The Midlife Curiosity Tour That Changed Everything | Allison Aubrey

0:00Jonathan Fields: Allison Aubrey spent 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters. Then a routine test at a longevity lab that she had agreed to do only as part of a story she was reporting told her something about her life that rattled her. It was a huge wake-up call that sent her on a journey to figure out who she wanted to be in her next season of life and what really matters. In this conversation, you'll learn why the tests built to measure her aging body ended up diagnosing something entirely differently. The one word that a stranger used that made her stop hearing anything else in the room.

0:37Jonathan Fields: You'll learn what a dream about missing a live broadcast actually turned out to mean. We'll explore the real difference between passion, purpose, and mattering, and why one of those actually shows up in your blood work. and the simple question that helped dozens of women find their way back to themselves, along with the specific repeating patterns that Allison saw in people living incredible later lives as she traveled the country on what she called her curiosity tour. Allison is also the author of the new book, Your Turn, How to Create a Midlife You Love. So excited to share this conversation with you.

1:12Jonathan Fields: I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll jump right in after this short break. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast, or wherever you listen. Good Life Project is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms.

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3:40Jonathan Fields: That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash Good Life Project. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Your new book started as reporting. You find yourself, you end up at a longevity institute, kind of a bit of experiential journalism like James Nestor, Michael Pollan style. Like I'm just going to go in and become a part of this. you have a long career before that as a health and science journalist, reporter. So this is not new for you. You've been exploring and trying to live a life that you feel is alive and connected and healthy. Things don't go as planned. Take me there. Sure.

4:24It was actually very new for me. I have been telling other people's stories for 25 years. And I got this call from the woman who heads media relations for Northwestern University Medical Center. And she explained in this very excited voice that they had this new longevity institute they were launching. And they were trying to think of a reporter who could do a great job kind of introducing it and putting it in context. And she was sort of flattering me while at the same time offering me an exclusive, and I fell for it. And I sort of unwittingly went in there with, you know, thinking, oh, this is going to be a great story.

5:05Like people need to understand this, you know, the science of longevity and, you know, lifespan is accumulating. And this is like a really important, you know, you know, institute. So once I found myself there that day, and I had agreed to this battery of tests to try to measure basically and distinguish my chronological age. That's the number on my birthday cake from my biological age or my epigenetic age was sort of how fast I'm aging. And I just didn't give it enough thought. I assumed that I had the DNA of Methuselah, right? I was like, oh, yeah, I'm in. I'm game. And then almost from the word go, I started to get little surprises, should we say.

5:50The first thing they did, they put me, they stripped me down into like, you know, a little medical robe. And I went into a bod pod that measures body composition. And the cardiologist was sort of like, oh, yeah, you know, you're a healthy body weight, but you're a bit under muscled. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, under muscled. And then I think the moment of fear came, I was sitting in the dark in this chair, with a monitor strapped to my wrist. And for a few minutes, they cut off my circulation to measure something called endothelial function, which can in theory detect sort of like early stages of cardiovascular disease.

6:35And this young medical tech had this like, look on his face. And he he said, oh, you know, you're on the low end. And I said, what do you mean the low end? And he said, below average, like on the low end. And he sort of fiddled with it thinking like, oh, you know, was he really getting the right measurement? And at that point, I kind of stopped hearing anything in the room. You know, I thought, what? Me? Like, I'm healthy. I exercise, I eat well. What is going on here?

7:10Jonathan Fields: So, I mean, you go into this thinking, okay, this is just kind of a cool journalistic project. And I'm going to go, like, I get to sort of like learn some things maybe about myself also. When you get this and you sort of like see the look on the person's face and you hear these words low end. I mean, what's going through your mind at that point? because when you said yes to this, it wasn't about you. That's right. Now it is. Well, the thing that was the ticker tape racing through my mind was, am I failing a longevity test? And that's what it felt like. And of course, it was irrational. I had not gotten any results at all.

7:52But the bod pod experience and then this little endothelial test, it just kind of was like, whoa, wait a second. I am aging. Now, after the fact, I learned that the arm that they did this test on, I'd had, you know, the very stereotypical middle-age injury of frozen shoulder. I was nursing a frozen shoulder, so I had been taking it easy on that left side. And later I found out, oh, that could have thrown off the test. I was then assured, oh, Allison, this is just a research tool. Like, don't read too much into it. Like, my blood work was fine. I mean, you know, way after the fact of as I pieced together sort of what was right and what was wrong, most of what was right were the numbers that matter, right?

8:38You know, cholesterol and, you know, the things that really make a difference, A1C, the things that were wrong were kind of linked to my stressed out lifestyle, my sort of, you know, over caffeinated, you know, living in this sort of state of, pathological productivity, most of what turned out to be wrong with me was linked to that. And it wasn't so much biology as it was kind of this sense that I realized I was kind of running to stand still. In fact, the moment I felt that, we were in this laboratory. And after that endothelial test, I kind of zoned out. And there was a wall of windows when he opened the door looking out to Lake Michigan.

9:25And for a moment, I felt like I was in that water tumbling, like not drowning, but kind of just like almost floating and coming to a deep sense of standing still. And when I came back to the room and people were talking at me, telling me what the next test was, that was this moment I said to myself, Alison, you are running to stand still. That's how I was feeling at that moment in my life.

9:52Jonathan Fields: so let's zoom the lens out a little bit then um tell me what life looked like for you at that time you know if you're running to stand still paint that picture yeah well i would say this was coming out of the pandemic and during the pandemic i worked unbelievable hours i was on the air frequently often at 5 a.m in the morning so finishing reporting at 10 o 'clock at night waking up to do sort of up first the morning edition you know podcast in the morning and really just throwing my health self in as I had have done in my reporting for years and years and years and years. And I think coming out of the pandemic, something deep within me knew that I was a little bit ready for something else.

