Midlife Mastery - with Daniel Wagner
Midlife - the main words associated are 'crisis' and 'spread'. But what if we challenge the societal narrative and make midlife the opportunity of our lifetime? What if it was our invitation to become more intentional, live more purposeful, and use our accumulated wisdom to contribute to the world around us? In Midlife Mastery we'll explore ways to do that. So that the best is yet to come.
Midlife Mastery - with Daniel Wagner
Jonathan Rauch on the Surprising Upsides of Aging: Breaking Down the Happiness Curve
Get Jonathan's book here: https://go.midlifemastery.com/the-happiness-curve
See Thomas Cole's paintings 'The Voyage of Life' here:
https://go.midlifemastery.com/childhood
https://go.midlifemastery.com/youth
https://go.midlifemastery.com/manhood
https://go.midlifemastery.com/old-age
Do you ever find yourself questioning your happiness despite achieving success in your life? Join us as we engage with Jonathan Rauch, author of the insightful book "The Happiness Curve", who unravels his personal journey of navigating a sense of discontentment during his 40s, amidst a successful life. Jonathan educates us about the intriguing concept of the 'happiness curve' - a U-shaped pattern of wellbeing that descends in midlife and then ascends again, irrespective of external factors like wealth, health, and relationship status.
In this enlightening conversation, we journey deeper into the complexities of midlife and beyond. We tackle the often-overlooked shift in values and priorities that comes with age, as we gradually shift our focus from achievement and status to relationships and community involvement. Together with Jonathan, we draw comparisons between this midlife transition and the tumultuous phase of adolescence, highlighting the glaring absence of adequate guidance and support for adults in this phase of life.
Lastly, we boldly challenge the societal narrative around aging, illuminating the numerous positive aspects of growing older and the abundant possibilities for leading a fulfilling life post-midlife. Our conversation underscores the importance of recognizing and harnessing the wisdom and experience of older adults, instead of forcing them into retirement. Moreover, we advocate for the critical role of coaching in helping individuals identify their evolving values and successfully navigate this transition! Listen in and gain a fresh perspective on midlife and beyond - it's a conversation you won't want to miss!
Hello and welcome Dengel Wagner here for Midlife Mastery, and today I'm with Jonathan Rouch. Jonathan is the author of multiple books, but the one that caught my attention first was I'm really proud to have a hard copy right here the Happiness Curve why life gets better after midlife. And, as some of my listeners and followers, I'm really, really curious about midlife and my own experience of midlife was so difficult that I really hoped that I would find ways to shorten that face in other people's midlife through midlife mastery. So I want to bring Jonathan on to the stage in just a minute and ask him some questions about the book, his own life experience and some stuff that I've prepared that he doesn't know about. So, without any further ado, let me bring Jonathan on to the stage here.
Speaker 1:Hi, jonathan, thank you for making the time Pleasure to be here. So, reading your catalogue of work you've done and I really let people do their own research I'm not one for making long introductions, but what really fascinated me about your life, jonathan, is your personal experience around midlife. You wrote that book for a reason. What was your personal experience of midlife and how did you come to write the Happiness Curve?
Speaker 2:My personal experience was befuddling. In my late 30s and early 40s I began to notice a change in my temperament. I began to notice a sense of restlessness, disappointment not depression, but a sense of real discontent, and it would bother me. Especially in the mornings, I'd hear almost the equivalent of voices telling me why aren't you doing something meaningful with your life? Why are you wasting your time? Go do something different. And this got worse over time, even as I succeeded in meeting all my goals and got well beyond them. I had absolutely nothing to be disappointed about and I knew something very odd and not really rationally explicable was going on. When I was 45, I won the highest award that a magazine writer could get it's the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize and that finally gave me the sense of achievement and accomplishment I was looking for for about 10 days. And then the voices came back and I went back, right back to the same patterns.
