How to Rewrite Your Story After a Life Quake with Bruce Feiler

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Rituals are one of the few things that we know work.
My core way of understanding this is that how we look at the
world effects how we look at ourselves.
Life is the story you can tell yourself and you can change it
for whatever reason, including that you just want to.
The key is to take control of the pen, take control of the

(00:21):
story. Be the hero of your own story.
Welcome to the Midlife ChrysalisPodcast with Chip Conley, where
we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time
of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful
chapter of your life. Welcome to the midlife

(00:41):
chrysalis. This is Chip Conley and wow,
Bruce Feiler is one of those people who is a bit of a hero of
mine because he's a first class noticer.
He goes out in the world, study something and then communicated
to other people in seven different New York Times

(01:02):
bestsellers. The Midlife chrysalis speaks to
this idea that we are going to transitions.
The chrysalis being the, yeah, in between stage of the
Caterpillar and the butterfly. Bruce wrote a book called Life
is in the Transitions. So we're going to go into some
depth about that in this podcast.
You may want to slow down your listening speed here on this one

(01:24):
because we go deep very quickly.He talks very quickly, and
there's a lot of content in thisone.
If you're going through any kindof transition in your life
today, this will be a gem. I hope you enjoy it.
Bruce Filer, thank you for joining us on The Midlife
Chrysalis. I'm honored to be here, My old

(01:45):
friend, my midlife friend. We, we were, we were midlife
friends, I think it's fair to say.
We have been going through midlife together.
We're going to talk about the midlife chrysalis in a minute
and about transitions. And, but let's also just start
knowing like this man, everybodywho's watching and listening to
this seven New York Times bestsellers, a wide variety of
books Walk in the Bible, the Council of Dads, the secrets of

(02:07):
happy families. Life is in the transitions.
What's a commonality amongst your books and, and amongst your
approach to determining what you're going to write about,
including your book that comes out this coming spring called
Rituals or it's, I don't know ifit's called rituals, but it's
about rituals. It's called a time to gather.
It's about rituals. Perhaps we'll talk about it now

(02:28):
and I hope we'll talk about it in the spring.
So to, you know, I'm a place person like I could one of the
other things I sort of like to ask people, you know, like like
are you a who a what a when, a where or why?
You know, like I'm a where person and like I'm the very
like defined by place person. So I come from Georgia.
I come from 5 generations of Jews in the South and I love

(02:53):
being southern, right? I love the stickiness of it.
I love the familiness of it. I love the storytelling this
other of it, but I grew up Jewish in the South, which meant
that I was a part of it, but I was apart from it at the same
time. I love being Jewish.
I love the familiness of it and the stickiness of it and the
storytelling miss of it. But I grew up Jewish in the

(03:15):
South, which is not only different from the long story of
the history of Jews going back, you know, 4000 years, but it's
also different from the the American Jewish stories.
I grew up a part of it and a part from it.
So I actually, if there's a commonality of my work, like
going back, you know, and just to put this into some context, I

(03:35):
sold my first book 36 years ago.How old are you, Bruce?
How old are you? I'm 60 years old.
OK, at 24. At 24, I saw my first book.
I've never held a job since, except for the year I spent as a
circus clown, as I think you just alluded to.
If, if not, then we, you know, don't start me.
If, if you start me telling circus stories, then we're
really going to be here for morethan an hour.

(03:55):
I can assure you. I can assure you of that.
So I I think of my life and so sort of the so I grew up in the
in Georgia. I left there, I went to Yale in
the 80s and I left there and I moved to Japan, like you sort of
drawn to travel and that experience.
And I am old enough so that I started writing letters home on

(04:16):
crinkly airmail paper. It's good that this is a show
about midlife because the kids today have no idea what that
meant. Like the letters were weighed by
the Oz and what you said, you know, mattered how much it cost.
And when I got back to Georgia six months later, everywhere I
went, people said, I love your letters.
And I was like, great, have we met?
And it turned out that my grandmother had Xeroxed them,

(04:37):
Speaking of old fashioned thingsand passed them around and they
went viral in the sort of OG sense of the word.
And I thought, well, if this is that interesting to me and to
all of these people, like, maybeI should write a book about
this. And I, it doesn't happen this
way. But I never met anybody who'd
ever written a book. And one thing led to another,
and I got an agent and I sold this book at 24.

(04:58):
And so in a lot of ways, what has united my work is I sort of
feel like I'm like a combinationof like two things.
On the one hand, I'm an experientialist, OK?
Like I grew up in the age of discount airfare like you.
Like, I when I wanted to learn about something, I got on a
plane and I went there and I tried to kind of immerse myself

(05:19):
in this world. On the one hand, I'm like good
at experiences going immersing. And then the other thing I'm
good had is that I've been drawnto all these years is coming out
and explaining to you what happened in that room where you
were not whether that was teaching junior high school in
Japan or joining the circus or climbing Mount Ararat or going

(05:40):
backstage at the Grand Ole Opry or you know what my work has
become more recently of trying to figure out how people
navigate the transitions in their lives whenever they occur.
So fundamentally, I think that that yeah, those are the two
things that drive my work and experience explaining.
And then also I've sort of thinkof myself as being bound by this

(06:04):
desire to sort of connect to thetime we're in, like what is
going on inside me that relates to things that are going inside
other people and this crazy way I live my life as I can go out.
So when I had kids and it was like, oh, how is it that
families operate? Like we're 100 years after Freud
and people are still confused. So let me go out and try to
answer that. And that's exactly what drove me

(06:26):
into the work that brought the two of us together.
You are a first class noticer. That's what I would say you you
are and you're an amazing storyteller.
And so I would just say, you know, for those who have not
read Bruce's books, highly recommend them.
You know, we're going to talk quite a bit today about his

(06:47):
newest book, which will come outin the spring and but but mostly
about life is in the transitionsbecause it's the one that
actually has the most commonality with MEA curriculum
and particularly relevant duringmidlife.
Although I knew. This was coming.
I mean, we're 4 minutes in. I knew it was going to come and
I was waiting to know when we were going to get to it.
No. It's good at me.
Let's be, let's be zesty. But I want to start with you,

(07:08):
though. So you went through some, you
went through your own midlife chrysalis or a chrysalis, you've
gone through many. Let's let's start by saying I
agree with you. The fact about the fact we don't
have a singular chrysalis moment.
We have many of them. You have coined the term life,
the word life quake, which I love and you went through at

(07:29):
least once in your life, a life quake.
You want to talk about your journey health wise, family
wise, financially and what you learn from it.
So this, you know, goes back in a way to the story where you
just started, right? So in the language that I've
come to think about the world in, I think of the life that I

(07:50):
had that began when I was 24 andsold Learning to Bow, my book
about teaching junior high school in Japan.
I think of it in a lot of ways as a linear life.
Like I figured out what I wantedto do early.
I did it for no money. Then I had some success in my
30s. I wrote this book, Walking the
Bible, which described this journey.
I went across 3 continents and five countries and four war

(08:11):
zones and it was the same thing.It grew out of an urge within
my, you know, within me, like, oh, I, I want to understand the
Bible. Like I haven't read it since I
was a kid and I wanted to, I wanted a book to help me and I
couldn't find it. And I'm like, Oh, I'm going to
go do this. I'm going to go be the
experientialist. I'm what I used to say was I'm
going to go join the Bible as ifit were the circus.
I didn't say that publicly, but that's really kind of what I

(08:33):
thought. And that book sort of became a
thing. It's been a year and a half on
the best seller list. I made ATV show about it.
That was seen by 20s of millionsof people and, and I got married
and I had children. Like I had that fantasy life to,
to go back to the world that yougrew up in.
It was sort of the hockey stick,right?
I like plodded along and then boom, it took off.
And that's the fantasy life thatwe all think that we want until

(08:58):
my 40s when my life blew up. So as you mentioned, 1st, 17
years ago, the month that we have this conversation, I was
diagnosed with a rare aggressiveform of bone cancer in my left
leg. At the time, I was the parent of
three-year old identical twin girls.
And Speaking of walking the Bible, I was sort of The Walking
guy and I couldn't walk like it was right there in my femur.