10:34I just didn't know what it was. And so instead of facing that head on, I just dug deeper, I gave myself more deadlines, I kind of pushed aside any sense coming from my intuition or heart of like, oh, you know, what else might there be? But the more I dug in, the more I felt that my work was becoming this sort of practiced task. I wasn't getting any kind of lift or reward of like hearing my story on the air, or even reporting the stories. I was doing like deep dives into very complicated medical science and distilling it, that's my job. and suddenly it didn't feel like it was giving me the same lift it had.

11:19And I wondered, you know, who's benefiting from this? I sort of wondered if I had been doing the same thing so long that it was time to parlay my skills and my strengths to something new. But I think I was scared.

11:35Jonathan Fields: Yeah, as are so many of us when we sort of like hit a certain moment in our lives. But like you also, I think so many of us, we're heads down. You know, like we're in that season where we're still working really hard. We've got a million people looking to us and, you know, we're trying to do really good work. And oftentimes we've been doing some version of that for years, if not decades, without ever having the space to just step back and pause and say, like, how's this working for me? Um, so it sounds like you, you come into this experience at the Longevity Institute, maybe primed, but not necessarily consciously aware of how primed you are.

12:13I think that's a really, really good way of saying it. Sort of like, you know, my head didn't know what was happening, but somewhere deep within I, yeah, I was starting to sense it. I should add also, I have three children. And at that time, the oldest was in college, the middle was headed off to college. And my baby, who's now 15 years old, would have been, you know, sort of starting middle school. And so I think that I was just really conditioned to what I call this moon bounce of controlled chaos, right? Because I'd been parenting for so long, I was so accustomed to sort of, you know, running from the newsroom back home to parenting duty and sort of jumping between the obligations of parenting and the obligations of work.

12:54And when you get into that rhythm, it's hard to get out of the moon bounce. Yeah. Yeah.

12:59Jonathan Fields: And I think that's so relatable for so many people. You know, everyone has their own version of the moon bounce. I love that. I love that visual, by the way. So when we're back at the Longevity Institute, and you start to see a couple of numbers that make you raise your eyebrow, How does that come together with what you stepped into that moment sort of like with your brain working on to make you start to ask a bigger question? So I wouldn't say that it was some kind of like immediate pivot. I think it was a slow recognition of what I just explained to you that, oh, Alison, yes, you're competent at what you do.

13:42And that's a very good feeling. And you're rewarded. You get a paycheck for what you do, and you've won awards for what you do, and you educate people who listen to NPR, and all of that felt good, but it didn't feel like enough anymore. And I'll tell you why. About sometime after that experience, I was deciding I wanted to do a story about dreams, and I contacted a guy named Ian Williams, and he has live interpreted thousands of dreams on the BBC. So he's a therapist who analyzes dreams. And we started out, and he asked me to tell him about one of my recent dreams. And I had had an incredibly vivid dream.

14:27It goes something like this. I was in my bed, and suddenly the on-air light was flashing, and Stephen's Keep, who's the host of Morning Edition, said, you know, NPR's Alice Nalbry joins us now, and I could see the on-air light. I could see actually the studio in our old building at 635 Massachusetts Avenue, but I was stuck in my bed and I couldn't get out. And then I woke up and of course I ran to my phone. My God, oh my God, what time is it? What day is it? Did I just miss a, you know, a live hit on Morning Edition? And I calmed down enough to realize that, you know, I hadn't. And so Ian Williams said to me, what do you think that dream means?

15:03And I said, I don't know, like it's like an anxiety dream. Like maybe I'm getting too old to wake up at five o 'clock in the morning or I'm scared I'm going to miss a deadline. And he said, how long have you done your job? 25 years. Oh, how many times have you missed a deadline? Never. So you've done your job 25 years and you've never missed a deadline. Your dream is not an anxiety dream about missing a deadline. I said, oh, okay, what is it? And he said, you have something to say that you can't say on Morning Edition. And with that, I knew he was right. It was just like every cell in my body knew he was right.

15:52I had been working on a proposal to write a book. And it's a lot of work. You know, you got to get an agent. You got to write the proposal. You know, I have three kids and a full-time job. And so it was just this little side hustle project that was just sitting. and after that conversation with Ian Williams, I was like, that's it. I'm finishing the proposal. I'm writing this book.

16:14Jonathan Fields: And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Skylight Calendar. So our executive producer, Lindsay, told me the first week back to school, it just used to be total chaos in our house. Pickups, drop-offs, who got who. But since she got her Skylight Calendar that same week, it wasn't chaos at all. Everything was just in one place and it was just clear. Skylight Calendar is designed to bring families together for more time. This all-in-one digital smart calendar, it syncs seamlessly with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, and more, giving you customizable views for daily, weekly, or monthly planning.

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17:26Jonathan Fields: Go to myskylight.com slash goodlife for$30 off your 15-inch calendar. That's myskylight.com slash goodlife. Good Life Project is sponsored by BetterHelp. So, you know, I ask a version of this question to guests sometimes and to friends even, but let me turn it on myself for a second. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing? I think for me, it would probably be comparison. Even doing work I love, even after all these years, I still catch myself measuring my chapter, my days against someone else's highlight reel. And I'd love to be better at just kind of running my own race, doing my own thing.

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20:00Jonathan Fields: I've tried every flavor and I love them all. Right now, Drip Drop is offering podcast listeners 20 % off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use the promo code goodlife. That's dripdrop.com promo code goodlife for 20 % off. Stock up now at dripdrop.com and use that promo code goodlife. Yeah, I mean, which is no small thing. You've been doing a job for 25 years. You're great at it. You know, you're known for it and known widely by a lot of people for it. And there's a certain amount of identity that gets wrapped up in it, right? and for you to say okay there's this thing that's been sitting on the side and it's actually time um i mean it's interesting also though because a lot of people will sort of like keep their mainstream gig and then write a book on the side um some people would just say i'm going to take a sabbatical i'm going to take a year off when you thought about oh like this act what he's saying this dream means actually that feels real to me.

