40 Is Coming Podcast Episodes

 How do build community, make friends, and find our place now that we've graduated from the spaces that were created for us just because we were the newest and youngest adults? 

For the generation that redefined greatness online and in our society, with what we know now at our age, how should we think about what makes someone great? How do we nurture and navigate our own greatness?  

Whether you're the type of person who likes to chill and keep the peace, or the type of person who is ready for whatever needs to be done to deal with someone who has disturbed your peace; at this stage in your life, how do decide whether a fight is worth it? 

At this point in your life, what are some things you simply will not do? In your personal life, with your family, on your job, as you navigate the society, are there things you will always do? How are you creating the "Will and Won't" lists in your life?

"It is better to give than to receive." Often, we give right after receiving. Whether what we've received is a rush of happy hormones after seeing/experiencing something wonderful, or a vibe-killing wave of sadness/shame after being made aware of something horrible, a strong motivator for us to take action and do good in the world is driven by temporary moments of heightened emotion.

After years of trial and error, listening to different points of view, and trying new approaches, at this point in your life, how do you deal with being told that what you're doing isn't right, isn't enough, or isn't helpful anymore...and that you need to try again?

What have you experienced or witnessed that has changed the choices you make in certain areas of your life? Is there something that you can't unsee that has caused you to change the way you think and act?

Doing better is a choice, a commitment, and sometimes a struggle to actually follow through with. But sometimes we make the choice and the change, and do things differently.

What irritates you at this stage of your life? Has your opinion on what is annoying, self-righteous behavior changed over the years?

Are there things that you now do - and you know rub other people the wrong way - which you have doubled down on, regardless of who is bothered by it?

Are you still finding a stream of potential new friends for you to meet? How have your friendships changed and evolved over the years? Has the way you make friends changed over the years? Are you still making friends?

Have your various identities - in your family, relationship, wealth, beliefs - impacted who you've kept as a friend, who considers you a friend, and who you will consider as a potential friend?

 This episode is for givers. The people who have everything, for everyone else. Those who do everything, give everything, fix everything, find everything...for everyone else.

When do you allow yourself to take? When do you ask for what you need? Which area(s) of your life do you keep for yourself? 

Social media is one of the rare instances where we were present at its origin, participated in its construction, and observed how certain things were created and became status and identity markers.

We have survived long enough online to see how this thing - which didn't used to exist or matter - arose to change how people interacted with each other in a specific space. At 40, there is a certain clarity about the blue checks in life that we never got.

Anyone who has ever had their property attacked or their body assaulted knows, listing what was taken from you is different than thinking about what you lost.

When an incident like this happens, our common triage assessment of the aftermath involves asking:

"What happened?", "Where are you?"

"Are you okay?", "Who was hurt?"

"Did they take anything?"

There are so many ways to answer that last question, and to explore what those words mean to us at this point of our lives.

For those of us turning 40 at this moment, our adult lives have overlapped with the rise of real-time financial data, the rise of the personal finance media industry, and the rise of the financial expert/influencer.

And it feels like we've seen it all: from cable TV stock pickers and social media real estate gurus, to crypto evangelists and entrepreneur lifestyle influencers.

How do you decide who to listen to about finances, investing, and handling money?

When did you start weighing the tradeoffs between a good night's sleep and a good night out?

For many of us, turning 40 means that our preferences have shifted in when we find the time to have a good time.

Everything from where we are willing to go, when we are willing to go, how long we are willing to stay, who we are willing to go with, and what we are willing to wear.

How often have you looked at a situation, looked around at the people with/near you, and decided that you were going to have to be the one to make sure that things didn't go bad on your watch?

What are the muscles you've built from the times when you've had to go it alone and get it done by yourself? What are wounds and scars that came as a consequence of not having anyone by your side?

Does anyone else feel the strange pressure to look young on the day when the calendar is literally reminding you that you've never been older?!

Are you finding that how you think and feel about your body on your birthday is more about how well your body is actually doing, or more about the expectations and opinions from friends, family, and/or society about what your body should look like at this age?

Do you love to travel on your birthday? Are you the kind of person who needs to take some sort of trip - whether across town or across the globe - as part of your birthday festivities?

But sometimes life happens, and we have to adapt and adjust, and expand our definition of what a getaway can be. Do you find that you still feel pressure to have plan big birthday trips, have Instagramable birthday events, and make big birthday plans ?

Have you ever found yourself disconnected and detached at the kind of party you used to enjoy, with people you used to be comfortable with, in a space that you used to look forward to going to?

When was the first time you remember feeling isolated, alone, and/or invisible in a space full of friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers? When was the most recent time you felt like this?

How do you navigate the times when you are required - or feel responsible - to stay in environments and around people who don't resonate with you?