(09:22):
And there's something about thatthat still I can't entirely
explain, but yet that feels partof part of the story.
That was an O 8. That was the Great Recession.
My family owned a bunch of real estate in Georgia that all got
wiped out. 52 banks in the stateof in the state of Georgia went
went under. And then my dad who had
Parkinson's got very depressed, as you alluded to, and tried to

(09:43):
take his own life six times in 12 weeks.
So this was whatever it was. And I think a lot of, I think a
lot of what you're tapping into with MEA and your books and even
this podcast is what I felt, which was I was going through
something. What was that something?
And I think that, you know, I'm a, I'm a sort of a word guy and

(10:05):
a story guy. And it was the way I experienced
it was as I've lost control of my story and I had just spent,
I've written five books about the Bible.
Like I had been immersed in the origins of human storytelling
and I understood how central storytelling is to human life.
And yet I couldn't tell my own story.
And it was that disconnect that ultimately drew me in.

(10:27):
So I wasn't, you know, I sort offeel compelled almost to say
again, and I and and I know you and I've talked about this in
the past, but I wasn't looking for transitions.
I wasn't looking for life quakes.
I wasn't looking for midlife or whatever we want to call it.
I was looking for when we lose the plot of our story, how do we

(10:48):
recapture it, right? I mean, if everybody, if
everybody listening to us stops for a second and listened to
that thing in your head, right? If you got cold summit to the
hospital right now from a loved one, what would a story would
run through your head, right? When there's a change in your
life, when you when you get stuck, when you propel forward,
when you when you try something new that is fundamentally a

(11:10):
narrative event like life. Life is the story that you tell
yourself in almost every way that we can imagine it.
That's what we've learned now through brain science in the
last 25 years. But what happens when we lose
control of that? And this time that that happened
to me and to my father and to everyone I know.
Like I had this feeling at the time that was sort of like

(11:32):
everybody seemed to be saying the same thing.
And by the way, this was seven years ago.
And I think it's your life in the last five years shows as
much as anybody's on planet Earth, it's even greater now
than it was seven years ago whenI first had this idea.
It's this idea that my life is off track or off kilter or off
schedule. Like somehow the life I'm living

(11:53):
is not the life I expected to live.
And I would say if there's kind of one thing to put a, to put a
bumper sticker on that I've learned in the last seven years
is that the problem is not your life.
The problem is the expectations you had of your life.
We've been fed wrong expectations and that gap
between our expectations of the reality is the cause of a lot of
the, I don't know, the trauma and the unused that we have.

(12:15):
Disappointment equals expectations minus reality.
An emotional equation of mine from long ago.
You know, Brené Brown calls it the midlife unraveling.
And you know, it's, it's the time in one's life when you
start to unravel these expectations, obligations,
success scripts that you've had and you realize they're not

(12:36):
yours. It's not your script.
It's not your, it's not your story that you're telling.
You're telling your parents story or your community story or
your spouse's story. You have a beautiful quote.
I wanna, I wanna quote you from your book Life is in the
Transitions. That speaks to this idea of a
story. And then I'm gonna let you talk
about that a little bit further,as well as your story when you
went through that time in your 40s.
We have a choice in how we tell our life story.

(12:59):
We do not write it in permanent ink.
There are no points for consistency or even accuracy.
We can change it at any time forany reason, including one as
simple as making ourselves feel better.
After all, a primary function ofour life story is to allow us to
place experiences firmly in the past and take from them

(13:20):
something beneficial that will allow us to thrive in the
future. Only when that happens will we
know our transition is complete.What a beautiful paragraph from
your book. Life is in the Transitions.
How did you know when you went through that life Quake time in
your 40s that your transition was complete?

(13:43):
So this is an interesting question I had.
I had AI had a a friend over forlunch yesterday.
She is a was a very prominent podcaster read LED a very high
profile organization and she just recently went through one
of these experiences where she left an organization, went out
on her own and she came to see me and when we had lunch

(14:08):
yesterday, a lovely lunch, talking about change and life
and reinvention and and and yet yet keeping with the old at the
same time. And she said, I read Life is in
the Transitions when it first came out, but I recently started
listening to it on audio. And at the time, it was funny
that she said this because we were we were sitting in our
dining room here in Brooklyn, over the closet in the Airbnb,

(14:32):
My friend from Airbnb downstairs, where I recorded the
audio because Life is in the Transitions was supposed to come
out in May of 2020. And you remember this because we
were connecting at the time and no bookstore was open.
We shut we we pulled the thing. And when we had this big old
from, you know, complicated conversation of when should we

(14:53):
bring it out? And finally, my editor said,
let's bring it out. People need this book.
And we brought it out in July 2020, which then sent me into
my. So they sent the kits to me.
I hung blankets on the wall and started doing this recording.
And my daughters were my twin daughters at the time were in
refreshment in high school. Now they're now they're juniors

(15:15):
in college. When they would leave to like go
get lunch or go to the water, they would on the floor and I
would hear it. I'm like, stop, I'm trying to
record this audio. But what she said was that this
figure in the book jumped out inthe audio that she hadn't
remembered when she read it because she needed at the at the
moment. And what I and, and I'm sort of
we're, we're sort of plunging into the middle without going

(15:37):
through the whole thing of what I did, which we can come back
to. But I will say that the
signature piece of data from thework I've done on transitions
and collecting life stories, it's now been 500 life stories
in the last seven years, which I've coded and analyzed.
In fact, now a team at Stanford has just taken them and they're
turning them into a large language model to try to help
all of us navigate live transition.

(15:59):
This is new since I last talked to you, but the signature piece
of data is it takes five years. But that most people, when
obviously I'm talking to people who did it, but most people say,
hey, that they get through these.
That is the thing about it. And it goes back to the thing
that you read in the quote. You can say it's a mind trick.
You can say it's science. You can say it's, it's

(16:19):
resilience, another word that I'm grumpy about.
But the truth is, is that we getthrough these periods.
That is the power of the the event like the life quake,
right, which is the moment of disruption.
It's the event. The transition is the human
response to the event. And in some ways, if you want to

(16:41):
ask me, the number one thing I learned is that you cannot
control the life quake. About half of them are
voluntary, but about half of about half of them are
involuntary and half of them arevoluntary.
It's 57% are involuntary and 43%are, are voluntary.

(17:02):
Now, I looked at that at the time and I thought, oh, we're
getting the idea of the nonlinear life.
You can choose to make change, right?
What's the difference, right? An involuntary life quake is, is
a, is a, a diagnosis, right? Or a natural disaster, right?
Or being laid off from a job or a recession or a pandemic.