21:02Jonathan Fields: And it sounds like immediately that book that's been sitting over here, I was like, mm-hmm, that's the thing. How do you navigate the question of, okay, what will it take me to write this? Do I need to just pull back from everything that I'm doing, devote myself to it? Because it's so hard for any of us to step away in any meaningful way from something that we have been so vested in for so long. Yeah, I call this my rope swing moment. You remember like jumping from a rope swing when you're a kid. You're kind of like, you're holding on and you're like looking down. You're like, oh, you know, like you're afraid to let go because you don't know what's underneath.

21:40But you know it's time. You know it's time. If you don't, you're going to go back and hit the rock. So, you know, you're hanging on. I felt like I was hanging on. I felt that rope swing moment. Like it was just, it wouldn't go away. And so at a certain point after I got my book contract, I could have stayed on and written it on the side. But I just knew that that was running counter to everything that my heart was telling me. And so I just, you know, went to my editor and I was like, look, I have this book contract. I want to take a sabbatical. I'm calling it my curiosity tour. And it's a lot of negotiation to get a huge, huge chunk of time away in a newsroom.

22:18Of course, I was giving up like job security. They filled behind me when I left. And, you know, I was intending to come back and I did come back. But I left not knowing, you know, it felt like a risk. And to me, I just had to do that. I mean, there wasn't another choice for me. I think that my fear was that all I kind of knew was a newsroom setting, right? I know how to be part of that hive. and I like to be part of the hive. I like to feel like I'm in the middle of like exciting things happening and that never disappoints in a newsroom. But I also didn't know what there was outside of that. And I looked around and I was fearful that once I left the newsroom, there wouldn't be anything as purposeful or as exciting or as adventuresome.

23:06And that's really the question I asked when I set out on this curiosity tour. I was like, I'm gonna look for people, women in midlife like me, Not billionaires or movie stars or Olympians or super influencers, like people like me who've been in the trenches for decades, sort of toggling between parenting and paycheck, and find out who are the people who are thriving? What are they doing? What are their stories? Like, how do you make a midlife pivot?

23:33Jonathan Fields: Yeah. I want to dive into a whole bunch of what you discovered on that tour as well. Before we get there, though, let's tease out a few other things. the idea of a summons I think a lot of us hit a moment where we feel like and people call this different things is it a call is it there's something inside of you that basically we've probably it's been like sort of like nipping at us for a long time and we're like no no no no no no but there's this idea that you explore of like getting the summons and almost nobody answers it what is the thing that But when you get that call, in your mind, what's really happening there?

24:16Well, in my mind, so that language of the summoning comes from James Hollis, who's a Jungian analyst who I interviewed. And I've read several of his books, as has my mother actually gave me the book when she sensed I was feeling sort of a midlife wall. And that language really comes from James Hollis. And it's the moment where you realize you've been living the societal script, right? Like, we all have this sort of like, learn, earn, and then what? Retire, like learn, earn, retire script that we're supposed to be following. And, you know, Gen Xers have been really good at following that script, right?

24:58We've done all the things. You know, my mother told me when I had two little children and I was in NPR and I was like, oh, like this is feeling a little overwhelming. Like maybe I should step off the career track. And she said, you'll do no such thing because you will never get that job back. And you worked really hard to get there. Just keep going, you know. And so I think that's the script that we got, that we could do anything and be anything because we were Gen X women. It came at a cost, right? Like we've been just running and running and going and going, parenting and the paycheck and parenting and like, you know, rinse and repeat of obligation for decades.

25:31And I have a lot to show for that societal script. I think my mother was right. I think that staying at NPR was the best thing ever. And it's been an incredible career. Absolutely, positively incredible. I am paid to be curious. And I am so incredibly lucky. But I think what the calling is and the summons is, is that you reach a point in this midlife where the question you're asking isn't what does society expect from me, but what is my intuition telling me? If I'm sensing that I'm looking for a shift, how can I tap into that intuition? And what I recognized is that I was so committed to that societal script, you know, because I've done well by that societal script.

26:18Many millions of us have, right? I had a lot to show for it. And, you know, it paid the bills and it gave me accolades and it gave me a sense of purpose. However, I was reaching a new phase and fear. You asked, what is it that stops people from being able to listen to the summons? It's fear, right? Like nothing cuts off intuition like fear. And I had fear. Like what if I'm not NPR's Alice and Aubrey? Or what if the best years are behind, right? And so I had this sort of like slow crossfade where I was toggling between like hanging on that rope swing moment to this belief that there had to be something else, that there was a life of adventure and joy and purpose outside of a newsroom.

27:06Jonathan Fields: that lands is really true. I'm curious, fear of what? Because it could be so many different things, you know, loss of identity, uncertainty, like there's so many different things. I would imagine, you know, the concoction is probably a little bit different for everybody. Yeah, no, I think you hit the nail on the head, right? I mean, I think it's all of those things. I think it's, you know, loss of identity, you know, it's ego to some extent. I mean, And some of it's real, right? Like I still get my health insurance through NPR, right? So there's just the practical side. Like women retire with 30 % less than men.

27:42And so there's just the practical like money elements, right? Well, I have enough money. Like how will I get health insurance? So there's the practical side of these things. But once you face those and plan for those, the meta things are just what you're saying, sort of ego, identity, legacy, all of that. Yeah.

28:02Jonathan Fields: Yeah. And I would imagine fear of the unknown also. It's just like, you've got a long history of showing up and kind of having a sense of like, I've been doing this long enough that even though things are different every day on a meta level, I like, I kind of know, I know the rhythm. Yeah. I can navigate this, whatever it is. And then when you're stepping completely out, you're like, I don't know the majority of what my day is going to look like. And for most of us, that's terrifying. I agree. I think nothing stokes anxiety like uncertainty. And so we cling to the familiar. So I agree. Have you experienced that in your life?