Speaker 2:That began to spiral, because I was thinking it's not just that I'm discontent, but I have no reason to be discontented, so something is wrong with me. Am I going to be a complainer the rest of my life? Is this the new me? So I began to doubt my personality structure. I began to feel ungrateful. That, of course, factored into it. My life was going on. None of this was severe enough to be an impediment to doing the things I wanted to do. It wasn't like being seriously depressed. It wasn't an emotional disorder. It was more like a contentment disorder. I finally, a few years later, discovered a whole branch of new science that explains all this, and the light bulb went on. I realized that what I was going through was normal and natural. It's a transition in life, but because people don't know about it, we pathologize it. So that's why I decided to write a book and share the science and all the things I wish I had known when I was entering my 40s.
Speaker 1:Wow. So you talk about actually having had a really great life and you were surprised by your own emotions around the actual, perfect life.
Speaker 2:Exactly Surprised and disappointed in myself, I started thinking there's something wrong with me. I can't be. I'm not grateful. I should be grateful. Why am I not grateful?
Speaker 1:And this I think you talk about it in a book as well this kind of aggravates the situation. Right, the expectation, what do you call it? The expectation gap, is this what you call?
Speaker 2:it yes.
Speaker 1:Can you give us a bit more detail on that?
Speaker 2:Well, this gets into the actual science of the matter. So it takes a couple of minutes to explain. If you want the details, would you like that, or would you like the headline version? I would like that, do you want to?
Speaker 1:know the science. I would like to bit of science. Yes, please, it's a scientist, go for it.
Speaker 2:All right, Scientific point number one the findings I'm about to tell you oddly surfaced not in psychology but in economics. A whole lot of data has been accumulated since the 1970s on well-being. That's the form of happiness. It's called the value of happiness. That's not my mood at the moment, which you would gauge with questions like how often did you smile today? How stressed do you feel? Questions like that, this is the value of happiness, which is how meaningful and fulfilling do you think your life is? On a scale of one to 10, best possible life for you, when would you place yourself? So this is how you evaluate your life as a whole. This turns out to be more important than your mood in determining how you feel about your life generally, and people distinguish between the two. So, starting in the 70s, polls or surveys are done on this question internationally. And by the late 1990s and early 2000s, there are millions of data points from countries all over the world and economists are crunching these numbers to find out how you make people happier. Because that's the point of economics, right, Not just to get richer, but to get happier.
Speaker 2:And this finding keeps just popping out and no one can explain it. And first, no one even pays any attention to it because it looks like a weird artifact. But here's the finding If you correct for all other variables, that you can find things like income, health, education, marital status, employment all of those things that you can find you still find a pattern in this data all over the world. It's a U-shaped curve in which well-being declines in middle age, usually in the 40s, typically on average, bottoming out in the late 40s and then rising again. And remember, this isn't because of marriage or job. That's after you factored out. This appears to be the effect of aging all by itself, independent of other variables. Now, why the heck would that be going on? Well, I recognize that's what happened to me. All the other variables were either staying the same or getting better, but the aging process was somehow creating this sense of disappointment. So finally, back to your question Expectations Gap. What's that? We still don't know for sure what accounts for the U-shaped curve. We know it's pretty fundamental because it's spotted everywhere and in 2012, it was identified in other primates chimps and orangutans Same phenomenon. So we know it's pretty fundamental. Why is it happening? That's conjectural, but it seems like three things are going on, and the first is the expectations Gap. So, okay, what's that?
Speaker 2:Suppose you move to. I'll use a US example, if that's okay for your audience. Suppose at age 22, out of college, you move to Seattle for the sunshine. You want to have warm weather and bright skies. Every day you go to Seattle and that's what you expect. The first five years are not so good because the weather is actually pretty cold and dreary and clouded. But you're okay with that for the first five years. Maybe it's just a bad run. It's going to get better. But 10 years in, 15 years in, you're starting to feel pretty disappointed in the weather. You're starting to feel like this pattern is never going to change. This is never going to get better. I made a terrible mistake and so on. That's a forecasting error. You made a mistake about your future feelings, about where you would live Really. However, you begin to think well, okay, I've corrected my expectations about the weather and there's a lot of other things to appreciate about Seattle, so maybe this is okay.
Speaker 2:It's a rough parallel, but that's what happens with the aging process. In our 20s we imagine if I get that great job, if I find a partner, if I can find a house by the time I'm 35, I'll just be overjoyed because those are the things I want in life. And it turns out ambition is a trickster because it keeps moving the goalposts. That's the whole point, right? It doesn't want you to stand still. So every time you achieve one of these things, it goes into your well-being baseline and you're on to the next thing. So, although you're achieving, you're never reaching the satisfaction levels that you thought you would. That's okay the first few years, because I'm still in my 20s. I just need the next thing. Then I'll feel happy.