(17:22):
But a voluntary life quake is you choose to leave an
organization, right? You choose to leave a marriage,
you choose to stop drinking or whatever it might be, right?
An involuntary life quake is your spouse cheats on you.
A voluntary life quake is you cheat on your spouse, right?
So I looked at this and I thought, oh, we've been, we're
embracing the opportunities of the non linear life because 43%

(17:45):
of us are choosing life quakes that bring change in our lives.
And whenever they happen. I had a bunch of, at the time,
millennials who were helping me code these stories and they're
like, wait, 57% are involuntary?You mean I can't control my
life? Because we all, when we're in
our 20s, we make these like, youknow, we have these things that
we read about in in undergraduate textbooks that say

(18:06):
we're going to have this and we're going to have this and
we're going to do things on cycle.
Well, that turns out not to be how we live.
Back to a question I asked you aminute ago, though, how do you
know when a transition is complete?
And we're going to go through your seven, the seven stages or
the seven tools for transition in a moment maybe or maybe this
is the time to do it because maybe, maybe these seven tools

(18:29):
help you to understand at what stage you are within a
transition with these three stages.
Do you want you want to go to the go there, Bruce, or do you
want to actually tell us a little bit more about your own
story? Well, I guess I, I mean, I'll
answer your question then we cango back and unpack because we,
we jumped into the middle perhaps a little bit too deeply,
too quickly. But I'm part of me wants to say

(18:50):
that the transition is over whenyou decide to go into it.
That feels a little bit like, like an argument.
But I do think that the key stepis to decide you're ready to go
into the transition when you begin to sort of say I'm going
to exert some control over the life quake in this situation.
Once once you do that, you're going to get through it.
I feel extremely confident. So part of me, if I'm being sort

(19:12):
of, you know, too clever by half, I would say the minute
it's over is the minute you decide to change your story and
to begin to go through the transition.
But I think if you want to be somewhat so let's just say
technical about it, I think it'sover once you move it from the
present tense to the past tense.There's this thing that happens
when you were telling people about it.

(19:34):
When you say I'm in it, I'm stuck or I'm just getting
started or I'm a little bit confused or I'm beginning to see
the end. There will be a moment and it,
it would be an interesting thingto I, I don't remember coding
for this, but it would be an interesting thing to know.
There is a moment when you startsaying not this is something
that's happening to me, but thisis something that happened to

(19:54):
me. And that's the moment that it's
over. Once you've turned the page,
once you were telling a different kind of story, once
you've made pigs fly, which is my phrase for it, which is once
you've made the happy ending, atthat moment, it's over.
It doesn't mean you're never going to be out of it.
Because I think a big, a big theme of mine is that we spend
half of our lives in transition.So we have to stop.

(20:16):
Stigmatizing the difficult period to try to get back to the
stable period, because if we do that, we're ruining half of our
lives. And let's recognize that they're
normal and natural. I think one of the things that
happens for a lot of people and,and my, my frame on it is in
midlife, but it, you know, it could be in all of life, is that
we somehow think we're the only one going through this.
And men in particular, because women are so much more

(20:40):
socialized to actually talk withtheir friends, family members,
whomever about what they're going through and being
vulnerable about it. So, you know, for a lot of men,
you know, they go through the quiet desperation of thinking
like, I'm an idiot because my libido is going down.
I'm an idiot because I have a prostate cancer diagnosis.
I'm an idiot because I think I'mgoing to lose my job.

(21:00):
I'm an idiot because I'm a bad father and I don't care about my
kids having now left the home and my wife is freaking out
about empty nests and I'm sort of happy about it.
And you know, but we, but men just don't talk about this stuff
and therefore they think that something's wrong with them.
That is a story I would put in the past tense, but I do think

(21:21):
that that is something that for sure defined a lot of men and
defined masculinity for a very long time.
I think it's breaking down. I'm, I happen to be taping a
podcast right now with someone who has been very open about his
prostate cancer diagnosis and who invites people to come to
safe spaces and have vulnerable conversations.

(21:43):
I have heard from, I would almost say hundreds of men
who've been through your, you know, echosphere who've come to
my work with transitions or workor whatever it is to say thank
you for being a man standing openly.
I wrote a book called The Secrets of Happy Families.
I'm married to a woman, Linda Rotenberg, who runs an
organization called Endeavour that supports high impact

(22:05):
entrepreneurs in 50 countries around the world.
And I have joked for years that when we would go to PTA meetings
or to social events, the men come up to her for stock tips
and the women come up to me for ironing tips, right?
So it's like, so there are, we are, we are in the process of
flipping this dynamic, right? And if you look, and I wrote a
book called Council of Dads thatgrew out of the fact that my

(22:25):
children were three and were at risk of losing their father.
And I asked a group of men to bepresent in the lives of my
children. And I called this group of men
the Council of Dads, which became a Ted Talk, which became
a documentary on CNN, which became a prime time television
series on NBC. And that's normalizing that.

(22:46):
If you look at the data as you know, men in their 50s or more
involved in parenting than men in their 60s, men in their 40s
more than men in their 50s, men in their 30s more than men in
their 40s. There is a massive change that's
going on. The expectations that society
attaches to all of these successnarratives are still dated.

(23:07):
But what I, you know, a lot of what I'm trying to do is change
those narratives. And I would say that the number
one way that people respond to this work I've been doing now
for all these years, life is 10 transitions was a book.
It was also a Ted talk. I teach a Ted course called How
to Master the life transitions. I've done a lot of work with

(23:28):
your team to, to build these courses that you've brought to
so many people. And the number one reaction
people have to my work, and thisis a technical term, is like
you've put words on these feelings that I have that I
didn't know. There were words like
back-to-back to Linda likes to say of me, like I have hard
knowledge about soft things. And what's interesting about the

(23:48):
reaction to this book, which I didn't fully expect, is I was
giving a talk about this in Toledo recently and this came up
like I got data, like I ran the numbers and we crunched the
numbers and that gives men, interestingly enough, more
permission to accept us. So.
Take us through the seven tools that help people to understand

(24:09):
where they are in their transition, as well as the
coping mechanisms that go along with each because they very much
match our MEA anatomy of a transition point of view.
So let's go back in the story. So I was in this thing that I
didn't know what it was and I quite literally was at a 30th
college reunion and I called Linda and I was like, people,

(24:29):
people are stuck and they know what don't know what to do when
I want to do something to help. What I did was I created this
thing that I now call the Life Story Project, that as I said,
in the last seven years I've collected and analyzed 500 life
stories of Americans of all ages, all walks of life, people
who lost limbs and lost homes and changed careers and changed
genders and got sober and got out of bad marriages.

(24:50):
And I crunched these numbers over many years.
I've the first book that came out of this is Life is in the
Transitions. The second is the search on how
to navigate work transitions. And this new book I've been
doing with Life Rituals uses some of this data.
And I would say just quickly I learned three things #1 the
linear life is dead. The idea that we're all going to

(25:12):
have the same one job, you know,1 sexuality, one relationship,
one home from adolescence to assisted living, which is the
dominant way that most people were raised in the 20th century.
That idea is deader than ever. So #1 the linear life is dead #2
the non linear life involves many more life transitions.

(25:34):
So my data show that each of us goes through three dozen of what
I call disruptors in the course of our lives.
OK. I just, that's one every 12 to
18 months. That's more often than most
people see a dentist. So for some, it could be a, it
could be as small as a Fender Bender or a twisted ankle or as
big as losing a loved one or a global pandemic.

