Chip Conley Wants You To Love Getting Older

What if the best is yet to come?

This week I talked with New York Times bestselling author Chip Conley about his new book Learning To Love Midlife: 12 Reasons That Life Gets Better With Age.

Chip is also co-founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which I’ve had the pleasure of attending and highly recommend. To learn more about Chip’s illustrious career, go here.

Chip believes—and I concur—that life doesn't really begin until you turn 50. Everything else is a dress rehearsal, he says.

But you wouldn't know this listening to the horrible messages about aging we hear in our culture. So many people dread the idea of getting older, seeing it as one long, slow decline. I used to be one of those people. I have been absolutely shocked by how much happier I am in my 50s and how much I look forward to what is to come.

But getting to that place took a lot of unlearning toxic social conditioning that is driven mainly by industries that want to make money off of scaring us about "getting old."

"We have an enormous gap between the societal narrative on aging versus the personal narrative," notes Chip. "But there's something called the U curve of happiness…which is research that's been done across socioeconomic groups globally, has shown that there's a long slow decline in life satisfaction from our early twenties till around 45 to 50 when it actually bottoms out. And then with each decade after age 50, you get happier and happier."

Nothing will change the way you experience aging more than the mindset you hold about getting older. Many of us have a nasty "inner ageist" we need to get rid of. "Research has shown that when people actually shift their mindset from negative to positive when it comes to aging, they gain seven and a half years of additional life," notes Chip, "Which is more life than if they quit smoking at 50 or started exercising at 50."

Watch our conversation (or read the transcript) to learn how to start thinking differently about the second half of life.

AI Generated Transcript

Note: there may be some mistakes in this transcript; you can watch the interview above for complete accuracy.

Kirsten Powers:

So I'm here with my friend Chip Conley, who runs the Modern Elder Academy and is the author of an incredible new book, Learning to Love Midlife. And Chip is one of the people that helped me learn to love midlife. I was able to visit the Modern Elder Academy, which I've written about before. I'll link to that and you can read more about that. Can't recommend it enough. And Chip, I'm so excited to talk to you about how we can change the channel about how we think about aging. So just jump right in and just tell me what you think.

Chip Conley:

Well, let's start by, first of all, honored to be here. Thank you. And yeah, what's interesting is we have an enormous gap between the societal narrative on aging versus the personal narrative. So the societal narrative, aging on aging says if you can make it through midlife and your crisis, you have disease decrepit death ahead of you. And yet there's something called, the U curve of happiness on the other hand, which is research that's been done across socioeconomic groups globally, has shown that there's a long slow decline in life satisfaction from our early twenties till around 45 to 50 when it actually bottoms out. And then with each decade after age 50, you get happier and happier. And so there's a lot of reasons for that. So we have a weird dynamic here where there's a societal narrative, which is don't do it when it comes to aging.

Chip Conley:

And then there's a personal narrative, which is that somehow people get more satisfied with life as they get older. So that's part of what we try to focus on at MEA is where's this discord and how do we create more satisfaction in our lives after age 50? But there's no doubt there's a lot of anti-aging products out there. And what we've tried to be is a aging product because [inaudible] has shown that when people actually shift their mindset from negative to positive when it comes to aging, they gain seven and a half years of additional life, which is more life than if they quit smoking at 50 or started exercising at 50.

Kirsten Powers:

That is so important that we all have this inner ageist inside of us that has all these ideas that we need to sort of deprogram and unlearn and get rid of because they're not true. I mean, this idea that everything is just going to fall apart and be miserable, it's not only, that's not what happens. The opposite happens, at least in my experience.

Chip Conley:

Well, the subtitle of my new book, learning to Love Midlife, is 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age. And I really, with each chapter I sort of talk about them. Everything from our emotional intelligence improves, our wisdom starts to develop, assuming that we are cultivating it, we are no longer identified with our body quite as much. We move from ego to soul.

And so there's a lot of things that get better with age for people across all economic stratus. This is not just something for the privileged. We have had over 4,000 people from 45 countries come to MEA, and over half of them have been on some form of financial aid. And so we've had everybody from CEOs of tech companies to social workers and physical therapists. And what I can say pretty consistently is that the thing that is most predominant and that what people need is a sense that the narrative of what happens in midlife, which is going through a lot of transitions, is normal. These are things that are normal. So we have to say the narrative of somehow you're going through a crisis. I like to call it a chrysalis because halfway between the caterpillar and the butterflies is the chrysalis, and that's where it's dark and gooey and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. And that's I think, why the U curve of happiness shows an upward trend after age 50. So

Kirsten Powers:

Go ahead. I was just going to say we probably should quickly define what midlife is because you talk about in the book about how there's actually three stages of midlife. Maybe you could say a little bit

Chip Conley:

About that's, so this based upon lots of conversations with academics and doing a lot of white paper research, there's some people think midlife lasts 40 years long now 35 to 75, which is earlier than it used to be thought of. And that's partly because there's a lot of people in their mid thirties who are feeling obsolescent earlier because of artificial intelligence or just the digital world sort of sneaking up on them and feeling like they're a little outdated. And then it's lasting.

