Purpose

This is such a foundational question, especially when you’re sitting on a Baja beach surrounded by fellow mid-lifers. Once you’ve taken yourself off the habitual treadmill (aka, the "hedonic treadmill"), you start to notice things that were previously just wallpaper in your life.

"If you really knew me and my relationship with money, you’d know ___________." Welcome to one of the more intense sessions we do in many of our MEA workshops.

I was fortunate enough to be asked by the six founders of Burning Man to join their inaugural non-profit Board a dozen years ago.

If you knew you only had five years left to live and money and time were not a problem, where would you visit and why? As I say in this video from Fly Ranch Geyser at the end of the blog post, your passion isn't just something you care deeply about, it's something you're willing to sacrifice for.

Ken Dychtwald’s AgeWave puts out some of the most insightful studies on retirement. Their most recent study, "The Four Pillars of the New Retirement: What a Difference a Year Makes," explores how the pandemic has affected many older Americans’ perspectives on health and financial security.

The Law of Inertia, also called Newton’s first law, states if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force. I wonder if Newton was talking about the human condition as well as physical objects.

The premise for today’s quick post comes from Dr. Mark Goulston (whose guest blog post will appear tomorrow). I love the title of this post, so don’t be surprised if this becomes an MEA workshop in the not-too-distant future.

I hosted my first-ever Future Funeral recently (in two sessions: virtually on May 10, and in-person on May 22). I promised myself that it won't be the last. The reason is simple: I learned a tremendous amount from it, so did my 'guests,' and all those who heard about it from different parts of the world but couldn't join either of the sessions personally.

What a profound six minutes! Cindy Chang’s soulful, cathartic TED talk about how she creates public spaces to encourage deep dialogue is a revelation. It has had almost 6 million views and I’d never heard of it until recently. I love that she turned an empty New Orleans home into a chalkboard for a community contemplation about something we rarely talk about.

Occasionally, there’s a TED talk that brings a tear to my eye, a song to my heart, and an epiphany to my head. This TED talk by Dr. Dixon Chibanda is one of those. There are just 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe, a country with 14 million people.