(25:56):
Most of these we navigate prettywell.
We're actually pretty good at dealing with change.
But one in 10 becomes what I call a life quake, right?
So what is a life quake? It's a massive burst of change
that leads to confusion, but also reimagining and then also
renewal. And it's that process.
That's the chrysalis that you talk about is the essence of
what goes on in there. And so that then leads to the

(26:18):
third thing, which is and, and as I said, the, the, the average
length of them is five years, OK, So you do three to five life
quakes in our lives. Four, 5-6 years they take.
That's 25 years. That's half of our adult lives.
We are in transition. You or someone you know is in a
life quake right now, which leads to the third, which is the

(26:39):
transitions are a skill that we can and must master.
OK, so that's sort of the big thing about it.
We can talk about, you know, whatever you want.
We're going to get into the tools here.
But a lot of it is why we had this misconception, why we
believed in the linear life. That's where in some ways, this
little bit of conflict between us comes in, which is where the

(27:01):
whole idea of midlife comes from.
But let's put that off stage fora second.
Maybe we'll just keep teasing itand we'll do it at the end of
this conversation. Welcome back to you exactly.
So you're in a life quake. The key decision, as we
discussed, is affirmative decision to go into the life
transition. So now what?
Because what happens? And you know this, you know

(27:22):
better than anybody that I know,people tend to do one of two
things when they get into a lifequake.
Either they make a 212 item To Do List and say I'm going to do
it in the weekend and I'm going to get a blue ribbon and I'm
going to be the the best it everwas.
And I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to pat myself on the
back and I'm going to be, I'm going to kill it.
Or they lie under the covers in the fetal position with a cat

(27:44):
and they say I'm never going to get through it.
And woe is me. And I'm stuck.
And no one ever, ever been with this.
OK, I, I won't do a show of hands for people listening.
They'll take your hands off the wheel if you're in a car.
But everybody fits. Both of these are wrong.
And they're wrong because to a certain extent they involve both
and various iterations. So that again, this is where my
data show very clear that they do fall into a structure.

(28:08):
OK, it is a three-part structure.
I know you and I have some similarities and some
differences in our three-part structure.
But for me, the three parts are one is the long goodbye that's
accepting that you're in it doing things to market.
We can get into the tools with that.
Then there's this thing that I called the the messy middle in
the in transitions when it came out.

(28:28):
And then there's the third stage, which is what I call the
new beginning. But here's the actual the thing
that's most important about this.
And that is when Arnold van den of the anthropologist who first
invented the phrase rites of passage in 19 O 9.
When he first talked about the idea that it was a sort of a
three-part structure, he insisted, as did Bill Bridges in

(28:48):
the 1979 book Transition. He they both insisted that you
must do these and orders. That's a lie that first you say
goodbye, then you have the messymetal, then that's a total lie.
Life is non linear. Life transitions are non linear.
Basically everybody is good at one of these faces and
everybody's bad at one of these phases.

(29:08):
And so my advice has been from the very beginning, like start
with where you're good at. So if you're good at making
list, if you're good at the messy middle, that's great.
Start there. That doesn't mean you're not
going to have to go back and deal with the emotional turmoil
and maybe even the wreckage and the shame or whatever you felt.
You're going to have to do that because if you go right in the
middle of the end, you're going to, it's going to frustrate you

(29:29):
and other people. If you're emotional and you
don't want to turn the page and you're stuck, fine, start there.
But you are going to need to move to the list making and the
experimenting that comes in the messy metal.
So that's the first thing that there is a structure.
And then I do think that there are these tools, and again, I'm
going to do them kind of in order, but I want to say clearly
I'm doing air quotes, if you're listening to us, is that they're

(29:51):
not in order, that there is no order, OK, That what we're
talking about here is a set of things that will help you.
OK. So the two that are associated
with the long goodbye are #1 accept it, OK.
And by the way, any 12 step program, the first one is
accepted, OK. I mean, and I looked, I mean,
here's a very simple question toacceptance.

(30:11):
Let me ask you, OK, You've just you, you, you've been through a
lot of these things. You talk about them all, you
know, openly and have led the way in this conversation.
God bless you for that. Well, let's just talk about the,
the, the medical thing, OK? And I are both cancer survivors
and have been very open about that.
And what was the biggest emotionyou struggled with when that
first happened? The disbelief, like the big C

(30:34):
word applies to me like no, I sothat the lack of accepting it,
to be honest, the opposite, the opposite of that is the lack of
accepting I. How do we, how, how do you know
that? Like, you know, so there was a
disbelief. So I've looked hundreds,
hundreds of people in the eye and these are the top 3 answers.

(30:55):
Number one, fear. How am I going to get through
this? What's going to happen to me?
How am I going to live without this person?
How am I going to live without? How am I going to live without
this job? How am I going to recover
because all my belongings have been, have been destroyed when
the hurricane took the roof off of my house or the OR the
tornado did #1 fear #2 sadness. I liked having that job, OK, I
liked being with my children until they went off with with

(31:17):
college, OK. I liked having my legs before
one had to get removed in an operation or an accident and I
can't walk anymore. I'm just sad.
I'm just weighed down by it. The third, I mentioned it
earlier because I'm sure that itcomes up in a lot of your work
at NEA, is shame. I'm ashamed, by the way, and I
thought it would be gendered andit's not gender.
I'm ashamed of what I did when Idrank too much.

(31:38):
I'm ashamed that my child has ananxiety disorder.
I'm ashamed that I was always the, the, the, the breadwinner
and now I have to go ask family or friends for help or a spouse
or a child or whatever it might be.
This is an emotional experience.You cannot deny it.
And if you're not starting with what are the emotions, then
you're not fully either recognizing the pain that you're

(32:00):
in or opening yourselves up for the opportunity of the renewal
and reinvention that could come out of it.
So number one is accepted. Accepted.
And I would add something there because as you asked me that
question about cancer, I gave you my honest answer, which is
not in the top three. But I think I wonder, and I'm
going to ask you, I wonder if itdepends on the kind of

(32:21):
transition you're going through.This, I would say, is the number
one change that I went through in the course of this project.
And I remember one of the smartest people I know to be
another Time magazine and the big international consultant.
Now he's in the original Councilof dads.
He said, OK, here's an idea. Here's what you're going to do.
You're not going to do one book.You're going to do a lot of
small books. And one's going to be on health

(32:41):
and one's going to be on relationships and one's going to
be on work and one's going to beon identity, whatever it
whatever it was. Then my, you know, I have all
these different 99 different things people go through.
I would say the biggest change that I went through is that it's
not fundamentally different. It's not different between
voluntary and involuntary. It's not different between
health and emotion. Because if you say, left a job

(33:01):
to start a new venture, you don't think people who do that
are afraid. They are afraid.
What if it doesn't work? OK.
You don't think that they're that they have to give up, that
they're a little sad that they gave up status, that their
mother is giving them a hard time or, or that they're
disappointing a parent. I mean, that is you.
You said that and I almost jumped out of this chair.
Like, you're absolutely right. The people try to live other

(33:26):
people's stories and they want to be the hero of someone else's
narrative. And the key agreed in here is to
be the hero of your own narrative.
And that's incredibly complicated.
And you have to fundamentally disappoint somebody.
And people are afraid to do that.
And so even voluntary transitions.
Absolutely. You know, include this include,

(33:48):
I failed as a spouse, I'm ashamed of what I did.
I want to have a better relationship in the future, but
that relationship is not going to be as good if you do not go
through the process of acceptingthe shame you feel about your
role in the failures of the first.
You'll just repeat it. We all know that.
Let's go on to tool #2. A market and you know, and that
that's connected to the ritual thing that I've been doing the

(34:08):
last couple years is that peopledo things to signal to
themselves or to other people that they're going through a
change, right. It there's it's almost like a
manifestation of it. You know, living people jump, I
mean, I mean, do things, I mean like jump out of airplanes, you
know, go to sweat lodges, go to MEA conferences.
They do thing burn candle. They do things that are rituals

(34:33):
that and, and the way I've understood it now in this book
I've written about rituals that we'll tease one more time and
talk about later perhaps, is what are rituals?
Rituals are ways of bringing people together to collectively
mark and rebuild after a you know, rituals are shared
collective experiences that makeus feel at home.

