Why life gets better with age
Chip Conley has learned to love midlife and wants to empower you to do the same.
Conley, a successful boutique hotel entrepreneur, founder of the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) and best-selling author, shares his inspirational message as the guest on this week’s episode of The American Legion Tango Alpha Lima podcast.
This is the first guest episode with new co-hosts Adam Marr and Joe Worley, who join Stacy Pearsall in the Tango Alpha Lima virtual recording studio. (Meet the new co-hosts in this episode.)
Conley says he lost five friends to suicide and had a near-death experience himself. Then he discovered his role as a “modern elder” when he worked with AirBNB, which was a little-known startup at the time.
And with that, his transformation was on.
His new book, “Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age,” was based on key learnings from MEA. It started in Baja, Mexico, and is now expanding to Santa Fe, N.M., with an expected opening in April.
Conley says his book is meant to be your own personal roadmap to midlife, offering the opportunity to chart out how you want to curate the second half of your adult life. It offers an alternative narrative to the way we commonly perceive midlife. He goes on to explain that from our 20s to mid-40s, adults typically experience “a slow decline in life satisfaction.”
But there is hope, he says, “from age 50 on, we get happier with each decade. Who would have guessed that life begins at 50?”
That’s the message he imparts via his book and academy
“What I really wanted people to see with this book, and with our academy, is, ‘What if midlife is not a crisis but a chrysalis?’” says Conley, whose father served in the Marine Corps. “It is this life stage between caterpillar and butterfly that might be dark and gooey and there is stuff going on that sometimes gets you bummed out. But it’s also where a metamorphosis, a transformation, happens.”
His MEA academy is expanding to Santa Fe on a 2,600-acre regenerative horse ranch. Dedicated to reframing the concept of aging, MEA supports students to navigate midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility with in-person workshops, online programs and free virtual events.
“Curiosity may have killed the cat, but curiosity kept people living into their 90s,” he says, harkening back to his AirBNB experience. “That alchemy of curiosity and wisdom is what the world could use right now. There is no doubt we need wisdom but we also need curiosity because curiosity is what opens the door for us to learn from someone else.”
Additionally, the co-hosts also:
• Riff on hundreds of women who posed as men to fight during the Civil War.
• Discuss the origins of the phrase “balls to the wall.”
• Hand out several Bravo Zulu awards to American Legion members and posts that went above and beyond to serve their communities.
Check out this week’s episode, which is among more than 230 Tango Alpha Lima podcasts available in both audio and video formats here. You can also download episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or other major podcast-hosting sites. The video version is available at the Legion’s YouTube channel.