28:37Jonathan Fields: Oh, so many times. I'm like multiple career changes into into my life. So I've been in the trenches of uncertainty. And but there's a certain exposure therapy when you keep revisiting that and realizing like, oh, is really hard, but I keep finding a way through. So I think I'm going to like, whatever it is, eventually, I think it really, it, it, it forges you rather than destroys you. Um, I have another curiosity though, when you're sort of like exploring this, which is, um, I think a lot of folks will be listening and saying, okay, so I've been doing the same thing for a long time. And there is this thing that I feel like it's calling me, but as you described, When you're in the kind of like the work, work, work, work, work bouncing, the moon bounce thing where there's almost no time to pause, it's so hard to figure out like what is – am I just delusional fabricating that call?

29:33Jonathan Fields: I mean, when I left being a lawyer, I knew that I was working insane hours. I was so psychologically and physically incapable of making a rational decision that I actually, I took a leave of absence before I made any decision because I was like, I'm not capable of understanding, of hearing the whispers in any sort of rational way. I need to actually just pause long enough to hear it. But did you see as a pattern or have you experienced like in this shift for you, you know, the struggle between is this something in the real that I should follow? And how do I how do I know that I'm sort of like I have the cognitive wherewithal in this space and the sense of groundedness to make a really well-informed decision right now, especially when you're running so hard for so long?

30:27I think that's where my curiosity tour came in. I framed my sabbatical as a curiosity tour. And what is a curiosity tour? It was just that, like me following my curiosity. I mean, I was of the mind that when news happens, you fly, you get on a plane and you fly to where the news is happening, right? And I had to sort of reframe how I thought about curiosity and start seeing things that were right around me. So I did travel to some cool places for my curiosity tour. But what I also did was I slowed down enough to notice people in my own backyard. For instance, I met this woman, Catherine. She is an NIH scientist, a bench scientist at NIH, a plant scientist.

31:11And her third turn, I sort of came to call the midlife passage your third turn, this time between 50 and 75. That's sort of the beginning of, you know, your, you know, your midlife pivot. And Catherine caught my eye because right down here at the corner of my street, there's this stream and there's a lot of invasive species that are like vines that are wrapping around the trees and ruining them. And I would see this crew of people working out on these trees and like doing the hard work of taking these like thorny vines and like pulling them and cutting them from the trees. And the person leading this effort was this woman, Catherine.

31:49And she's this brilliant PhD scientist who had this big job at NIH when it became too much for her. And she started this band of what they're called weed warriors. And so they're getting rid of these invasive vines and they're saving the trees one by one, which then saves the water quality of our stream. And she calls this her and or act of resistance from that Star Wars show, Andor. And the idea is that people can pull together in groups to tackle a little problem and then see the result right before their eyes. And are they fixing climate change? No, they're not, because none of us has the power to do that.

32:25But can they walk by the tree that they saved every day and take pride in that and know that that was a community effort? And so this is the work she does now. She left behind this, like, super big, powerful job at National Institutes of Health. And she took on this very soulful, very purpose-oriented passion project, right? And she's making a difference in a way that she didn't see in bench science. And so meeting Catherine in my own backyard was my first clue of like, oh, my God, there are like fabulous, wonderful pivot stories all around me. And so I just one by one by one started interviewing women who had made very interesting pivots.

33:09And one of the through lines was most of them had had big, big jobs or impressive jobs by societal standards. But what they were doing now was all about legacy, all about purpose. And it was all coming from the heart, all of it. I mean, these were women who let go of the rope, right? They had their rope swing moment. Oh my God, can I jump? They jumped, right? And look how wonderful their lives were. I mean, I met a shy editor who became an improv performer. You know, I met people who are doing the boldest thing of their life, like a 65-year-old CEO who I call her my badass Pollyanna because she actually took hold of the$60 million company and turned it into a$6 billion company and convinced private equity bankers to give every employee an equity stake in the company because her true north is fairness.

33:58And so she could have retired to paradise 15 years ago, but she stays on because she wants to see the system where every one of her workers, you know, gets a piece of the pie. If the company succeeds, everyone should succeed. So, you know, she's living her true north. Her purpose project is to sort of remake how business works if it's only for her company. So some people are doing the boldest thing of their life, and some people are doing the simplest things of their lives. I hung out with groups of women who play Mahjong, which is this amazing game. And, you know, it's very trendy right now. And people think that it's this fancy society thing.

34:36But honestly, Mahjong is incredible. It creates this sort of like magic circle, right, where people come around the table. It's a brain game, right? Very good for memory. It fosters connection and play. And so the way that people pivot and find their third turns is as different as we are different as human beings. But the through line is, is that you're listening to what your heart is telling you and that there's some sort of passion and purpose.

35:06Jonathan Fields: And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Wild Alaskan Company. So I think about how disconnected most of us have become from where our food comes from. and something shifts when you can trace it back to the person and the place and the work behind it. It's just one of the reasons why I love Wild Alaskan Company. They work directly with Alaskan fishermen to bring you wild-caught seafood like sockeye salmon, coho salmon, Pacific halibut, Pacific rockfish, quick frozen right at the source, locking in texture, flavor, and omega-3s. No GMOs, no antibiotics, no additives.

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36:24Jonathan Fields: I was looking for a charger for some of the battery-powered yard tools that I use, like my hedge trimmer. And I found this seller who was selling them in real time for so much less than I could get them at full retail. And it was also fun too. Everyone's just chatting with the seller and a bunch of other people who love tools as much as I do. It felt like a room full of people just kind of geeking out together. That's Whatnot, the largest dedicated live shopping platform out there. And it's not just art supplies. It's beauty, collectibles, electronics, fashion, even cookies. So much other stuff.