(34:55):
That's my sort of working definition of rituals, having
spent three years going to rituals in six continents in 16
countries. And I think that's what this is.
This is I've been alone dealing with my emotions.
And so now what I'm going to do is do a collective thing to
signal to everybody that this isa change.

(35:17):
And so that's the second one. It's market.
So it's to market, so, so not MARKETMARK space.
Space IT, yes. So let's talk about this one and
and let's give you some chance to talk about the new book at
this point, because here's one of my biases.
And that is that we have, because we've added more than 30

(35:38):
years of additional life since the year 1900 in the United
States. And the global side of this is
even more. You know, we've more than
doubled life expectancy in the last 125 years globally because
many of the kinds of transitionswe go through after age 40,
let's say, are modern in their derivation, you know, divorce or

(36:04):
changing a career or even retiring, to be honest with you,
you know, farmers didn't retire.It feels like we are really
lacking in the rites of passage that help people to mark a, the
ending, the, the long goodbye ofsomething that they're moving on

(36:25):
to and they aren't getting the community support as a result.
And whether it's an empty nest party or a divorce party or a
menopause party or I had a prostate removal, a radical
prostatectectomy dinner party with some friends where we
talked about, you know, are prostates, which men don't
usually talk about a lot until they're about 70 years old.
And then they talk about it way too much.

(36:46):
Organ Recitals. Organ recitals.
My dad used to love to say that,yeah, my age, everything is an
organ recital. So would would you agree that we
as a society have done a very poor job of helping people in
the middle of their life find the rituals collectively or even
personally to mark the transition into from, you know,

(37:08):
the long goodbye to the messy middle?
Well, there's two parts of that.My short answer is society
failed to do that. And so everyday people are
stepping up, which is the sourceof the, the, the, the ritual
renaissance that we're in right now.
And I think that that's, that's the short answer.
The long answer is I became an empty nester two years ago.
We dropped our kids, we became afull nest from empty nest to

(37:31):
full nest originally in 32 minutes because we have
identical daughters. And then we became an empty nest
in 32 minutes to the other end when we dropped them off at
college and and came back home. And I walked through the front
door of the house where I'm talking to you now in Brooklyn.
And I had this feeling I've never had before, which is I
felt homesick in my own home. And I realized that I was in
this moment of change. I thought, oh, I've been ready

(37:52):
for this. I've written two books about
transitions. Like, if anybody's ready for
this, I ought to be ready for this.
And what I realized was that life is in the transitions, and
even the search about work were basically about individuals and
how we handle them as individuals.
And that where I was was, oh, all the relationships in my life
need to be redefined. My father had died at this

(38:14):
point. My mother was aging.
My children have gone to college.
My marriage needs to be redefined.
Yeah, so. And I realized, oh, I wasn't in
a life quake. I was in a group quake and then
I realized, Oh, I had this instinct just I just talked to
you about markup. I know what I need.
I need a ritual. And so I sort of went out left
walk through that same door a few weeks ago, going to look for
a ritual and I stumbled into this amazing story, which I will

(38:36):
just, you know, mentioned briefly and and and we we, we,
we, we can talk about it closer to when the book comes out.
But then basically, rituals are one of the few things that we
know work and every culture for 100 centuries, that's 10,000
years we've ever been studied. People use collective ceremonial
life occasions to mark moments of instability and change.

(38:57):
When people come into a group, Amarriage or a birth, when people
leave a group coming of age or, you know, a death, when there's
a sickness or something, we basically remake the group and
reconstitute the group through acollective ritual.
And that's happened for 100 centuries until this century
when we are turning our backs onthem.
People are not having birth children and they're not having
birth rituals. OK, Adolescent rituals are a

(39:18):
total chaos right now and peopleare not getting married.
As I don't have to tell you in 19, sixty, 90% of Americans were
adults were married. Now it's under 50% for the first
time and no one's having funerals.
It's a story that's very little told.
But in 1975% of Americans were cremated.
Now it's 65%, going to 80% in the next 20 years.

(39:39):
And only one in five cremated people has a funeral.
So traditional life rituals we are abandoning, we are turning
our backs on one of the few things that we know hold this
together. And yet at the same time, there
has been this explosion of new rituals like we, we, we're in a
celebration recession. And then we are now in this
ritual renaissance where people like you are saying top down

(40:01):
institutionally mandated pre scripted rituals have failed us.
So I'm going to script my own. I'm going to have a prostate
removal or a mastectomy ritual or a crooning ritual is
something that you hear, you know, women of a certain age do.
And these all happen. But these are conflict yet
again. It's not just people who were
older where I agree with you what's happening.
It's also people that are younger.

(40:22):
And as you say, a lot of these are shadow rituals.
So not just, you know, not just marriage, but divorce, not just
fertility, but infertility, OK, not just first menopause, but
last menopause, all of these things.
There's a sort of a series of shadow rituals and extraordinary
celebrations around every changein life.
Because pretty much whatever theproblem that we've got, whether

(40:44):
it's loneliness, ritual is the answer, polarization ritual is
the answer, dehumanization ritual is the answer.
And so the book I've written is I went on this two year round
the world ritual road trip. I went to rituals in six
continents in 16 countries, someof which I emailed you from in
real time, including adolescent tooth filing in Bali, you know,

(41:06):
group baptism in the Vatican, a traditional wedding in tribal
wedding in South Africa, 6 weddings in a day in Vegas, and
10 funerals in a week in Ireland, and lots more in
between. And I've written a book called A
Time to Gather, how ritual Created the world and how it can
save us. That'll be out in May 2026.
And let's let's put a pin in andtalk about it.

(41:27):
Then we will definitely upon thelaunch definitely help you with
that because just like we did when, when Life is in the
transitions came out, we had we had a good conversation with our
community. You know, there's a guy named
Melodoma Somay who recently passed away not long ago.
In the middle of COVID, he mighthave been of COVID, I don't
know. It was definitely during COVID
2021. I think it.

(41:48):
Was yeah, I don't know. But what I do know is that he
defined the difference between routine and ritual, as in a
ritual you're willing to be altered, whereas in a routine,
frankly, you don't want to be altered.
I think that's for me, one of the ways I look at it when
someone's saying like, OK, well,is it a routine?
Is it a ritual? Well, ritual can be personal.

(42:09):
You can do it on your own. Like, it doesn't have to be
collective. I think collective makes it even
better because you have this social support at a time when
you're going through a transition.
But, you know, unfortunately, you know, in, in our American
sort of parlance of this, you hear the word ritual and somehow
you think like, OK, like drinking Kool-aid in Jay in, in

(42:31):
Jonestown, Like there's it's sort of Satanic.
There's a Satanic ritual. Did you get any impression in
the writing of this book that ritual, the idea of ritual,
needs to be renewed in the senseof the upside of ritual?
I think it is being renewed. I think that one of the powerful
things is that it's is that it'sthat it's happening bottom up

(42:53):
from the grassroots, redefined by people.
I think that, you know, that I in in the work I've done with
spirituality over the decades I've been in this, you know,
there I have sort of a big thingthat I believe in is that there
is this idea of creation and destruction and recreation,
right. That's the story of the
Israelites leaving Egypt and going into the desert and going

(43:13):
through a period of destruction and then coming out and, and,
and, and, you know, and buildingthe people of Israel that that
there there's a reason that Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and
and, and the Buddha, everybody, you know, goes to this period
where they go in the wilderness and they come back.
So that's a, a common theme and that's what I think is going on
now. We broke away from tradition.
We rejected the prescripts. And by the way, there's a lot of

(43:34):
reasons to defend the traditionsand a lot of reasons to
understand and accept the idea that the traditions forced a
bunch of painful changes on people that they did not want.
And now what's happening is the people are taking back the reins
and they're saying and I there'sa quote in in the conclusion of
my book. I mentioned to you by e-mail
recently that one of the biggestchallenges I have to to try to

