older and our body tells us that, and it doesn’t feel good. In our 40s, we have a bunch of dreams and aspirations and expectations that we haven’t met, and we’re like, oh, maybe I’m never going to become the mayor of New York City or whatever it is.

Chip Conley [00:40:08]:
But more than anything, it’s this sense of the unrelenting habits, like narrowing our choices and feeling stuck. And so for some people it has to be like this weird circumstances that something falls apart, a divorce, losing a.

Wes Moss [00:40:30]:
Job, like, for you, near death experience.

Chip Conley [00:40:32]:
Something like my near death experience. But what was so interesting about that was the near death experience happened exactly when I was going through the worst of times. So in some ways, it was like a divine intervention, because it was like, okay, wake up. It’s about the hotelier’s wake up call. I was a hotelier. I got my wake up call that said, this is not working, Chip, and I have to get to the place of feeling like, okay, I’m going to die to get to a place of saying I will change, then that makes sense.

Wes Moss [00:41:03]:
You’re right. I was just thinking about my own life. To your point, the bottom of the research in the u curve, before it starts to go back up. And you’re right, just a great accumulation happens, kids happen, and then you realize you’re getting older, and then you realize, like, well, maybe I wanted to do this and I didn’t ever do it, but then what is the realization of going back up the happiness curve if you don’t go to Mea, why naturally do humans get happier then?

Chip Conley [00:41:33]:
Yeah. And that happens around the world. So this is a natural thing globally. So it’s not just people go to Mea, what’s going on is once you unravel all those expectations and start to maybe clarify what’s important to you, you start to take a little bit of agency and control over your life, as opposed to just being on this treadmill that you’ve been running on, and you start making some tough choices. We call it the great midlife edit at MEA, where you actually realize that the first half of your life was about accumulating. The second half of your life is about editing. And you need to actually, at midlife, realize, okay, it’s time for me to edit some things for my life. What else happens? At some point, your kids move out.

Chip Conley [00:42:21]:
At some point, your parents pass away. At some point, you have more freedom. At some point, you have a little bit more money in your pocket, and you go into a little bit later life. Also, more than anything, as I talk about in the book, there’s a chapter in the book about, I have no more f’s left to give. I’m going to swear for a second, I have no more fucks left to give. That doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t give a f about life. It just means you get clear about what you do care about, and the rest of the stuff just goes away, including what other people think of you. And it is around 45 or 50 that you start to get more comfortable just saying, hey, this is who I am, and I hope you like it.

Wes Moss [00:43:06]:
That’s such a good feeling.

Chip Conley [00:43:07]:
Yeah, I’m going to be evolving, and I’m going to get better over time, but I’m not here to satisfy you. That’s not my job. That is huge. There’s a lot, frankly. This is what the whole book is about. So I think if someone is at that stage in their life is thinking, okay, I need to understand what’s going to naturally happen and get better. Some things I’ve talked about are just natural things that get better. And some of them you have to take agency on.

Chip Conley [00:43:34]:
You have to get clear on, like, okay, I’m not happy. I have a bunch of stuff that, in my life, I’m not happy about. What are those things? How many of those things can I edit? Because sometimes there are obligations you can’t walk away from. Your parents are in a nursing home, and you’re just taking care of them, so you can’t walk away from that. But you don’t have to do it all alone either. And if you have two siblings who are doing nothing, time to have that conversation with them. It may be hard, but you’re not supposed to be the martyr here.

Wes Moss [00:44:05]:
Can you tell us a little bit about the partnership with blue zones? You mentioned Dan Buettner, and he teaches, too, at Mea. Or does some of the courses. Tell me about those. There’s a blue zone retreats. I love that concept, too. Yeah.

Chip Conley [00:44:18]:
So blue zones. Good for Dan. I mean, Dan had an idea. He followed it. He did the research on it, started writing books about it, and then Netflix did a documentary for episode documentary that came out last summer. So Dan and I got to know each other a couple of years ago and became really close friends quickly. And we’re just on the same path. We’re almost exactly the same age.

Chip Conley [00:44:42]:
And we both were curious about longevity, but not from the biohacking kind of way, but more. Hey, what’s the socioemotional side of longevity? Dan and I taught together last year at MeA in Baja. He loved it so much, he said, let’s do a partnership. Let’s teach two or four blue zones workshops a year at. And so that’s what we’re doing. And the first one is this June in Baja, and then the next one after that is in Santa Fe in October. And it’s like our normal five night workshops, but it’s more specifically focused on longevity and the nine most important qualities.

Wes Moss [00:45:28]:
That lead secrets are living longer. Yeah.

Chip Conley [00:45:30]:
The secrets of a living longer. Exactly.

Wes Moss [00:45:32]:
Yeah. Do husband and wives come to your retreat, or is it usually one spouse that does it?