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37:55Jonathan Fields: I mean, two words that are, depending on who you ask, amazing or loaded. Passion and purpose. I feel like we've heard a lot of talk about them. And we've heard there's been a tremendous amount of pushback on the word passion these days. Yeah. And I'll go with you on passion. And I'm willing to let passion go. In fact, let me just agree with you. Passion's probably over you. So let's push passion to the side. But let's focus on purpose, okay? Okay. The reason why I love purpose is because I love the science around purpose. As part of my reporting on this, I interviewed Steve Cole at UCLA. And he did this study about five years ago where they took women who had been kind of shut-ins, like they stayed at home, they watched TV, they said they were lonely, they didn't have a sense of purpose.

38:44Like on surveys, it was very clear that they, you know, were feeling isolated. And this group of women agreed to volunteer in a school for the year. Now, they took these women's blood, they took a blood draw at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year. And at the beginning of the year, what the blood draw showed is that when you look at the white blood cells in the immune system, you can actually see when someone's sort of lonely or chronically stressed because of loneliness or lack of sense of purpose, what you'll see is that the genes that regulate for, that encode for inflammation, they get turned up, right?

39:23So inflammatory genes are upregulated and antiviral genes, the ones you need to protect you, are turned down. So it's this sort of molecular signature of chronic stress, of loneliness, of disconnection, of lack of a sense of purpose. Now, at the end of the school year, nine or 10 months later, they did the same blood draw. And they could show that these women who agreed that they felt much better, they felt part of a community, they felt like they were mentoring people, they had a sense of purpose, they had a sense of connection. They felt like their life had meaning, that there was a reason to get up in the morning.

40:00That's all purposes, is a reason to get up in the morning. They felt that, a reason to get up. And guess what? The molecular signature in their blood, in their white blood cells, in their immune system changed, right? The genes that are regulating inflammation were turned down, and the genes that regulate the antiviral response were turned up. And I love, love, love that study, because if people are like, purpose, purpose, whatever that is, okay, no, no, no, no. You can measure it. You can measure a sense of purpose in the immune system, in the white blood cells. It is linked to longevity. It's linked to better health.

40:39Like, do we need more science to say that when you have a reason to get up in the morning, you feel better and your life is better and you feel more joy? You know, I think that we shouldn't throw away the word purpose.

40:51Jonathan Fields: Yeah, and I'm completely on board with that. I've done a bunch of a deep dive myself on purpose. And the parts of life that it touches, it's pretty much everything, you know, from relationships to cognitive function, to immunity, to life-ending or altering disease risk. It's kind of wild how much that can play a role. So when you're on your curiosity tour, you're talking to all these different women. And from what I remember, it's sort of like age, early 40s to 100, early hundreds was the span there. It sounds like purpose is one of the big patterns that you see. But I want to tease out something specific to that because I think you brought it up.

41:32Jonathan Fields: When a lot of us think about this word purpose, we're kind of thinking we need this one big thing, like a big universal thing. Like it's got to be a big thing. But what you're inviting is, well, for some people, maybe it is. Like there's one big unifying universal thing where you put everything behind it. It's going to impact the world. But maybe it's also like clearing the vines off of like, it's like tiny little local things. And I think, I wonder if oftentimes we discount that. Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, people are scared to talk about purpose because I've had women say to me like, oh, there's, I don't know how to do anything that would change the world.

42:11Like, I don't like climate change, but I don't know what to do, right? Like, little me, I can't do anything. And I think that is something that all of us have a sense. Like, how are, you know, in the poly crisis of the world, like, how are we supposed to make a difference? Well, if you don't think that you're going to be part of some tiny, tiny little solution, if you can't right size, you know, some little thing that you can be a part of, well, then where's the hope, right? And once we don't have hope, like, what do we have? So I think picking some small, you know, start with an interest, you know, and then work your way backwards.

42:51Here's an example. I met a woman named Ruthie Smith, and she's a retired police officer in Prince George's County. And every Saturday, my husband runs a 5k park run, which is a community run. They're held all over the country. It's an organization based in the UK. Okay. And so I went one Saturday and there was this woman, Ruthie Smith, and she was at the very, very back of the line. She was walking. She had on a little penny and it said tail walker. And I was like, oh, hi. And we started chatting because my husband had run up further ahead and I was sort of walking with Ruthie. And she told me that when she retired from the police force, she was excited at first, but then kind of fell into this like, oh, what am I supposed to be doing with my day?

43:35I need a sense of purpose. So she found the park run. At the time, she said she was pretty out of shape. And so, you know, doing a 5K walk every Saturday was really just the beginning of her taking on physical activity for the first time in a while. She was starting to feel more fit. And then she volunteered for this position called tail walker. And her job is just to be the eyes and ears of the trail, the last person finishing the race to make sure that, you know, nobody's hurt or nobody needs attention. And, you know, nobody is ever going to like say, wow, one day I'm going to be the tail walker in a community 5K.

44:13No one ever. But it gives her this incredible sense of like helping out others, being connected to a community. And she has fun doing it because she's also walking the 5K. So I think about Ruthie a lot. It is not something that she would have been able to predict. This role found her once she found the 5K. But tapping into that community then gave her this purposeful role that makes her feel good about, like, gives her something to do when she wakes up, gives her that sense when she wakes up in the morning of like, oh, I need it, right? Like, I have something I need to do today. I think it can be a big thing or a little thing.

44:54Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I love that because it really invites everything into the purpose tent. You know, it's sort of like saying you don't have to make a big grand gesture or commit to a big thing or put yourself at risk in some big, meaningful way. It's like just open your eyes and look around your neighborhood or your family or your group of friends. Guaranteed there's something there that will matter in a way that like maybe nobody's even paying attention to before. Maybe mattering is a better word than purpose because purpose has become a little overused. Yeah, a couple years back I interviewed, sadly he passed recently, but somebody who was one of the leading researchers on mattering.

