Midlife Will Never Be The Same. Excellent!

I was walking through London a while back when I came across a sign that stopped me in my tracks. Its message was simple: “Don’t slow down for the wrong reasons.”

I stood there longer than was probably acceptable for someone standing on the pavement staring at a sign. But it landed. Because it said in a few words what I’ve been trying to articulate for years about midlife – about what we’ve been told it is, and what it could actually be, if we chose to look at it differently.

A few weeks later, I had a conversation with friends that made the whole thing even clearer.

We were in the middle of what I can only describe as the classic Gen X sandwich situation – aging parents on one side, children still at home or at university on the other, and us somewhere in the middle, financially responsible for everyone and quietly wondering when exactly we became the load-bearing walls of other people’s lives. The conversation turned, as it often does in these moments, to the future. To what comes next. To retirement, and what it would actually look like.

And here’s what struck me. My friends – smart, thoughtful, self-aware people – were horrified by what they saw ahead. Not because retirement seemed bad, exactly. But because when they looked forward, the only image they could find was their parents’ retirement. Store. Home. Television. Neighbours. Repeat.

“I don’t want to live like that,” one of them said. “But what’s the alternative? It is what it is.“

It is what it is.

I’ve been thinking about those 5 words ever since. Because they sounded, to me, less like acceptance and more like surrender. A surrender to a version of later life that was inherited rather than chosen – absorbed from watching our parents and grandparents age, and never really questioned.

So I asked, “Is the life we’re living now the life our parents had at the same age? Do we have the same options they had, the same technology, the same opportunities, the same understanding of health and longevity, and what’s actually possible?”

I watched the wheels start turning.

The Old Midlife Is Extinct. And That’s Actually Good News.

Let me be direct about something: the midlife our parents lived is gone. Not diminished, not slightly updated – GONE. As extinct as the fax machine, the travel agent, and the idea that one job would carry you through your entire working life.

And I say that with zero disrespect to the generation before us. They lived the lives available to them, shaped by the options and expectations of their era. Their version of midlife and retirement made complete sense for who they were and when they lived. The store, the home, the television, the neighbors – that wasn’t a failure of imagination. That was a life built on the existing structures.

But those structures don’t exist for us in the same way. And if we keep trying to pour our lives into a mould that wasn’t made for us, we’re going to spend the next thirty years quietly confused about why it doesn’t quite fit.

Consider what has actually changed. We are going to live longer – significantly longer – and be healthier for more of it than any previous generation. The concept of a clean stop at 65, followed by a gentle wind-down, is a fiction that our biology has simply outpaced. Many of us at 55 are more active, more mentally engaged, and more capable of reinvention than our parents were at 40. That’s not a boast – it’s a data point. And it has implications.

It means the chapter after traditional working life isn’t a footnote. It’s a full act. One that could last twenty, twenty-five, thirty years. One that deserves as much intention and design as any other period of our lives – possibly more, because this time, there’s no institutional structure setting our objectives for us. No school timetable. No career ladder. No manager. Just us, and the question of what we actually want.

Let’s be honest, most of us have never sat with that question seriously. We’ve been too busy. Which means we arrive at the threshold of this enormous chapter with almost no idea what we want it to look like – and then we reach for the only template we have, which is the one we inherited. And wonder why it doesn’t feel right.

“It Is What It Is” Is Not a Life Plan

I want to stay with my friends for a moment, because I think their conversation represents something much bigger than just someone having a hard week.

The resignation in “it is what it is” isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s the result of genuinely not knowing that another option exists. When the only retirement you’ve ever seen up close is your parents’, and nobody around you is talking about designing anything different, the default becomes the destination. Not because you chose it – but because you didn’t know you could.

This is what I mean when I say the narrative needs to change. Not the glossy, aspirational narrative of retirement ads where everyone is somehow always on a boat in a linen shirt. That’s not the alternative I’m offering. The alternative I’m offering is more interesting and more honest than that: the idea that retirement is something you build, not something that happens to you. That the shape of your later years is, to a meaningful degree, a design project – and that the best time to start designing it is now, while you still have time, energy, and options.

We are not trees. We do not have to stay rooted where we were planted. We can move in direction, in mindset, in the very structure of how we imagine the years ahead.

So How Do You Actually Shift the Narrative?

I’m not going to give you a ten-step program, because that’s not what this is. But I will share what I’ve seen work – both in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with, when it comes to starting to see midlife differently.

The first thing is the most uncomfortable, you have to get honest about what you’ve been assuming. Most of us are carrying beliefs about aging and retirement that we absorbed before we were old enough to question them. 

That later life is a diminishment. 

That ambition has an expiry date. 

That wanting more – more purpose, more adventure, more genuine engagement with the world – is somehow not appropriate once you reach a certain age. 

These beliefs are worth excavating because they are running quietly in the background and shaping every decision you make about the future.

Ask yourself, whose version of retirement am I imagining? Is it mine – or is it inherited?

The second thing is to let yourself get curious about what you actually want – not what you’re supposed to want, not what seems realistic given everything, not the sensible version. What do you actually want your days to feel like in ten years? What are you still curious about? What have you been meaning to explore when things settle down? What would you do if the answer “it is what it is” wasn’t available to you?

Let’s be honest, many of us haven’t asked these questions seriously since we were young enough to think the answers were still possible. The news is that they still are. The chapter ahead is longer than you think, and considerably more open than the template you inherited suggests.

The third thing – and this is where intention becomes action – is to start preparing for that chapter the way you’d prepare for anything that matters. Not just financially, though that matters too. But across the full picture:

• your health
• your sense of purpose
• the relationships and community you’ll want around you
• the shape of the life you’re actually building toward

These things don’t arrive ready-made on the day you stop working. They are built, slowly and intentionally, in the years before.

The people I see thrive in this next chapter are not the ones who had the most money or the best circumstances. They’re the ones who got curious and intentional early enough to actually shape what came next. They asked the questions. They challenged the inherited template. They decided – consciously, deliberately – that “it is what it is” was not a sentence they were willing to end their story with.

There Is Light. Quite a Lot of It, Actually.

I want to come back to my friends, because the conversation didn’t end with resignation.

It ended with questions. Real ones. What would we do differently if we actually planned this? What do we want that we’ve never let ourselves want? What does a good day look like when nobody needs anything from us for once?

And I watched something shift in the room. Not dramatically – there was no sudden epiphany, no thunderclap of insight. Just a quiet opening. That the template was optional. That “it is what it is” is only true if you decide it is.

That’s the conversation I want to keep having. With you, with my community, with anyone who has ever looked ahead into the years and felt the low-grade dread of a future that looks like someone else’s past.

Midlife will never be the same as it was for our parents. Thank goodness for that. It’s bigger, longer, more complex, and – if we choose to approach it that way – considerably more interesting.

Don’t slow down for the wrong reasons.

Your takeaway:

The retirement you inherited as a template was built for someone else’s life. You are not obligated to live it. The question isn’t whether a different version of later life is possible – it is. The question is whether you’re willing to design it.

Your first small step:

Write down three things you have always wanted to do, be, or experience – things you’ve been saving for “someday.” Then ask yourself honestly: is someday on your calendar? If not, pick one. Give it a date. Not a plan yet. Just a date. That’s enough for now.

Over to you:

When you imagine your retirement – honestly, the first image that comes to mind – whose life does it look like? Yours, or someone else’s? Let me know. I read every message, and this one I’m genuinely curious about.