When was the first time you knew you were adult? When you moved out on your own? When you took over paying the bills for older/younger loved ones? When you accepted responsibility and accountability for your actions?

One of the things we all come to realize is that there are levels to adulting. One key level of adult life is being able to identify and prioritize the essential components of our lives. The relationships, habits, beliefs, and possessions that allow us to survive and navigate our days.

What are the parts of your life that cannot break?

When you're young, ignorance is bliss. By 40, more often than not, ignorance is just expensive. And what's even more expensive than ignorance? Procrastination.

Whether because of fear or fatigue, denial or distractions, being overwhelmed and/or underpaid, most of us have some area of our lives where we have been warned and informed that there's something we need to address and we have yet to do anything about it.

Sometimes, we have less time than we think, the future comes faster than we expected, and we're left stuck with the consequences of our choice to put off to tomorrow what should have been handled today.

Taking an episode to celebrate the impact of the semi-strangers in our lives. They are not the super famous figures who had an impact on our lives. They are also not the super foundational people who have close, personal connections to us and to our life story.

They are the people in the middle. We may not have known them well, but they made an impact on us, they played a role in our lives, and their legacy matters.

Who are the semi-strangers in your life?

By 40, many of us have experienced being on multiple sides of expectation-acceptance dance. Many of us had childhoods that were defined by the expectations of others.

We saw how their acceptance and approval of us was often determined - or withheld - by how much we met their expectations, or how much we resisted and went against them. And this social reward/punishment system continued into multiple aspects our adult lives, whether we are known by a few hundred people, or by a few million.

At this point in my life, I realize that there are two kinds of 40-year olds: those who have experienced at least one humbling moment where they weren't as smart as they thought they were, or that things around them weren't as certain as they thought...and people who have never had such an experience.

One advantage of experiencing a humbling moment, is the knowledge of what it feels like - as an adult - to need help. It's one thing to need help. It's another thing to want help. But to ask to for help? For many of us, asking for help is an entirely different matter.

One of the gifts of turning 40 is the self-awareness to know when to keep your two cents to yourself and sit out a fight, whether over the internet or in your house.

But life comes at us fast, and it seems like every few weeks another Really Big Deal Event happen, and many of us answer the battle cry of our group and take to our phones, our TVs, and our streets to stand up and speak out.

This episode is a check-in meditation for a generation of 40 year olds who have already lived through a lifetime worth of interpersonal conflicts, social movements, online fights, and existential crises.

Have you ever experienced the stages of shock, denial, anger, and grief after discovering that someone who you respected and admired was not who you thought they were?

At this stage of our lives, a year has not gone by without us witnessing some once-beloved and respected entertainer, politician, local community leader, or religious figure get caught up in a reputation-tainting scandal.

Did an experience of being let down by someone you looked up as child affect how you react today to hearing about a public figure's fall from grace?

One of the social media trends I've come to appreciate has been people making TikToks of themselves using the face aging filter. In the majority of the ones that appear in my feed, people generally respond lovingly, gently, and knowingly at the visuals of their future faces.

I think this trend, that made it socially acceptable to publicly share images of a version of yourself with more wrinkles, less hair, and no youthful glow, has been a much-needed counterbalance to the body slimming underclothes, weight loss supplements, plastic surgery procedures, hair dyeing kits, and the billion-dollar industries that feed on the insecurities and realities of many of us soon-to-be middle agers.

At this stage of your life, do you still dream? What are your dreams about? What are your dreams no longer about? Who are your dreams for?

40 is a great time to ask: What have your dreams cost you? What has cost you your dreams?

I wish more adults could experience an offseason, especially those of us about to enter mid-life. I believe that we all need time to sleep, time to rest, time to reflect, time to reset. We need time to dream.

A few days ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being stuck in an elevator at my job for an hour. On the 13th Floor. On a Friday afternoon.

While this highly irritating, slightly traumatizing ordeal was taking place, I decided to do what most writers do. I took this unexpected prompt, opened my notes app, and started writing.

This experience was a good metaphor for life moments that happen to many people around 40. Moments when we get stopped, moments where we find ourselves stuck.

My hair-related fears and concerns about aging never included worrying about seeing my hair turning gray. My two biggest concerns had always been about developing a receding hairline and balding.

Seeing my hair turn gray is one of the few life milestones I have experienced alone, and it got me to thinking about the kind of life milestones that define the first part of our lives, and the kind of milestones that will define this stage of life.

In many ways, turning 40 is primarily a conversation about timing. The timing of the events in our lives. The timing of the seasons and stages of our lives.

Bad timing. Good timing. Unbelievably fortunate timing. Unbelievably tragic timing.

How many of us are approaching 40 in a season of life where we cannot afford for anything to go wrong because we have too many people, and things, to care for?

The first time I heard about the concept of 3rd places was when I was in college. Over the years, I've enjoyed a variety of 3rd places, including coffee shops, gyms, houses of worship, and live music venues.