Kirsten Powers:

They're babies.

Chip Conley:

They're babies.

Chip Conley:

At the upper end, the reason it's lasting longer is because more and more people are living to a hundred. And so as a result, it's a long period, 35 to 50 is the early part of midlife. It's probably the roughest part of midlife. 50 to 60 is the core, and then 60 to 75 is later midlife. And often when we think of midlife and we think of midlife crisis and people buying red sports cars and having affairs, that's often that early midlife period where people are trying to go from middle essence to adolescence. But I think what's really important for people to recognize is that midlife is a bridge. It is a bridge from the earlier part of your life to later part of your life. And could it be a bridge of troubled waters? Excuse me. But yes, it could be, but it is a bridge. It is a time where you actually can start to have some pattern recognition and understand your life narrative a little bit better, and therefore make better decisions.

Kirsten Powers:

Well, and you also say it's the most transformative era of your life. What do you mean by that?

Chip Conley:

Well, because it's the era. So as a society we've been really good at when someone's going through transitions in their life, we often do rituals for them. So it's like there's birth and there's the communion and there's oh, baptisms and quinceaneras and bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, commencement addresses, graduation, getting married, having baby showers. And then between baby showers and funerals, there's nothing yet. Midlife has as many transitions as any other life stage except for adolescents. It's about on par with adolescents. That's why I like to call it mid adolescence. And so we're going through all of these transitions, and yet we don't have any kinds of communal rituals or societies support us through them. And so that's part of the reason we created MEA, because we really needed to sort of say, Hey, there's social support for you out here as you're going through whatever you're going through, but if you can go through it and do it well such that you're not just changing the landscape outside of you, but something changed inside of you like it did with you. I mean, truthfully, your story is a chrysalis story of realizing you got into that place, you realized you didn't want to be doing it the way you've been doing it. And then you said, I'm going to break free of this and out popped the butterfly.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah. I think one of the things is another thing you said. So I feel this is very true. When I was reading your book, you said life begins at 50. Everything else is just a dress rehearsal very much the way I feel. But I just was wondering if you could say more about that.

Chip Conley:

Well, I think it's not to say that our life before age 50 is irrelevant. Of course it's relevant. It's made us the person we are at that point. But quite often we've been living a success script that was defined by someone else. And so we're on a treadmill. It could be our parents, it could be the community we grew up in. It could be our friends, whomever. We've often formulated ourselves based upon what we thought people wanted us to be. And it's around midlife. And sometimes it's these life circumstances that are out of our control that just sort of are just a knock up the side of the head that forces us to actually make the change in our life. But it is at that era where I think we start to realize that we could create our own success script as opposed to having the script be defined by someone else.

Chip Conley:

And so that's really what's happening during that era. I think there's also, Brene Brown calls it the midlife unraveling. When she first said that to me, I was like, Brene, I don't want to unravel in midlife. That's like I'm losing my mind. And she said, chip, if you look at the word ravel, it means to be so tightly wound, you can't get the thing undone like a bull or some string. And so I think that learning how to create some spaciousness in midlife for you to be a little bit more conscious in how you want to curate your life is really important.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah, it feels to me like you spend the first part of your life building this thing, and then you spend the second half deconstructing it. You know what I mean? Kind of taking it apart and trying to think, okay, I'll keep this and I'll get rid of that. And for me, I really couldn't have done it without being in community with other people that were doing it, reading books about it. I really was quite lost when I was in my, I would say in my, around 47 is probably when it started for me and somebody that is the

Chip Conley:

Low point.

Kirsten Powers:

And I was, it's

Chip Conley:

47.2,

Kirsten Powers:

47 2, and I had that feeling of it's all over and it's all down a hill. And somebody recommended Richard R's book, who I know has been to MEA Falling Upward. And I read that and I was like, oh my gosh. There's this whole different paradigm that we're not really taught about life, that I'm now going into this new exciting phase. And I actually got very excited about it. But I do think it's important for people to have help in this process. And so some people can go to MEA, everyone can't go to MEA, but for somebody who's watching this and thinking, okay, I want to start changing my thinking about this and start viewing this differently, what would you suggest to them? Because I think it's still hard for some people that they just feel stuck or they feel like the best years are behind me and all these kinds of things.