Speaker 2:By your late 30s and early 40s it's starting to dawn on you that the things that you thought would bring you happiness are just now part of the wallpaper of your life and that you still don't feel that sense of deep, lasting satisfaction you expected. And in fact this is worse for high achieving people and people with good lives, because if you get a cancer diagnosis at age 38 or 40, that's when a white ball of these other things out. But if everything's going smoothly, you're really going to feel this expectations effect and then you're going to feel not only disappointed in your level of satisfaction but disappointed in your own disappointment, because there's no moral justification for that. Mathematicians have worked this out. What you can show is that this mid-life dissatisfaction is very often literally about nothing. Nothing needs to change in your life for this to happen, except that in your 20s you had unrealistic expectations about how much satisfaction you would get out of enhancements in your status and position in life. Then a correction ensues.
Speaker 2:Into your 40s, Two other things begin to kick in. One is realism and the other is rewiring. Realisms related to the expectations gap, but you begin to get more realistic about how happy you're going to be as a result of getting the social thing. You begin to redesign your values and they become less focused on achievement and comparative values like am I making more money than the person next door? They become more focused on relationships, on who are the people in my life I care about. How can I give back, join the community? It's a natural process as we age. It appears to be biological in nature.
Speaker 2:The third thing that begins to kick in in 40s and 50s and beyond is rewiring. Older brains are actually better at savoring the sweet side of life and tuning out the bitter side of life. This goes against the stereotype, but older people tend to have less depression and anxiety, be more emotionally stable and better at savoring the good side. All of these things are conspiring such that in the first half of life you're fighting the current, expecting a degree of satisfaction that you're not going to get from improving your social status and standing. Then, in the second half of life, those very things begin to reverse and it becomes easier to appreciate your situation. With time. This appears to be a pretty universal phenomenon. I'm sorry to drone on at such length.
Speaker 1:No, no, it's beautiful. I try to remember the small little points. To recap on the first thing, are you saying that age in itself is a determinant for happiness?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Taking everything away. We have noticed that, even if you correct it for all other factors, age in itself and getting older after midlife will make you happier. If you have nothing for it, it's just a factor of life.
Speaker 2:Correct. Two caveats. One in between mileage will vary. This is not true of everyone, Of course, because we're humans. I was in textbook case, maybe you were too. Not everyone is. Some people won't experience this Caveat. Number two age is not the only thing that matters, of course. It's just one element in the equation, but it turns out to be an important element Going from other things equal. Just aging from about age 25 to about 45 seems to reduce life satisfaction by the equivalent of half of a divorce or unemployment, or maybe a bit more. Huge Enough, so pretty big. If nothing else is going on in your life, you're going to really notice that. I wonder what the heck is going.
Speaker 1:I found that fascinating. When you talk about the undertow in the book, If everything else stays the same, then this effect is more noticeable. If you have all other chaos going on, it might just be part of life. I really liked it. I liked the idea that this came from not sociology but economics. Right, that they were not even looking for it. And obviously, once you notice it in primates, then it begs the question for me is this just clever design? Is it just evolutionary design that as we get older, different functions in the tribe are important? Is this the book and two adolescents? Is this the missing understanding that we need that becoming an elder or elderhood is something to be celebrated and we just forgotten it as a society in our race for more and better in achievement?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's right. It's conjectural. There are people who think about why would this happen, why would we be designed this way? And the leading conjecture is what's called the grandmother hypothesis. Humans are extremely rare in nature. There are only three or four other species, I think, like orcas and a couple others, that keep their elderly around past procreate of age, because a woman past menopause is just baggage as far as evolution.