But my two favorite 3rd places - by far - are laundromats and car washes. They are no-judgement, family-friendly, budget-friendly, class-collapsing spaces.

We live very different lives, in very different regions, in very different life situations. The forces of our economy, our politics, and our technology push and pull us into very different kinds of community and very different kinds of 3rd spaces.

I've been thinking about the cliche phrase "Get Off My Lawn" a lot recently. It's one of the timeless anthems of middle and old age. The point when people feel like they've lived long enough and paid enough dues in a society to claim some ownership of its "lawn" - the social norms, values, and standards of the society, which we begin to take responsibility for around 40.

One of the true gifts of youth is the privilege to dissent, to debate, and sometimes, to disobey the very people and institutions you depend on for your survival and development. Part of the work of child development and human maturity is not just to identify the literal and metaphorical lawns of the society around them and "touch grass", but to pull up the blades, dig random holes in the dirt, run all over the lawn, and daydream on the lawn.

What is the difference between the kind of people who start chorus of cheers or lead a crowd in a protest chant, and the kind of people who are the last to finish clapping at the end of standing ovation or the last person to throw a punch in a street brawl.

Humans are social, tribal beings. So we are still being influenced by others, and influencing others, far beyond our youth. Peer pressure doesn't end when we leave school.

At this point in your life, in what areas are you the "first clapper", leading the group; the "last clapper", joining at the last minute or with the last word; or the "middle clapper", not in a hurry to join the masses, but ready to engage when the timing feels right.

From the use of zodiac signs to screen romantic partners, to the use of tools like the StrengthsFinder and DISC assessments to evaluate employees, to the experimentation with tests like the Enneagram that help individuals identify their purpose, these personality categories, labels, and descriptions have seeped into our societal subconscious and have become a widely-used shorthand for describing ourselves, and others.

The godparent of these personality tests is the Myers Briggs Personality Test. I recently took the Myers Briggs test, nearly 20 after the first time I took the assessment, in my 20s. And it got me to thinking about how these assessments, the labels that come with them, the conclusions we draw from them, and the way we award and avoid others based on the meanings we assign to different personality traits.

The human body is incredible. And what happens to it over time is both fascinating and frightening.

Have you ever had a sudden "health humble"? A time when you found yourself receiving medical information about your body that you weren't prepared to hear and did not see coming? How did you handle it? 

Entering your 40s often means dealing with some kind of health humble. Some are small, and you can learn to live with and/or laugh at them. Some are big, and require you to fundamentally change parts of your life you may have taken for granted. Some are serious, and don't come with good answers or happy endings.

 A beautiful holiday week moment in my current city and a terrible holiday week moment in my previous city reintroduced some important research about how our psychology is impacted by our social contexts, and got me to thinking about fire fighters, who becomes a fire fighter, and whether we have enough of them.

For the purposes of this episode, I'm using the phrase fire fighters to refer broadly to the kind of people who choose to remain attentive, attuned, and aware to the smoke signals in our families, schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and societies. People who choose to respond to tragedy by getting up, getting involved, and working to try to reduce suffering and provide aid & assistance.

Who are the fire fighters in your life? Are you a fire fighter?

As a transition from tears and prayers of the 1st half of Jamie Foxx's Netflix special, "What Had Happened Was", to the laughs and vibes of the 2nd half, Jamie does a bit based on the refrain, "If I can stay funny, I can stay alive."

This phrase becomes more powerful as he shares multiple stories about how his sense of humor carried him through the toughest parts of the recovery process from a serious medical issue he suffered last year.

At 40, each word in Jamie's refrain take on new meaning. How would you fill in the blank for this stage in your life? If I can stay _______, I can stay ______.

Depending on your lifestyle and the part of the country you live in, it can be easy to think that the postal mail system is not a big deal, aside from receiving packages from online shopping.

However, recent natural disasters in the U.S., and the seemingly endless list of conflict and war related disasters around the world, have presented the world with images of people who once had hometowns, and homes, and mailboxes.

This has led me to think a lot about the phrase "return to sender", and how we handle situations when we discover that the things we planned on receiving, and the lives we expected to be living, are not going to arrive. 

A recent TikTok poking fun at those of us who use the elite, world-renowned "Bunny Ears" method of shoelace tying hit close to home, and made me think about how we respond when presented with a new way of doing something we've done a particular way our whole lives.

We live in a world that rewards the bold individual, the spicy hot take, most strongest worded opinions, and a never-back-down approach to advocating and arguing for what we believe in.

In most areas of our lives, especially online, our society does not have much patience for taking time to reflect on what has been done, to examine what has been said, to be self-aware about the stories we tell about who we like to think we are.  