Chip Conley:

Well, I mean, you don't have to spend money. So first of all, if people are interested in what I've been talking about today, I have a daily blog that's free if you can, a free subscription. We send you an email every day. You'll find it on the MEA website, mea wisdom.com. And it's called Wisdom. Well, that's the name of the blog. Yeah. You could read a book and that would be helpful. That costs a little bit of money, but not much. You could start a book club. Highly recommend whether it's one of David Brooks' books, his books tend to focus on midlife in a significant way. Or my new book, learning to Love Midlife, start a book club with some friends. Actually, the social connection you make is incredibly important. The Harvard study for 85 years now, the longitudinal, longitudinal study of adult development has shown the number one variable for living a longer, happier, healthier life is how invested were we in our social relations in our fifties? And so going out and reaching out to people and saying, Hey, let's talk about this topic of aging, or let's talk about this book. We've seen, or some people I know have done a film club around midlife. I would say number one on the list would be American Beauty with Kevin Spacey,

Chip Conley:

What not to do, what not do, but doing a film club around topics around midlife is a beautiful idea. And a RP, God bless their soul. I don't love them all the at times, but I think they're a good ER out there in the world. They have a list of the best movies that are grown up, mature movies, themes of the year, check out every year. If you do a Google search, you'll find them for every year and create a phone club and watch the movies with your friends and then have a conversation, have a meal afterwards.

Kirsten Powers:

What about people who feel like it's just too late? I'm 60 years old and I didn't do the things I was supposed to do. I don't have any friends I don't have. Do you run into people like this? Of course. And have you seen them sort turn it around?

Chip Conley:

Yes, for sure. We had a 60-year-old litigation attorney who hated her life. She didn't like what her job made her, it made her an armored bulldozer. And we asked her the question like, what in childhood were you passionate about? And she came up with something really quickly. She said, I loved baking pies with my grandma in the kitchen, and I can still smell the baking pies. And so within six months, she'd quit her litigation attorney job, and she actually went to become a pastry chef, and now she's opening a bakery. So that's one example. But the reality is 60, if you're going to live till 90, you're basically about a third of the way through your life. I mean two thirds of the way through your life. And if I like to count things from 18 on the average age of the person who comes to MEA is 54, the average age they think they're going to live till is 90, 54 is exactly halfway between 18 and 90, so not too many. 54 year olds I know would say like, oh, wow, I'm only halfway through my adult life. And yet, once you know that, you can sort of say like, well, gosh, what can I invest in? What can I do? How can I become a beginner? Again, this is how I learned at age 57 to surf for the first time as well as to learn Spanish.

Kirsten Powers:

Oh, now you're inspiring me. I'm going to learn to surf.

Chip Conley:

Yes. Come on back down to Baja, and we'll do that.

Kirsten Powers:

I'm going to be in Baja. I'm going to be in Baja soon. We'll talk about that offline. Let's talk about, yes, just to wrap this up, I'm trying to keep these short for people. Everyone has short attention spans these days, just something you talk about doing as a midlife edit. If somebody wanted to do that, what would be the kinds of things that you would say they should focus on?

Chip Conley:

Well, Richard Rohr says that the first half of our life is about accumulating, and the second half of our life is about editing. So we do something called the Great Midlife Edit at MEA. It's also, I write about it in the book. It's the idea of taking stock and doing an inventory of all the mindsets, roles, identities, even archetypes that you're living, the obligations you have, the people who are in your life make a list of all of those things that aren't working for you anymore. And they may be things that used to work for you. Being the caregiver in the family may work for you. It doesn't mean you are not going to get rid of being a caregiver, but maybe you dose it down to 50% of how much caregiving you've been giving. And so you come up with a list of what those things are, and then you say, I'm ready to let go of them.

Chip Conley:

And you hang out with a friend and you write them on a piece of paper and you throw them in the fire, and then you say, what am I going to replace them with? It's basically a ritual. A ritual is a great way to let go of something. And so this is a ritual that helps people to say, this isn't working for me anymore. I'm letting go. And six months from now, I can look back to that time and say like, that's when I let go of it. If you actually don't ritualize it, it's very easy for it to just get stuck to you.

Kirsten Powers:

Right, right. Yeah. Alright. Everybody has their assignment, chip. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. You're such a gift to the world. Thank you. I'm just so grateful for everything that you're doing around this topic. It's so important. It's impacted me personally, and I know it's impacted so many other people as well. So thank

Chip Conley:

You for Well, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being a role model.

Reframing Aging