45:28Jonathan Fields: And he said the academic definition, I'll try and remember this, was offering value and having that value acknowledged by others. He's like, there were two pieces of it. Oh, wait, say that again. It wasn't enough to do that. Say that again. It was offering value, like knowing that you're offering something that's genuinely valid, but also having that value acknowledged by someone other than you. And he's like, when you have those two pieces of the puzzle, that feeling of mattering, that's where that really lands the most powerfully. And that's stayed with me for a long time because it's an in-between thing, you know?

46:05I'm writing it down. I love that.

46:07Jonathan Fields: And we're talking about this in the context of, all right, we hit this season of life and kind of like what got us here maybe isn't gonna give us the feeling that's gonna get us there. So like, how do we get that feeling? Purpose sounds like is one of the things that you discovered as a common pattern. This kept showing up in big ways and small ways. There's another nuance I wanna tease out and ask you about, which is that you mentioned that one woman who is in this company where she grew it to 6 billion and then they had everybody sort of like, it sounds like she didn't leave. Because I think a lot of people also look at this season and say, to get what I need, to get the feeling that I need, You're going to have to blow everything up and go do something very different.

46:43Jonathan Fields: But I'm wondering if you saw patterns also in this curiosity tour where people actually stayed where they were, but they did things in a different or a more intentional way to give them what they needed. Absolutely. So Kathy Bullhouses is the woman who turned a$60 million company into a$5 or$6 billion company. She's still the CEO and she's still running the company. so she got to the point where she finally had the power as ceo to run the show and make decisions and once she had that she finally her backstory was she'd sort of grown up in poverty she'd watched her mother work in a factory and work you know come home with stained hands because she stained grandfather clocks in a factory and still not be able to afford christmas presents right she said what kind of world is this if somebody has to work all day every day and they still can't, you know, buy gifts, you know.

47:36So she really committed very early on in her life, if she ever made it to the top, she would change how the system works. So she's finally there, she's not leaving, because she's literally changing how the system works. She has thousands of employees, by the way. So her story is super inspiring. Another quieter version of that of sticking in the job that you've been doing is my I profile a friend Molly Andalina. She's a tenured professor at DePaul University, a political science professor. And, you know, we were in graduate school together. And she told me that she went on to get her PhD, I didn't get a PhD, stopped after a master's degree.

48:15But when she finished her PhD in political science, and she was hired on, you know, into this 10 year track job, she said, this would have been like around 2000. She said there, the idea was you had to be the sage on the stage, you know, you had to stand up in front of everybody and impress, right? You had to lecture and wow people and you wanted to be big and bold in the center of the room in the universe. And it wasn't her personality. She's an incredible scientist and researcher and writer and teacher and connector and all the things that teachers do that really matter. But standing on stage and like just talking at people wasn't her superpower.

48:53And so anyway, she has made a career of studying listening as a democratic skill. This is her superpower. And it took years to lean into that. And there's a sort of a long backstory as how she came to see that we learn more by listening than we do by talking. And it's a very noisy world where it's sometimes her students feel they're never listened to. So she sort of upended her classroom, and she's the moderator of an ongoing conversation, right? And of course, as a political science professor, she has to teach her students like how a bill becomes law. But you can learn that in a textbook, right?

49:33What she can do in the classroom is create this space for, you know, free and free flowing conversations and questions and allowing students to be heard and listening to each other and learning from each other. So she actually has published studies on sort of listening as a democratic tool. And when she made that pivot within the same job, she went from being kind of, you know, miserable in her job, wondering, is this what I should be doing to thinking, wow, this is exactly where I should be.

50:08Jonathan Fields: As you're going through the tour. So purpose is centered. It seems like this is a common theme across all the people that you're talking to. Like it is shifting to bring more of this into my life. Maybe it's the job that I'm doing. Maybe it's the thing that I'm doing on the side. Maybe it's just a couple of hours a week as a contract. But whatever it is, that matters. What other patterns did you see? What were the other big things, commonalities that really stood out to you? Yeah. So I feel like there's a bit of a formula. And I say that loosely because, of course, everyone's path is different.

50:39But I did notice some commonalities. And I'm going to give some credit here to Mark Friedman because he developed a midlife learning program at Yale. And before I ever went on my curiosity tour, I had interviewed him for a story about gen space in L.A. And he gave me this idea in this early conversation that we had, that when he leads these midlife learning programs, that part of the through line is to have people, you know, explore inward, kind of like, do a reality check on what is my self identity? You know, how am I different? How am I the same as I was 25, 30 years ago, right? because as you and I have been talking about, when you've been in the moon bounce of controlled chaos, you know, going between parenting and the paycheck, you haven't been thinking to yourself, oh, like, Allison, what are your strong suits?

51:31Like, what are your values, you know? And so this idea of, you know, of self-exploration or self-excavation is what I call it in the book, and I put a lot of tools in there that are evidence-based for self-excavation, And I redid all these tools myself. And so this idea of going in, right, to really listen, that seems to be stage one of the midlife pivot. Because when we go inward, we often discover like the joyful parts of us that we'd left behind, right? Like when I went inward and sort of like excavated the eight-year-old Allison who was freckly and redheaded and running through the woods, muddy and, you know, carefree and blithe and unguarded, I was like, wow, oh, the eight-year-old version of me, she was something, right?

52:19Like she was happy and joyful and she laughed a lot. She was goofy and she was mercurial. And I sort of was like excavating like my 1.0, if you think of it that way, or how I came to think of it that way. And I realized I'd left a lot of her behind. And once I kind of excavated freckles, I started to remember what lit freckles up, right? Like, I played piano my whole life. And the piano was the thing I would do when I was happy when I was sad. Like, I mean, it was the instant way for me to get a reset. And my piano is still up there, but I hadn't been playing it. It just goes out of tune. And I didn't have a good excuse.