We're not very good at admitting when we are wrong. We struggle to understand how our perspective could be incomplete. Many of us have a very hard time dealing with life circumstances where we were right, and things still went wrong. 

Twice this week, I had a movie studio quality, REM sleep dream sequence abruptly cut short by my phone alarm. An alarm that I set thinking that I had given myself enough time to rest and to dream. The reality of the alarm was that my time for those dream sessions was over sooner than I expected.

For some of us, turning 40 feels like an alarm that has interupted the dream of young adulthood. For others, approaching 40 is more like a notification bell that is reminding you that it is time to get back to your dreams.

What is the state of your dreams at this stage of your life? Do you still dream? What are the alarms in your life that are interrupting your dreams?

To the icebreaker question "If you could have any superpower, which would it be?" my superpower of choice would be the ability to speak any language, dialect, or tongue.

The ability to understand, and to be understood, in all contexts & in all places is - for someone like me - the same as the ability to fly or walk through walls. Curiosity about myself & others is one of the reasons this podcast exists.

At this stage of your life, do you see yourself as someone who is curious, indifferent, or hostile to the languages and lives of other people? At 40, do you live in an environment where curiosity about others is valued?

One of the things that prompted me to create this podcast was the sense that there are going to be a lot of people in our generation who are not going to feel ready, even at 40.

A recent TikTok poking fun at people who are hitting their late 30s and still aren't sure what they want in the romantic lives got me to thinking about all the other areas of life where we get asked questions like "You're not ready, yet?!" and "What are you waiting for?!"

My heart for this episode is really for everyone arriving at 40 with nothing solid enough to call a cornerstone, and too many immediate concerns to have much time for dreaming and planning for achieving capstones. This one is for anyone who looks around at your life and sees mostly rolling stones.

After a lifetime of positive experiences at the dentist, a throwaway comment about the structure of my teeth during a recent visit for a routine cleaning threatened to end my four-decade long run of good dentist visit vibes.

Which led me to think about the structure of our lives, the roots we have, the roots we are missing, and the roots we needed to be stable, secure, safe, and successful in this chapter of life.

In many ways, this podcast - and the upcoming book that accompanies it - is designed for people who are arriving at 40 with a life that has some scrapes, stains, and smudges...which is most of us.

Many of us have at least one aspect of our life where we are low on hope. Whether it's an intractable issue in our bodies, an ongoing saga with our loved ones, or a recurring drama with someone, or something, in our lives; we can find ourselves in a place where we've run out of the mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual fuel to manufacture hope for certain areas of life.

And once hope runs out, so does everything else that good and life-affirming. Including the will, ability, and strength to try. So this is a moment to check on your hope tank, and identify what's filling or draining it.

On a recent drive home on a busy four-lane road during Friday evening rush hour, in a momentary break in the traffic, I saw a group of middle-school aged kids crossing the road on their bikes and it got me to thinking about the last time I had seen something that was such a routine part of our childhoods.

The societal shift in how and where kids gather and play, especially in many areas across the U.S., has happened in just half a generation...and it's our generation of 40-year olds whose collective decisions have disappeared some of the most formative aspects of our childhoods from the childhoods of our children. 

So how did we become these kinds of parents? 

Is anyone's face good enough?

We have arrived at a moment in society where the range of people who feel compelled to undergo signficant shape-shifting procedures to alter their appearance has expanded well beyond those in entertainment, and now includes people from all walks of life.

In some ways, the plastic surgery spectacle of many in ithe public eye is a funhouse mirror of the rest of us. Their dramatic facial and body transformations represent an exaggerated expression of the ways that our desires and fears lead us to shape shift in our private lives.

A lot of us have altered ourselves. What kinds of alterations have you made?  What motivated/forced you to do it?

By 40, for every feel-good story of the sacrificially kind, altruistic, good Samaritan, whose generosity helped someone else get back on their feet and rebuild their lives; we've heard a cautionary tale of a person who also tried to be kind, and tried to help someone in need. Often a friend, a family member, a neighbor, a romantic partner, or a co-worker. Only to have their entire life turned upside down - or worse - by the very person who desperately needed and accepted their assistance.

This stage of life is a good time to ask some questions about how we've come to think about helping others.

Who do you help?

When do you help?

How do you help?

Do you ask for help?

Recently, I've been thinking about the saying "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it". And if turning 40 is about anything, it is about getting to a lot of life's bridges.

family bridges, health bridges, relationship bridges, career bridges

Are you arriving at 40 feeling hopeful and more free to build bridges, as many of the gates and gatekeepers that controlled access to bridges of opportunity are losing power and control?

Do you arrive at this stage of your life with a deep sense of betrayal and/or abandonment, after following the advice of elders who promised that bridges of safety and security would be guaranteed if you followed a certain life path, only to find that those bridges are now nowhere to be found?

Coming Soon

Coming Soon