Speaker 2:I hate to put it that bluntly but some biologists have called us walking cadavers once we get to the age where we're not reproducing. So why are we kept around? Leading hypothesis is that it turns out to be very good for ourselves and our offspring, and especially their offspring, to have grandparents around grandmothers, and that's also been found in orcas. So it seems like nature equips us for a later stage in adulthood, when we're not focused on rising in status, so that we can have more mating opportunities and collect resources for our children to improve their mating opportunities. Once we pass that stage, we become more attuned to the group, to helping our children raise their children and helping other people in our groups raise their children, and it turns out having grandparents in the house is one of the best things you can do for kids. So that's a conjecture about why this happens, but we don't really know.
Speaker 2:But you said something very important, which I just want to, if I can. I just want to point out that she used a very important idea, which is transition and adolescence. What seems to be happening here is a natural transition, and a good transition, and one with a big pot of gold at the other end, because we emerge from this transition more attuned to the things that really do provide lasting satisfaction, not passing satisfaction, and that's investing in our core relationships, loving others, being loved, giving back, mentoring, that actually those are goalposts that do not move. But there's a transition from the earlier stage, the acquisitive phase of looking for satisfaction, to the giving phase, and it's not unlike the phase in adolescence, which we all understand is a natural part of life that's hard for some people to get through.
Speaker 2:So what do we not do in adolescence? If a teenager is having problems with anxiety, we don't say to them oh, you're having your teenage crisis, what are you going to do? Go buy a sports car. Oh, look, you got pimples, ha ha. We set up lots of guardrails and social institutions that guide teenagers through this difficult period. We do nothing like that for adults in middle age, because they're assumed to be strong and dependent, taking care of their kids and their parents. They don't need any help, right? Well, it turns out they do need help, because this is the next big transition in our lives. It's much, much harder to do it alone, and that's why your job is so important coaching.
Speaker 1:I heard you speak about coaching favorably, which I really enjoyed hearing. It is a look. This is actually a non-therapeutic support for people to be able to voice some of that in a dialogue that no one hears right, and I feel this is more prevalent in men. You said many times that the U-curve and this mid-left transition is non-gender biased, but I guess the way the expectation of what men are supposed to do and how they operate means we're less likely to talk about it. We feel more shame if we don't feel up to the game or if we don't feel we can perform. So I do feel that men suffer longer and more in that phase. Is that something that's been proven or no? Numbered to that?
Speaker 2:No, all the data. There's massive amounts of data from surveys around the world.
Speaker 2:Find no gender differences in life satisfaction and in the depth and shape of the U-curve. So the actual phenomenon is not gendered, but the expression of the phenomenon, as you said, may be gendered. It may be, especially in the past, when men were supposed to be the strong, silent ones who were supporting the family and all of that, that men were under more pressure not to show these effects and that that would produce more of the strains that could result in actual big life mistakes by throwing away your marriage, for example, or poorly thought-through job changes.
Speaker 2:That may account for the stereotype that midlife crisis is a male phenomenon. In reality it's not, and both genders need help with it.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I was very fascinated by the Thomas Cole voyage of life, how you picked up these four paintings to describe those phases. Now, from the time, thomas Cole, I think it was the mid-19th century when these were created to date yes, 1940s.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's like almost 200 years now. We added another 30 years of lifespan to the average adult life. Have we created just a fifth chapter, or is this just an in-between chapter between adulthood and the Senex the old man? How do you see that? Because obviously back then it was literally one, two, three, four and you died in the 1950s.
Speaker 2:So maybe in the show notes you could place a link to the famous Quadriptich by Thomas Cole. He's an American landscape painter and his greatest work Truly, truly, marvelous in the National Gallery in Washington DC, is called the Voyage of Life, and it depicts exactly the voyage that we're talking about and the stages of life. For childhood that's depicted as a baby. Youth, that's predicted as a young man age about 20. He's reaching for a castle in the sky. This shows his ambition. The third is middle age. This is someone about 40, and this is depicted as being on a boat in the rapids without a tiller, praying that he's not going to craft.
Speaker 1:The symbolism of the strongest. Yeah, it's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I should say that all four of these depict the voyager on a river, the river of life, the voyage of life and the river of time is the controlling metaphor of my book too. And then the fourth in the painting is old age. And now the boat is becolned and the voyager is old and being ushered off to heaven. And yes, daniel, you're exactly right. If those paintings were made today, you'd need a fist painting and it would go between numbers three and number four and it would be late adulthood. And that's the period. Late adulthood would be old age, but it's mid adulthood In any case.