(43:56):
figure out which melodomas are made quote to use because he's
as wise a writer on this as I have encountered.
And I've read three of his beautiful books on this topic.
There's a quote from a young ritual designer who's a
millennial and just, you know, my generation, we want them when
we want them and we don't care if it offends our parents and
we're going to do them and we'regoing to take the controls.
And that's really what's going on is the people are saying, I

(44:19):
wanted there is value in it. And if I declare myself in need
of a ritual, I'm going to createa ritual to meet it.
So I think that one of the, I think that ritual is what you
say about Jonestown shouldn't beignored because ritual is so
effective. It can be effective in gangs and
terrorists and cults to get people to do destructive things.
But just because it can be used negatively, like almost any

(44:41):
technology and ritual was the original human technology.
Ritual predate civilization by quite literally hundreds of
thousands of years. The first thing we did as a
species in some ways that distinguished us from our
ancestor was was buried, was buried the dead.
So we were doing rituals long before organized religion.
We'll be doing them long after organized religion.
But they are effective and they can be used for destruction, but

(45:04):
they far more often and far moreeffectively are used to bring
people together. Beautiful.
All right, let's go to we said, except it's number one in terms
of the seven tools of transition#2 is market.
And we talked about rituals and some depth.
Let's go to #3 as we move into the messy metal.
Well, let's talk about the we'lltalk about those two as a pair,
which I think will help us do ita little bit more efficiently.

(45:27):
And, and the first is shed is that people shed habits.
Some they shed reluctantly. Oh, I used to have dinner with
my loved one every night and they're, they're not there or
because they're dead or they're not there because they went to
college or they're not there because we got divorced or
whatever it might be. But they also, and I think it's
worth saying now you have the involuntary, they also

(45:47):
voluntarily shed things. I talked to a woman who've been
through, you know, who went through a, a divorce, a cancer
diagnosis and a career change ina very narrow wind of time.
And she said the thing that she said was coming home from an
unhappy day to an unhappy home and opening the fridge and
eating whatever she saw. And so she finally stopped yo-yo
dieting and she lost 60 lbs. So.
So we shed things. That's another form of shedding.

(46:09):
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. That's good.
That's good. So we shed things.
And what that does, it opens up for to me.
And somebody's the thing I was most surprised by, but but maybe
I shouldn't have been, which is astonishing acts of creativity.
And I don't mean creativity in the kind of thinking outside the
box way. I mean actual creativity, like

(46:30):
painting. I talked to a woman who was in a
faculty scandal of Emory. She started painting birdhouses.
I talked to a woman who, you know, retired from many years
teaching chemistry in Alabama and she start, she went and
pulled the ballet, the the ballet slippers out of the back
and, and started doing adult ballet.
And she walked, I'm going to do point on day one and I have two
dancers for children. Like, OK, they're not.

(46:51):
Let's just work on this a littleslowly.
So I mean, I talked to, you know, one of my one of my heroes
in life. Actually, there's a guy named
Zach Herrick and I should write about him on my ritual book
because I met him on a on a wounded warriors trip to Lourdes
when I was making APBS series onpilgrimages around the world.
Zach is a was a black child adopted by a white family in

(47:15):
Kansas wandered through his lifejoin the military, end up in
Afghanistan and had his face blown off by the Taliban. 31
surgeries between the tip of hisnose and the tip of his chin,
including having his tongue sewnback on suicide ideation
depressed everything. His mother had to move near
Walter Reed to help him. And she said, you know, Zach,
you're going to have to relearn how to eat, right because of

(47:37):
his, you know, oral cavity had been reconstructed.
And he started to cook, OK Then he started to write poetry, and
then he started to paint. And he said, you know, that guy
who splatters paint on the wall?I mean, like Jackson Pollock, He
said, yeah, I used to splatter the enemy with bullets, and now
I splatter the canvas with paint.
Zach gets married, runs a solar energy company in Virginia.

(47:58):
And that to me is the power of creativity.
You know, you mentioned the the pandemic and my book came out in
the summer of 2020. What was the number one cliche?
What was the number one cliche of what everybody did during the
pandemic, right? They baked, right?
We're going to we're we're goingto sourdough our way through it.
I may have been the least surprised person in America

(48:19):
because the act of just that little thing, getting your hands
messy, putting it in dough. Remember the race to find the
starter? Or, you know, could you mask and
take 10 feet apart and get the starter from your neighbor?
That little act of putting your hands in something and making a
loaf of bread. It was like, oh, I can make
something new. Maybe I can make myself a new.
It's, it's, it's back to the thing that we're talking about,

(48:39):
the ritual. It's the manifestation.
And it and it's agency. It's the the idea of autonomy
agency and the getting into the flow of creativity.
Yes, love it. So those are the two things,
right? And, and, and by the way, you
know, when we turn to the last and we can turn that because in
the new beginning and then we'llcome back to the third one, but
the new beginning has 2. So there's sort of two, two and
two. And then there's a floater is

(49:02):
basically, you know, updating your story and unveiling your
new self, right. That's so we talked about the
beginning. You were asking me when do we
know that it's over? We know then when you're ready
to tell the story. And that brings us you bring up
agency. I I just.
And that's share it. That's number five.
That's share it, no. No, No 5 is the floaters.
That's that's OK. That's.

(49:24):
Six launch it. Yeah, 6 is unveil your new self
and then then tell it is 7 I think, right, But share it.
If I'll just talk about that andwe'll come back to the
storytelling in a second. I I say this is the floater
because I have it 5 but it it really can happen.
As you mentioned, different people with different
phenotypes. Some people want to share from
the beginning and it's the one that happens really not

(49:45):
connected to the, to the three stages of the the long goodbye,
the messy middle and the new beginning and the essence there
is don't go through it alone. Right back to the ritual thing
that is, is find someone to tellit to.
But I would say about the share it is people like different,
like some people just want to bejust want they want huggers.

(50:06):
I love you, Chip. You'll get through it.
I believe in you. You're the best.
You know, that's a hugger. Some people like nudgers like I
I I love you, Chip, but you really been in a little rut
here. You're just telling the same
thing that maybe you need to getoff the couch and do this or
maybe you need to think about doing that, or maybe you need to
take this course or maybe you need to go to NBA or whatever.
Then there are people who like slappers in the figure of when I

(50:29):
did this for my God, when I did this for Ted, the lawyers.
You can't say slapping anyway. It's the sort of meth.
It's the sort of metaphoric saying, OK, Chip, enough of
yourself. OK, it's time you need to go do
a a it's time to actually launchthat business and stop talking
about it like, you know, jump oror or or come back on land.
So the point is before, if you're the, if you're sharing it

(50:49):
and if you're the person that's being, it's being shared with, I
almost think like ask before youadvise, what would you like?
I used to say to my kids when they were my kids would like,
show me something when they werelike 12 or 13 And I would say,
what do you, you want me to tellyou how good it is?
Do you want me to tell you how to make it better?
Right. And we sort of like, so do you
just want me to listen to you and tell me I love you?
And you know that whole manner from Mars.
You know that the, the we went from Venus thing from 30 years

(51:10):
ago. And I, but I do think it's
people like different things andthey want different things
depending on where they are and what kind of person you know
that and what kind of advice they respond to.
First of all, the the model for life is in the transitions and
the seven tools are very helpful.
The three stages very helpful let's now unpack the argument

(51:31):
around midlife. So the argument we've had, not
argument, but the debate we've had over time is you, you've
said pretty clearly to me that, you know, Chip, you're focused
on midlife, but it's happening throughout all of life.
And I, I agree with you. I, I, and the question is, is,
you know, with EU curve of happiness, which obviously has

(51:51):
been changing and young, young adults are less happy than they
used to be. It's it the, the actual visual
of EU curve is, is changed in the last couple of years.
But there seems to be around 4040 in one's 40s or early 50s,
a time when people are going through more life quakes.
Maybe it's due to the life stages.