52:57I just hadn't been playing it, right? So I started to be pulled back into the more creative parts of me that I'd kind of left behind. And I felt like that was a through line for all of the women. When I asked them to sort of take me back to how did you make this pivot? Everybody had this moment of sort of looking within to rediscover almost like the kid within, right? You know, who was the playful you? What were the hobbies and the things you did for fun? And are they calling your name again? Or is there something that you didn't get a chance to do that you were excited about as a kid, and now you might have the chance to do it?

53:34So I would say step one is look within. And once you do that, these new interests bubble up, and then you find people who are interested in the same things, right? When I think about the eight-year-old me running through the woods, like, it's not an accident that three of the women in my book, one is a certified forest bather, one is Catherine the weed warrior, that nature is a huge, huge theme in my book, right? How do we reconnect with our wild home? How do we spend more time in nature, Right. And so it just reminds you of who you were before the world had expectations of you and before you got too busy and the world was nothing but obligation.

54:11And you can make time in this very crossfade kind of way to bring that person to the fore again, you know. So and that connects you to other people and to these interests. So I think inward and then outward to connect with people with the same interests. Right. And I think that's the recipe for going forward. And I really did borrow that from Mark, sort of inward, outward, forward. And I think it really does hold true. Yeah.

54:39Jonathan Fields: And I mean, it makes a lot of sense also. It's really hard. You know, I tend to believe that a life well lived is an intentional life. But you can't be intentional. You know, you have to make decisions that are intentional. You can't make good decisions until you have a basis for making good decisions. If that decision is about, like, what am I going to say yes or no to? you've got to have a sense of who you are and who you aren't like what lights you up and what what drains you before you can make a decision which is actually going to be well aligned and but so many of us i mean it's interesting you're sort of like inviting us to step back into our like when we were kids to remember like who were we like what were the things back then and what are the adult you know like how is that presenting in an adult life um now i wonder if some people struggle with that though, because we become so disconnected from it over a period of decades that we can't even remember anymore.

55:34Jonathan Fields: Like we're just like, I don't even know. Like I don't remember the last time I felt something resembling aliveness, which is a little bit tragic, but I think I would imagine there are questions that you can ask yourself. Yes. So one of my intellectual inspirations before I started writing the book, I was reading Mary Catherine Bateson, and she's the daughter of Margaret Mead, and she's deceased now. But she wrote a lot in her book about kind of a second adulthood, right? She kind of likened it to Eric Erickson's, you know, stages of development when we're asking ourselves these really important questions of like, who am I?

56:13What's my self identity? What's happening to my body? And what is my generativity or my purpose, basically? What's my reason for getting out of bed in the morning? And I let that sit with me for a long time, this idea of a second adulthood. And what I realized is that for me, it did not feel like a second adulthood. It felt like a second adolescence, right? I was going through this transition, like physically, emotionally, at the same time, my daughter, who's 15 now, started puberty. And when our teenagers are angsty, when they are irrational, when there's rebellion, we say, oh, yeah, they're teens.

56:57That's teenage rebellion. We have a cultural acceptance of that. And we give them a pass. We give them space. We love them even when their behavior is bad. Where is that cultural acceptance for people our age, right? If I got around saying like, oh my God, who am I? What is happening to my body? And what is my purpose? People would be like, lady, get it together. We do not give enough space to have this second out of lessons. But that's exactly what it is. We are asking the same questions. Who am I now? What is happening to my body? And what is my purpose? These are not easy questions to answer because they require what you and I just talked about.

57:41They require like facing that passage and going, what am I willing to let go of? Am I willing to let go of ego and accolades, right? How am I going to make this transition? This bridge between like what we have been and what we're going to become, there's a lot of rocky water underneath. And asking these questions, you know, is hard to do. So it takes courage and it sometimes brings like a kind of form of rebellion, I'd say, and struggle.

58:11Jonathan Fields: I love that you use the word become there. I think about this often. And I wonder whether, you know, once we hit the middle season of life, we feel like who do we want to become next? But what we're really, really more deeply looking for is how do we return to who we once were? Oh, 100%. It's exactly. It's coming full circle. I mean, I use a lot of circle analogies in my book. I came up with the term third turn. I was inspired. I grew up in Kentucky. When I was 12 years old, I went to Churchill Downs, which is the home of the Kentucky Derby. And oftentimes in a horse race, you know, it's this predictable front of the pack horses.

58:51And then right around the third turn, some horse pulls from behind and, you know, finds this surge of energy that no one's expecting. And it's always a surprise, as my grandfather told me, something unexpected is going to happen at the third turn. And you find this surge of energy to race ahead and win. And I had this conversation with my grandfather about, you know, why at this point? Why do you think the third turn? And of course, as a teenager, you know, you have no concept of midlife. And I never forget what he said to me is like, well, when you can see the finish line, a sense of urgency arises, you know?

59:29And I thought, wow, okay. So I know you had a guest on who was sort of like talking about time anxiety, that's time anxiety right there, right? Like if there's something you're going to do, if not now, when? And so I feel like at a time when the hundred year lifespan is possible, you know, 50 to 75 is kind of the third turn or the third quarter. Like there is time to surge ahead.

59:56Jonathan Fields: Yeah, I love that. One of the things that you referenced also, which I want to dip back into, because I think it's really important. I don't want us to miss it. So you shared a case. So you find something that really just like, you connect with it for whatever reason. It's purpose, it matters. It gives you the feeling that you want to have. And right after that, you planted this seed that says, okay, now go find people who are doing that too. And it sounds like that was a common pattern also. You know that, okay, so it's cool to do this yourself. But when you can build community, family, chosen family, friendships, and you're all sharing, You have this affinity, whether you're kind of like parallel playing and doing it in your own way or all collaborating on one thing together, that connectedness, that sort of like shared participation in the thing, it sounds like that was a common pattern and also probably really important.