Speaker 2:Thomas Cole didn't even make it to his 50s and people used to die very often in their 60s. People now are living well into their 80s and that's going to extend further and more and more of those years are going to be healthy years. And these are people, millions of people around the world, tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are in the most pro-social, most satisfying part of their lives and they don't want to park themselves, they don't want to just retire and live on a boat. They want to contribute to society and give back at the time in life when they are best able to do that. They have experience, knowledge, wisdom.
Speaker 2:It turns out in business, if you have a group, mixed ages with some older people in the group, the group will be more productive than having one group in the single age. So what that means is we have this incredible opportunity as a society. First, we're going to live longer. We're going to have this stage of adulthood, which earlier generations did not enjoy. That by itself is, I think, the greatest gift that humanity has ever been given. But second, in order to exploit it, we need to get rid of the old model in which you retire in your 60s and then you wait around to die. We need new social institutions, jobs that involve mentoring programs, all kinds of things that will engage this population in the things that they're good at, and if we do that, the bounty here is immense, just immense.
Speaker 1:I've written one word down and circled it while you're speaking called mentoring. Wouldn't it be beautiful if more people our age and beyond I'm my end 50s I think you touched the 60s- I'm 63. Wow, we're invited back into society, not as redundant but as highly relevant, and that their experience will be valued, even in a digital age dismantling. How do you see that? If we were painting in a utopia where what you say is this bounty that can be had, how would society embrace that? How could we make a positive move towards it?
Speaker 2:Well, speaking in the American context, I'm not so sure about Europe, but actually a lot of work is being done in this area as people try to figure this out, and there are a few big buckets. One is the workplace, and that's the change to providing what are sometimes called gradual off ramps, so that instead of a retirement cliff where you just end at 60, you do the same thing 40 years or however long, and then you leave and you're done. People have a transition later in their career toward jobs that are more involved with other people mentoring, coaching, what are sometimes called not so hard jobs. People tend, later in life, to be less invested in wanting that next big raise or promotion and more invested in how can I help the younger people around me thrive in their work? How can I help business learn from my other's experience? And so that's something that companies can do and are starting to do to figure out how to keep, how to retain people as they age through adulthood and utilize them. So that's the job side. There's an education aspect of this.
Speaker 2:It's important to realize I could have emphasized this more earlier that the nature of this transition in midlife to late adulthood is a values transition. That's why coaching can be so beneficial. It's not fundamentally about pathology. Is something wrong with it? It's that your values are changing in midlife as you move away from those socially acquisitive, status-based values and more toward the values of giving back community cooperation, and that means you're going to want to do different kinds of things. Coaches can help you surface what those new values are. That's what a coach's job is really. It's to say, okay, what really matters to you at this point in your life and how can we get there? So you bring it up.
Speaker 2:That's what a coach does, so you can bring in coaching.
Speaker 1:Sorry, you don't have a slight overlap here. Sorry, did you finish? You want to finish your point?
Speaker 2:I was just going to say coaching should be much more available and common as a standard model of midlife. So that needs to be provided. And then educational models. We have this crazy concept we load everybody up with education in the first 20 years and then they work and then they die. And that's just crazy, because what we know is in their 40s and 50s, people want change in what they're doing in life. So we should make it much more easy and regular for people to go back to school for a year or two, study something new, for example, in their 50s. In the United States, it should be possible to withdraw a year or two of government pension benefits and apply those to midlife education. We should have gap years for people in midlife so they can take a year off and study and learn something new. We should have internships for people in midlife. All of these things that we tend to do for younger people are also things that people need in middle age.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. It makes me smile. I can see how that would also change how we're currently a very stereotype. If you Google midlife or midlife crisis, the imagery you get, the memes you get it's bizarre, to say the least, and it's not at all reflective of what is actually going on.
Speaker 2:Yes, the images are mostly men acting irresponsibly when you slow that's so hurtful.