(52:12):
Maybe it's due to the disappointment equals
expectations minus reality. 30s you're not disappointed yet, but
by 45 you say, like, I did not marry my soul mate.
I am not going to be president of the United States.
I'm not going to, you know, climb Mount Everest.
I'm not saying that there's not a midlife crisis.
I'm just saying there's not a midlife crisis, right?
I'm not saying that people in midlife don't experience this.

(52:34):
I'm not saying that you who are a legendary builder and, and in
some ways I always think of you in this way is that you are that
what you're doing and building is not real because it's very,
very clear. What I'm saying is we need to
understand first of all, the origin of this idea and this
term, and we need to appreciate that is happening everywhere.
I don't need to tell you that there are books on, you know,

(52:54):
the, the quarter life crisis is now a thing in your 20s.
And, and we also know lots of people.
My 88 1/2 year old mother, you know, is dealing with things.
So I, I, I want to be clear whatI'm saying and I'm, I'm not
saying don't do what you're doing.
In fact, I celebrated and have been partnered with you on any
number of things. Let's go back to what actually
happened, OK? And why I why I think it's

(53:17):
important to have this conversation, even if it's some
people might not be hearing it for the first time, because I
think a lot of people are. My core way of understanding
this is that how we look at the world effects how we look at
ourselves. So in the ancient world, there
was no linear time. There were no clocks.
There was no idea life was a cycle to every season, turn,

(53:40):
turn, turn right. They the idea that the highest
way of living in the ancient world was to repeat the cycle.
Why they were an agricultural economy and that is a cyclical
economy. And they took how they
understood the world and they applied it to human development.
It was the Hebrew Bible that introduces the idea of
linearity, right? It's a family, right?

(54:00):
It's Adam and Eve and then everything and then, you know,
the patriarchs and the matriarchs and on down.
OK, the idea of this is actuallythe beginnings of a making of a
new book I'm thinking about. But Genesis comes from the idea
of generations. We're passing things down
linearly and if you look and in life is in the transitions.
I have these visual demonstrations that really
clarified this for me that in the Middle Ages they thought

(54:23):
life was a staircase up to middle age and then a staircase
down different ones for men and women, but we peeked at middle
age and that So that's no new life at 50.
That's no, you know, divorce. That's no moving to Florida and
opening AB and B or an Airbnb, right?
It's straight up and straight down.
This begins to change, and that's how they understood life

(54:45):
with the sort of, you know, biblical understanding of
linearity. This began to change in the 19th
century with the rise of the industrial world.
OK, What was the industrial world built around?
It was built around factories. What are factories built around?
Conveyor belts, assembly lines. These were all linear.
And if you look in the 20th century, all of the great ideas

(55:08):
were in fact, linear. OK, Piaget with the, you know,
stages of childhood development,Freud, the psychosexual stages,
Ericsson, the 8 stages of moral development, the five stages of
grief, the hero's journey, theseare all linear.
This is not a coincidence. We have to understand how we
learned this. And we, you know, as bad as, as

(55:29):
well as anyone, but we'll just repeat it.
The idea of childhood, of adolescents, of retirement, OK.
All of these phrases and words were invented between 1890 and
1910. No one used these, you know,
children were young adults. All of these ideas were
invented. And why do we need retirement?
Because people were working seven days a week and you had

(55:49):
to. And this was won by the labor
unions. We can go into the whole thing.
The story of midlife is a story of this.
In 1957, Eliot Jock, a Canadian psychoanalyst, stood up in the
in in in London, and he gave thespeech about the midlife crisis.
He was laughed off the stage. He came back later in 1963 and
published the first time the word midlife was used in this
context. And where did the idea come

(56:11):
from? He didn't do any science.
He read 310 biographies of you know, of famous people from like
Michelangelo to Bach. Famous men.
I think it was the Yeah, it's only.
Men, men, men, can we sing this from the mountaintops?
And when asked where are the women, he's like, oh, women have
menopause. It like screws up the whole
theory. Well, I'm sorry if you're going

(56:31):
to dismiss it because women can,then there's something wrong
with the idea. 2 academics picked it up.
Daniel Levinson at Yale who wrote a book called The Seasons
of a Man's Life. OK, he did 40 men, all 40 to 43
in New Haven, CT. I went to Yale.
I have two children to go to Yale.
Like I spent a lot of time in New Haven, CT.
It is a lot of things representative of all human

(56:52):
beings. It's not one of them.
OK. And then Elliot Gould at UCLA
sent out some surveys and and started writing this.
A woman, GAIL Sheehy, writes a piece in in New York magazine
about the midlife crisis. And, and she says everyone does
the same thing in their 20s, Everyone does the same thing in
the 30s, then everyone has a midlife crisis between what, 39
and 44 1/2? Like, that's how precise you

(57:16):
are. OK.
Now when midlife has become likethe middle class, like anything
from like 35 to 70, that's another problem with midlife is
like everybody thinks they're inmidlife, which is, by the way,
good for your business model. But like begins to raise
questions about, about the seriousness of the term.
And this is the best part of thestory, which I know you know,
but I'm going to say it because I'm like on a, I'm on a rant now

(57:36):
at Las Culturesas. They only give you a minute.
I'm like 4 minutes into this ramp.
But she is Elliot Gould sues herfor plagiarism and wins because
he's uncredited in this article in New York Magazine.
And she has, she's a poor singlemom who's having an affair with
the editor of of New York magazine at the time.
And she gives him 10% of the book that she writes about this,

(57:57):
which is called Passages, which sells 20 million copies, one of
the worst deals of all time. And after she writes this book
in 1976, everybody thinks they have a midlife crisis.
The problem is it's just bunk. If you're between 39 and 44 1/2,
you could be having a crisis. But let's just take the
pandemic. If you're between 39 four, you
were having a crisis if you were14 as my children.

(58:19):
If you're 27 or 60, the reality is we go through these things
whenever they happen. It's not to say that they do not
happen in midlife, but to say that they only happen in
midlife. And, and that is not something I
know you're afraid of, that you acknowledge this.
You're not saying you must only have, you're not waving your
finger. So my problem is not with you,

(58:41):
It's with how the term is used. Which is why we call this the
midlife chrysalis. Also because it's it, is it,
Maybe it's not a crisis. Maybe it is a transformative
time in your life. I have one last question for
you. You've learned a lot over three
years and I believe there are painful life lessons are the raw
material for our future wisdom. So if you were to be asked to

(59:07):
come up with one bumper sticker that defined one of your lessons
of wisdom, what one of your pieces of wisdom, what would
that bumper sticker say? The Bruce Feiler wisdom
fingerprints on it and what's isthere an origin story on it that
helps you to say this is how I learned that lesson?

(59:28):
Be the hero of your own story. So for you in your life, at what
point do you think you actually really learned that?
I think I learned it the first time that I disappointed
somebody. When was that?
I think I learned when I went toJapan, actually, So I was 20
years old. I was in college, I realized

(59:50):
that I learned more about myselfas a Southerner by going to the
North, that I learned about myself as a, you know, as an
American. This was the age of discount
travel. And I and I was able to travel
and I realized that there were all these tracks that were being
laid down in, in, in front of me.