1:00:48Yeah, I think as you bring this up, I'm thinking about this woman I met, her name's Leslie, and she was a classical violin player. And I met her on a flight from Oakland to Dulles Airport in DC. So five and a half hour flight or so. And at one point, the Wi Fi went down and I'm a talker. So I struck up a conversation with her, I had watched her boarding the plane, put her instrument case up above. and I said do you play the violin and she looked at me and she said no I don't and I thought oh this is she's not a talker and she there was this pregnant pause and I kind of looked back to my you know notes or my book or whatever and then she goes I play the fiddle and she said it with this like playful like I play the fiddle and I was like oh okay well um I'm not sure I know the difference?

1:01:42You know, I think maybe I thought they were the same thing, but I'm not, you know, I don't know. And she was like, oh, yeah, it's the same instrument, but a completely different attitude. She said, when you play violin, you're playing someone else's music. When you're trained to play the classical violin, you're sitting in front of somebody else's music. And the stress of hitting every note the way somebody else intended you, intended for you to hit that note, it's a skill and you can get good at it, but it's also takes a lot out of you. So she said, I left behind classical music. And when I found fiddle, I got to improvise.

1:02:22I got to make my own music. So she made this like really simple switch from performance to play. And I think that's an amazing, her story encapsulates so much of the midlife pivot, If we can all go from performance, doing the thing to please the fans, to please the crowd, to a return to playing music because music makes your soul feel good and it's improvisational music, well, there you go. That's the recipe right there. And so I asked her, well, how has playing fiddle changed your life? And she said, well, I didn't have any community around violin. But once I started playing fiddle, I started going to fiddle competitions and weekend, you know.

1:03:10And once you find your fiddle people, you got your peeps, you know. So it's a great example of like find the thing you love and then or parlay that thing you know how to do playing violin to something more playful and then find other people who are doing that. And she was a very, very happy person.

1:03:29Jonathan Fields: So if someone's joining us, right, and they're nodding along, they're in this season of live, and they're like, okay, so finding something that really gives me that sense of purpose or aliveness, finding, you know, taking some time to really pause and look inward, you know, whatever that means to you, whatever the process or the questions are, and finding people that you can share, whatever emerges from that, really important. And maybe they're joining us and thinking, this sounds really cool. I'm in the moon bounce phase right now. I'm going hard, but I would love to figure out a first step in.

1:04:00Jonathan Fields: What would you invite them to explore? So a couple of things and also a little preamble. Oftentimes, when people say, oh, I would love to have that feeling again, but I'm too busy, or I'm taking care of my mom with Alzheimer's, or I have this responsibility. And I understand we are the sandwich generation. And it goes without saying that we just because our kids are launching or getting older and maybe we're, you know, done climbing the career ladder, most of us are still working and still have obligation on both ends, parents, kids, and those things never end, never will. That will be until the day we die.

1:04:40But we do have, if you have an extra hour a week, an extra hour a week, you have time to start doing a slow crossfade to a pivot, to a third term, right? So two things that I would say, two little starting places. One is I'm a big fan of this survey called the Values in Action Character Strengths Survey. It was developed by Marty Seligman and a bunch of other people, Peterson, right? and I interviewed Dr. Seligman about it when it was brand new and I was a young mom and struggling to know if it was like I was doing the right thing like running from here down to the train every morning at 8 20 while my au pair was trying to clean the kitchen here and get the kids ready and my life felt like chaos and I often wondered like am I doing the right thing and the the the tool is great because it helps you really figure out how your values and your strengths come together, right?

1:05:39And I remember taking it as a young mom and realizing that, you know, Marty Seligman telling me, assuring me, like, it seems like you're doing the right thing. Like, you do a job, you know, you're, some of your, your, your strongest strengths and, and values are curiosity and lifelong learning, you know, like, of course, you're doing the right thing. Like, you know, even my mother told me, if you stay home all day, every day, all you're gonna be doing is cleaning at the house and changing diapers and everybody was right. I just needed to see it. And taking that survey really gave me, reminded me of who I was at a time when I was too busy to see it.

1:06:15And so I think go online and take it. You can find a free version online. You can take one of the VIA classes, which are amazing. And just it's a way to check in with yourself to remember what are my strengths? What are my values? And that will start speaking to you. And then I think the first idea that you have bubbling up when you hear about a volunteer opportunity, even if it's just an hour a week, whether it's with animals or the environment or something political, it doesn't matter. The first thing where you feel your heart make that little leap when somebody describes what they're doing, follow along, right?

1:06:51You don't have to commit, you just have to try something. And then that might be an on-ramp to something else.

1:06:58Jonathan Fields: Love that. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live by heart and intuition. We talked about the three chapters of life as learn, earn, retire, I think a much better script is learn, earn, return. Return to living a life by heart and intuition. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure to be here. So one of the things I'm still thinking about from this conversation, it's how much Allison's body told her something that her mind kind of wasn't ready to hear. Two other ideas that keep circling for me, the summoning or the summons, that quiet nudge that most of us have gotten really good at not hearing.

1:07:53Jonathan Fields: I'm really thinking about whether I've missed some in my own journey, especially in this season of life. And the moon bounce, that visual, that specific exhaustion of bouncing between obligations with no space to ever ask if any of it is actually still working for you. And maybe a little bit of a bonus, the importance of mattering and finding people to share a deep, a deep curiosity or pursuit with. If there's one thing to really carry into the week, maybe it's this. Find one small thing that makes your heart. Just do that little leap that Allison talked about and give it a minute, give it a couple minutes, give it an hour.

1:08:32Jonathan Fields: See what it tells you. Hey, before you leave next week, we're sitting down with Bella DiPaolo to talk about what it actually means to be what she calls single at heart and why some of the deepest, most authentic lives being lived right now aren't actually built around a partner at all. So be sure to follow the good life project wherever you get your podcasts. So you don't miss that or any other upcoming episodes. Doing a quick personal favor, share this conversation with just one person or leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. it really helps us get discovered and reach more people.

1:09:06Jonathan Fields: This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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