Speaker 1:It is hurtful and I feel that partly people live into that narrative and it almost gives not permission, but it makes you identify with it. You start to measure up against this imagery and say, am I in this phase, is this happening to me? So I'm so passionate about changing the narrative and give midlife a rebrand to make it a really. I look at it as the other book hand to adolescence, from youth to adulthood, from adulthood to adulthood, if that's even a word. I think. A term I heard Chip Conley mentioned is middle essence. Right, not much used term, but I feel that even speaking about it helped. It helped me when I heard there was science around this.
Speaker 1:There are two more topics I really want to get your opinion on and I don't think it's anyone more qualified. But a quick question regarding rewiring. You mentioned earlier rewiring is part of it and that the brain changes. The brain chemistry changes. Do the Indians know about? Are we getting more in equilibrium using left and right brain? Does our focus you spoke about the focus of the early life Does the change to become, does our vision, change our emotional landscape? What do we know about the rewiring that happens in midlife and beyond?
Speaker 2:The answer to that question is yes. Those things happen. Thanks to the marvels of modern science, you can put people of different ages in an fMRI machine and directly observe brain activity. Suppose you take young people and you also take older people, people in late adulthood, and you show them images of happy faces or unhappy faces, or pleasure or pain. What you find is that the younger people's brains are more responsive, more stimulated by the unhappy pictures. The older people's brains are actually more stimulated by the happy pictures. They seem to be more attuned to the emotionally positive side in life. You also find that, of course, people can be emotionally volatile at any age, but the storms seem to be less extreme and to pass quicker when you're older. You and I know this from experience. The things that seem like such a crisis when we were 24, now seemed like a day at the office. Maybe we still get upset, so there's more equilibrium.
Speaker 1:But what I like about it and you mentioned the book, which I think is important it does mean that we just get numb to life. We still experience the positives. It's not like we're not just becoming more compressed in our emotional expression. We just don't seem to take the rough parts as rough.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yes, that's beautifully put. We, as Laura Christensen says, we're more attuned to the sweet and less attuned to the bitter. This is we're also less prone to depression as we get older. Something else that's not involved with rewiring the brain per se, but is closely related to it is, of course, we're conscious beings. We're not machines or animals, and so we're well aware, as we get into our 50s and beyond, that we don't have as much time left, and for most of this, that also leads to a conscious process of weighing who are the people I most care about? What are the things that I most want to contribute to and improve? Those are exactly the right questions to ask. So you get this working together of changes in the brain and then changes in our own priorities and outlook as we age, which work together actually in a very positive direction.
Speaker 2:One other thing, that's this is not known. This was speculation back when I was writing on it. I don't think it's been confirmed, but it makes sense. Everyone, we used to have this idea. Our brain was at its best in our early 20s and then we neurons die and it's all downhill, turns out. That's very wrong. Our brains continue to grow and restore themselves right through life, although we do lose sharpness, diminish in some of our particular capacities like I can no longer remember a string of numbers the way I used to. There may be a phenomenon known as all wheel drive, which is we compensate for that Beautiful by using more different regions of the brain in a more harmonized, integrated way to solve problems, and that also seems to be good for our well-being. So it's a different way of thinking and solving problems. Now, that's not really confirmed science. I think it's likely to be true.
Speaker 1:It does make sense and it would be a perfectly designed counterpart to the first 20, 30 years where we have to go out. I'm just seeing the ancient hunter model right when we are doing that and then later on you have a different role in the tribe. I still believe that we are by nature tribal and although we're living in larger and off separate communities, the wiring is still the same. So if you are looking at tribal societies where the elder has a function, they are doing different work. Right, they've been asked for their holistic view. I like the. Did you call it all wheel drive?
Speaker 1:Yes, that's, that's like it is a beautiful, simple metaphor that makes sense, like you're using in all factors In those societies.
Speaker 2:In those societies, so importantly, the elders are valued. In our society there's this huge emphasis on youth, and age discrimination may be the most blatant and common form of discrimination in the world. If you ask fourth graders about old age, they've already ingested stereotypes that it's terrible that you're declining and you're probably senile.
Speaker 2:All of the things that I'm telling you about actually life getting better after 50s, more satisfying, more rewarding, that we don't lose capacity, it turns out. By the way, the elderly are good entrepreneurs. They're good at learning new things. They do it in a different way, but no one knows these things. So we're fighting the stereotype.