(01:00:10):
My older brother had gone. I'm a bee.
I'm Bruce. I have an older brother named
Andrew and a younger sister named Carrie.
My, my parents named us like hurricanes were, were AB and C
growing up on the, on the, on the Atlantic Coast of Georgia,
where hurricanes were a real part of our life.
And my brother had taken the conventional path.
He'd gone to college, he'd gone to Wall Street.
Like he did the thing that was expected.

(01:00:32):
Even then, you know, of, of people of a certain generation
of a certain background to go and do the traditional thing,
OK, go to Business School, go to, you know, go to Wall Street,
go become a lawyer, all the things that sort of attended
people like me when I was growing up.
And I didn't do that. And I found the telling the
story, the telling stories that writing was the thing that

(01:00:55):
brought me meaning, you know, and and that's fundamentally the
thing I was going to say a minute ago.
And I'll do this as we as we we're way over time.
But as we wrap up this conversation, you were talking
about the YouTube, excuse me, EUcurve of, of happiness.
And one of the things that I've learned is, you know that

(01:01:16):
meaning is much more important than happiness because happiness
is a feeling that you have in the present.
And meaning is about stitching together past, present and
future. And meaning is about telling a
story when you were happy, but perhaps even more important when
you were going through a period of unhappiness, as we all do.
And the thing in some ways that's quoted back to me most
often from this work after say, life quake and you know, and

(01:01:38):
things like that in the five years is this idea of the AB CS
of meaning. And that we maybe this comes
from my own being a being a bee and an ABC that do this is that
we, you know, we have these three stories that we tell.
One is the story of agency. That's what we do or make or
build or create. The B is belonging, our

(01:01:58):
relationships, our family, the love, the loved ones in our
lives. And the C is a cause, a calling
or something higher than yourself.
In, in narrative terms, I think of this as your your me story,
your your you know, your we story and your the story.
And what I've realized is when we go through these periods,
when we go through these chrysalis, whether they are in

(01:02:18):
midlife or early in life or later in life, is that we, we
reorder these AB CS. Maybe you've been working very
hard, you know, think you can doa game like give yourself 100
points and how do you allot them?
Hey, I'm very much of an ABC. I'm a writer, I'm agentic.
I'm a very involved family person 'cause that's important
to me. My wife Linda is very 'cause

(01:02:38):
oriented. She's ACAB, you know, she, she
started an organization, she mentors people every day.
She's ACEO and A and a Co founder.
She's agentic but longing outside of our family.
You like, you know, not our highest priority.
But what happens in these chrysalis is that we rethink and
we say, you know what? I've been working too hard.
I want to focus on my family. Or I've been, I've been, you
know, raising children or caringfor aging parents.

(01:02:59):
And I want to do something for myself or I've been giving back.
I'm burned out. Whatever it is, you don't need
to ask permission. Like it was the first quote that
you read. Your story is not published in
the Library of Congress and you can't have access to it.
It's a living, breathing thing. Life is the story you can tell
yourself and you can change it for whatever reason, including

(01:03:21):
that you just want to. The key is to take control of
the pen, take control of the story.
Be the hero of your story. That's why we tell fairy tales
night after night, because they they turn our nightmares into
dreams. I don't know if I could add
anything to that, my friend. I think people are going to have

(01:03:43):
to listen to this on less than one point O speed.
They're not just not just because you talk fast, but also
because it's just so much packedin here.
Thank you, Bruce, you are my hero in many ways and I
appreciate that. We are mirrors for each other in
a in a variety of ways, and yourwork means a lot to me and to

(01:04:04):
the MEA community. You're just such a the lodestar
for all of us and how you've turned your own pain and your
own change and your own gifts into, into ways of assembling
people into, into rituals and conversations that bring truth
through messiness. And I'm I'm happy to be one of
your many supporters and uplifters.
Well, I hope you're as worn out as I am keeping up with Bruce.

(01:04:29):
He's he's got, he's at lightningspeed.
It reminds me a little bit of Arthur Brooks Speaks quickly,
Things quickly. That has a lot of ideas open to
to jousting, intellectually doubt jousting.
I love that about him. I love the fact he's an
experientialist. That's a great word.
I've never heard of that word before.
Which means his form of learningis to go out and experience it.

(01:04:51):
Many of us may feel that way, but now you can call yourself an
experientialist or you can call yourself a ritualist because one
of the three lessons I got from him was, you know, his
discussion of rituals and how they're making a comeback.
I'm excited about his new book, which comes out next May.
I also love the fact that Mea isdedicated to rituals, midlife

(01:05:15):
rituals. You know, he and I joust a
little bit about that. He thinks that that rituals have
to happen throughout your lifetime.
I agree. I don't disagree with that, but
I think we're rituals are most needed are in midlife because we
have none. We don't have a ritual for
turning 50. We don't have rituals for all
kinds of things in our lives that happen, you know, naturally

(01:05:36):
in midlife. At MEA, we do something on the
first day of our workshops called the Great Midlife Edit.
And it's the opportunity to let go of something, to accept it
and let it go, mark it with a ritual and to replace it with
something that actually is goingto serve you.
So in many ways, MEA is dedicated to rituals.

(01:05:58):
And I think for those of you whojoin us in Santa Fe, you'll
you'll hear about this from Lee,our Dalai Lama meets the
Marlboro Man, or in Baja, you'llhear about it from Teddy and
from Saul, our mindfulness guru down there and our shaman.
So rituals really important. And I really appreciate that
part of this conversation. Number 2 is I was really curious

(01:06:23):
about the mid, his discussion ofthe midlife crisis.
He gave one of the best brief discussions about how midlife
crisis as a term came up and thefact that Elliot Jakes gave a
Canadian psychologist, gave a speech in in the UK, people
panned it. He wrote six years later a white

(01:06:46):
paper that got very little attention.
So remember, midlife as a life stage hadn't gotten much
attention. Midlife crisis was a whole new
term. But it was a series of other
writers in including ultimately,GAIL Sheehy with her book
Passages that sold 20 million copies, that actually
popularized the idea of midlife crisis.
But when you look at the the scholarship that went into it,

(01:07:09):
it had huge flaws. So Long story short is midlife
crisis is something, it's the number one word attached to
midlife. And yet maybe it's built on a
very unstable foundation. And then finally, I think the
most obvious thing he talked about is the fact we no longer
live a linear life. My, both of my grandfather's
worked for the same employer for40 years now, two different

(01:07:32):
employers. They didn't meet until, you
know, my parents got married, but they neither one of them
ever worked for another employer.
The average person today has 12 or 13 employers.
People take sabbaticals at age 40.
They at age 50, they decide to go back and get a master's.
They get married at 60. They have children later in
life. We have non linear lives.

(01:07:55):
And yet we sort of have the the point of view that that the
tyranny of the three stage life,you learn when you're young, you
earn until you know about 65 andthen you adjourn or burn until
you die. And that learn, earn, adjourn

(01:08:17):
premise doesn't make sense anymore.
We are in an era in which you may be learning at 50, you may
be adjourning at 40 and retiringearly and then going back into
the workplace. So the, the fact is we are going
to disrupt this idea of the three stage life.
So that was one of the more content filled episodes we've

(01:08:40):
had. I I do hope you treasure it and
use it for your own transitions that you're going through.
To me, it's just one more piece of evidence that if you have not
actually done an MEA course or an MEA workshop in Baja or Santa
Fe, this is where you can learn about your transitions in the
context of a collective ritual with other people who are going

(01:09:04):
through their own transitions atthe same time.
Hope to see you in Baja or SantaFe or online in one of our
courses. I know I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to The Midlife Chrysalis.
This show is produced by MidlifeMedia.
If you enjoyed this episode, help us spread the word by
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