Chip Conley [00:45:37]:
Typically, I mean, we have about 15% to 20% of the people who come are in couples coming. We have yet to have a couple core and then get divorced. So that’s a good news, actually. Sometimes it’s a couple that’s in trouble, and it creates a new stickiness, a new connection, new language for them. But most people who come don’t come as a couple. They come for their own purposes. And quite often, one spouse will come and like it and love it and then tell the other spouse, and the other spouse comes a few months later on their own.

Wes Moss [00:46:10]:
Okay, that makes sense. All right, so, as we kind of wrap up, maybe if you can articulate one piece of advice to get our listeners who are thinking, wait a minute, I may be in some stage of this cocoon or chrysalis, as you call it. What would be one piece of advice about kind of embracing midlife today or figuring out that there’s something you might want to change?

Chip Conley [00:46:33]:
Here’s my number one question I like to ask. What is it that you know now or have done now that you wish you’d learned or done ten years ago. So think about that for a moment.

Wes Moss [00:46:45]:
Say that again. Say that one more time.

Chip Conley [00:46:46]:
What is it that you know now or have done now that you wish you’d learned or done ten years ago? And then here’s the more important question. Ten years from now, what will you regret if you don’t learn it or do it now? At age 57. I’m 63 now. At age 57, I started surfing. I learned to surf, even though I had a mindset of, like, I’m too old to surf, but I knew at 67 it would be harder than at 57. And I was living on a beach in Mexico, so I learned to surf. I also started learning Spanish at age 57. So anticipated regret of that thing ten years from now that you will regret you didn’t do or learn is a form of wisdom, and we’re a wisdom school.

Chip Conley [00:47:32]:
So helping people introduce people to their wisdom and looking at anticipated regret as a catalyst for going out and doing something and becoming a beginner today is part of what’s behind that question. And I would just say, lastly, it’s all about curiosity and openness to new experiences. That is the fountain of youth.

Wes Moss [00:47:53]:
So one of your courses within, I’m sure you spend some time around what are you going to begin today? So that is, I’m sure one of many themes within Mea is that curiosity. What is something new you can start today?

Chip Conley [00:48:07]:
Exactly.

Wes Moss [00:48:08]:
Which is hard for people to figure out. I get the, hey, what, what are the core percent? What are the research?

Chip Conley [00:48:13]:
But maybe you start with something very small, like, maybe you learn to juggle. Maybe at Mea, we bake bread together. Like, I don’t like baking bread. I don’t want to do that with a few people. But I had to learn how to bake bread because it was one of the things to introduce you to becoming a beginner again. At the end of the day, if you want to find your purpose or find something that’s going to lead to your purpose, look at what agitates you or excites you or makes you curious or something from your younger years that you’ve neglected that needs attention. We had a litigator who became a pastry chef for exactly that reason. She loved baking pies with her grandma in her teen years, and she’d forgotten about that at age 60, and she went back to learning how to become a pastry chef, and she now owns a bakery.

Chip Conley [00:48:59]:
So there’s a lot of hacks that can help you.

Wes Moss [00:49:03]:
Yeah. One of our, let’s see, is it beginners by Tom Vanderbilt.

Chip Conley [00:49:08]:
I love that book.

Wes Moss [00:49:09]:
Yeah, I love the thought around curiosity and starting something new. And it’s hard for people to do. You get into your fifty? S and you think, well, I wasn’t good at XYZ, so I’m not going to do something athletic. I’m not going to do something musical. I’m not going to do something artsy because I was not an artsy person. But the concept of trying to push that and get yourself to have a new core pursuit. Part of my research over the years is happy versus unhappy retirees is that happy retirees have 3.6 core pursuits in life. The unhappy group has less than two.

Wes Moss [00:49:42]:
But I get the question a lot like, what am I going to start doing? Where do I find a new core pursuit? So I bet you mea can help with that too.

Chip Conley [00:49:50]:
We definitely can.

Wes Moss [00:49:52]:
This is awesome, Chip. Thank you so much for spending some time here. Keep up the great work.

Chip Conley [00:49:57]:
Thank you.

Wes Moss [00:49:58]:
I know it can’t be that tough to spend time in Baja and Santa Fe. Maybe one of these days I’ll come visit you.

Chip Conley [00:50:05]:
Oh, we love that. We love that.

Wes Moss [00:50:07]:
And continue success. I hope you sell a couple million of these things, ma’am.

Chip Conley [00:50:11]:
Thank you. Thank you, my friend.

Mallory Boggs [00:50:14]:
Hey y’all. This is Mallory with the retire sooner team. Please be sure to rate and subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. If you have any questions, you can find us@westmoss.com that’s wesmoss.com. You can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube. You’ll find us under the handle Retire sooner podcast. And now for our show’s disclosure. This information is provided to you as a resource for informational purposes only and is not to be viewed as investment advice or recommendations.

Mallory Boggs [00:50:42]:
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Mallory Boggs [00:51:26]:
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