Speaker 2:I think you could say the bigotry of old age is a throwaway stage of life, something to regret, something to fear. And of course, that makes the midlife transition harder, because at age 45, if you're in a kind of malaise that I was, you're thinking well, if I'm not happy now, I never will be, because from here it's all downhill, aging's going to be terrible. So just telling people no, there is tremendous potential in late adult. Most people find this the most rewarding part of life. Many people will find ways to engage that they never even thought about when they were younger. If we could get that message across and then do something about the age discrimination in ourselves. Stereotype staging that makes midlife better, that makes youth better. It gives us a clear sense of what we can look forward to in life.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I feel that's why I am here. You seem to be here in a wider capacity, but it's definitely part of what you bring into society with your work. I had this thought and it dropped in while you spoke. Is it possible and I can't even ask you to confirm it, just tell you what came up for me. I believe that as our society is so youth obsessed and as we can sell more things to people that we can more easily get into ambition and build and dream about the castles in the sky, is it not natural that we experienced this? And as people get older, they are less easily manipulated into believing that material goods make you happy or that certain things. So it feels almost natural that a culture that makes material possession such a god would throw these beliefs into the media so that young people believe them, and as we get older, we believe them less. But there is this. Do you know what I'm getting at? I'm not expressing it very eloquently, but I feel this is generated, this is made, this is man-made.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a good point. I hadn't thought a lot about it, but the point you made earlier supports it, which is that there are a lot of other societies I think a majority of human societies have valued their elders and seen this as a special and pro-social part of life, and we don't. So, yeah, that suggests that what's going on here is cultural, which is good news because it means it can change, and there's something else we can value that would make a big difference, and that's to me. My favorite chapter in my book is the one I get to talk about the least, and it's a chapter on wisdom. So here's what most people don't know about wisdom.
Speaker 2:First, it's a thing. It actually exists. It is independent of experience, expertise and intelligence. It's its own category of thing and it's a meaningful scientific concept. It can be measured across cultures, and it turns out that what we mean by wisdom is pretty much the same in all cultures and in all of history, and it's features like a certain sense of equanimity, an ability to look at the situation you're in as if from above, transcending your own interest and seeing the overall picture.
Speaker 2:Wisdom, consistently, is about helping yourself and other people navigate complex social situations in ways that solve problems. It's extremely valuable. It's rare at any age and it does appear, of course, fewer people are wise than are wise. That's why it's so precious. But it does seem that all of these other changes in life that we're talking about as we get older this greater equanimity, this level of experience and reacting less to the bad things, seeing things not as always, a crisis, de-centering yourself All of those things make wisdom easier as we get older. So we don't necessarily get wiser, but we have more tools to become wise.
Speaker 2:So here's a question. I'll bet the last time you heard someone compliment you or somebody else by saying Daniel's very smart was probably yesterday, or what you said to me before the show gosh, you're so smart. And what if I said to you that's not much of a compliment. Why don't you hear the compliment? Daniel is wise. Yet we don't value wisdom, and one of the results of that is we throw away or undervalue what it is. That is one of the great benefits of having a society with more elders and then, values aging.
Speaker 1:When you said Daniel is wise, when you said Daniel is smart, I felt like I was a little bit like this is something I could have worked for or earned. But when you said Daniel is wise, it lands in a very different space in my nervous system. I'm thinking oh my God, I've been given, yeah, I've been seen as something important or valuable, very different to smart. Right, smart seemed like an achievement I can read and perform, but wisdom is something I need to have earned in a different way. So it definitely is a and there is some some all with it. Right, the imagery.
Speaker 2:I have is. Yes, yes, you put that beautifully. There's something we all intrinsically understand is special about wisdom Wisdom is contagious. Being smart, that's good for you, maybe it's good or not good for the people, but wisdom is this ability to navigate social situations and help others to do that.
Speaker 1:So having a wise person in your midst is good for everybody around you.
Speaker 2:You go to the wise person for advice.
Speaker 1:So it's that's good. So, yeah, isn't that what we wish our statesmen were? Isn't this what the old kings, this is what Solomon was living right, what Sri Rama and the like? Yeah, this is what we hope.
Speaker 2:In my grandparents generation we talked about wisdom. You almost never hear the word used now and that's a shame. We've lost something very precious. What we underappreciate the importance of wisdom.
Speaker 1:Conversations like this bring it back to us, and it is part of the consciousness we can create around it. Right? However small we talk about it, someone else can hear it, somebody else will pick it up. I believe it Well that's the hope.
Speaker 2:And there's good news, further good news it is not true that you're either wise or you're not. It's innate. Wisdom can be taught. Wow, it can be trained.
Speaker 2:Wisdom is actually easily demonstrable in a lab. If you give people an exercise to write about a situation in the first person, and then you give another group of people the same exercise, but you ask them to write about the situation in the third person, describing it as not happening to them but happening more abstractly, so they're a bit more distanced from it, and then you ask them what to do in the situation. The people in the second group who've been asked to distance themselves from it will give answers that an objective group of outsiders will characterize as wiser. And you can train people, you can train kids actually to reframe situations in which it's not so personal to them. Unfortunately, in the United States we now do the authentic. We say dwell on your lived experience, dwell on your authenticity. It's all about self. We'd be better off educating people toward wisdom. Think less about yourself, more about the overall situation and the role of others in it.
Speaker 1:I love it. I didn't know that this is a. Really I'm going to circle, that one Time flies it really does. I wish we had the whole day together and maybe one day we will spend a day, because I have two more questions and I think I might distill it down to one. And if you were, like me, in my position, trying to create a program called Midlife Mastery, helping people to make this period in their life positive, exciting, what kind of toolset would you think? How can I help people? What do you know that I need to learn or know so I can help people navigate midlife in a better way?
Speaker 2:This will sound like a crass answer, but everything I know I put in my book. I'm a writer and I thought what I could do to help people through this part of life and to help them appreciate this part of life is to inform them, because it turns out so much of the grief that goes on in middle age is people think there's something wrong with them. Got it?
Speaker 1:So literally, the awareness pod is so important. Awareness know about it.
Speaker 2:Awareness won't take away the actual midlife transition, nor, crucially, would we want it to any more than we would want to take away adolescence. Sometimes it's hard to get through, but it's leading us toward an amazing stage of life, so it's something we need to get through. The problem is the second order issues the fear, the anxiety. What's happening to me? Am I not the person I thought I was? Am I doomed to a lifetime of ungratitude and discontent? That doubles it. The second order stuff you can deal with by helping people understand. No, the transition you're going through is natural, normal and, if properly managed, completely healthy. It has a wonderful reward.
Speaker 1:That's what you're doing. So if we help eradicate or lessen the secretiveness that people or the loneliness in which people go through this, and also remove some of the stigma around it and the wrong imagery and the wrong narratives, that would go a great deal towards helping that.
Speaker 2:It goes a long way. Yes, I could not have said that better. When I was going through this, I did not confide in anyone, not even my husband, then partner Michael, because I was ashamed and I thought I'd be made fun of. For midlife crisis and isolating is one of the worst things you can do in this situation. There's more in the book about specific things you can do to get through this period with more equanimity, but it's very important that people feel able to understand this is a midlife, is a vulnerable age and that, as with any age, but even more so, you need outside support, friends that you can trust, coaches, resources that you can go to. A coach is someone who's probably been through this with dozens, if not hundreds, of other people, so they bring experience to bear. So, okay, your values are changing. How do we go through that together? That's what a coach can do. All of these things are easier if we get rid of the stigma and the shame and the isolation.
Speaker 1:What a beautiful message to end it on. We can go through this together If we remove the stigma of the isolation and the shame. Jonathan, it was such a pleasure to have you on this call. I really feel deeply fulfilled in my heart. I feel the warmth that you bring as a human and thank you for your hard work and the research you've done and all the other books you've written we couldn't even touch on, but this is the one that, for me, has already changed things. I appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:I grasp the chance to be here because I feel, every time I spread this message, and every time you spread this message, I promise you there will be a listener out there at least one, maybe more than one who will say wait a minute.
Speaker 2:That applies to me, that explains something I've been feeling, that I've been worried about and that could lead them to you for some coaching. It could lead me, could lead them to me for my book, but it will lead them to a better place. So I'm grateful for the work you're doing, which is why I'm here. Thank you, jonathan.