My Midlife Gap Decade: Retire Retirement and Redefine Midlife

Are you a fellow midlifer feeling a bit like you're muddling through midlife? As a midlife maverick, I'm ripping up societal scripts and declaring war on retirement and associated ageist beliefs.

Why work like a racehorse only to spend the final laps in the stable? Why stay trapped in a never-ending hustle and grind for whatever is "bigger, better, more, faster?" Why accept that age-related health issues are inevitable? Buckle up, because I'm about to spill the beans on my midlife rebellion; hoping to inspire you to rewrite your script on midlife and retirement in your own way. 

I think it goes like this:
- Gnawing sense something's missing
- A change is needed if only I could break free
- How do I break free?
- What do I do even if I could break free?
- How would I even do that thing if I could break free?

My rebellion was sort of a perfect storm and a bit extreme. I call it.....
the Midlife Gap Decade.

Yup. Ten years (actually twelve, but calling it a midlife gap decade +2 is a mouthful). It's an uncommon path, I know.  And it's not feasible for most people to do in its scope, scale, and time. Nor should you. That's not the point here.

But....I do hope to challenge and inspire you to shake up your status quo, whatever that is. To do something big and bold. To reclaim your life from the insidious societal norms that burrow into your brain and take over your thoughts and perspectives about how life should be lived rather than how you want to live it. 

The Change: You Choose It & It Chooses You

It's that feeling of being stuck in the wrong lane of life's highway. I've felt like this most of my life. I've been making moves into oncoming traffic since I was a kid. It's harder. It's lonelier. Perhaps you know the feeling as well. No matter how committed you are to being accountable for your own choices, other things in life get chosen for you.

Here's my story of how choices I made and choices that were made for me melded together to set my life in a new, radical direction.

At 42, I swapped my suburban house and everything in it for carry-on luggage to heed the call of adventure. Why? A convergence of several shitty things happening in a short amount of time. I call it the triple D: dead dad, dead dog, and divorce—presented a window of opportunity at an ideal time. Down in that grief-filled hole, a percolation of wonderings began until they were frothing feverishly.

These wonderings all began the same way: Who am I without?.....a home, a marriage, a job, a pet, a career, a car, and nearly all my stuff? Some were chosen by me and others were chosen for me. Either way, I made myself into an experiment of being without.

And I leaped before I looked. Because the alternative; staying put wallowing in sadness while stuck in the trap of American capitalism sucking the very life force out of me—was worse. People often tell me what I did was brave. It didn't feel like that at the time. It felt like if I stayed in my predictable, sheltered world, I'd sinker deeper into despair and depression.

Fueled by my lifelong penchant for societal rebellion, I nuked the life that I'd so carefully built and embarked on what ended up being twelve years—smack dab in the middle of midlife—that became, pardon the cliche, 'an adventure of a lifetime'. All the while giving a big F-U to conventional beliefs and societal norms about career paths, financial planning, and aging. Who does that? Mavericks do, that's who.

Less is More: The Great Ridding

They say your home is your castle. At the time, it was my anchor. So, I sold the castle, cut the anchor, and set sail on the sea of possibilities. But it wasn't easy. Unloading my 3 bedroom / 2.5 bath suburban Portland home of 8 years and all its contents in several months was a logistical nightmare. I call it The Great Ridding. Somehow I even managed to test out nomad life by traveling abroad a bit during those months. It was an intensely emotional process detaching from all my stuff.

And then one fine October day, I became intentionally homeless. 

And all those wonderings of 'Who am I without.....?" were replaced by my new identity. I'm a nomad. I'm a seeker. I'm an adventurer. Flitting about on the whims of my desires. Getting lost, getting found. New cultures, people, food, environments, and never-ending excitement. The thrill became an addiction of sorts. I leaned heavily into nomad life and would gleefully (and sometimes annoyingly) flaunt how I escaped the sticky web of conventional living.

I prided myself on escaping the cubicle. For shutting down the hustle. For extricating myself from the entrenched mindset to always seeking the next level, the next opportunity to advance. For trading money for experiences instead of stuff.

Hitting the Road: Travel as a Personal Growth Accelerator

This section alone could be a book of my adventures and misadventures traveling the world as a nomad for so many years. While the adventures were amazing, more interesting, and pertinent to midlifers, is how travel is an accelerant for personal growth.

The constant movement, being plopped into the middle of other cultures and environments, the stress of the unknown—these and other often subtle psychosocial dynamics coalesce into what I call the ZoU, the Zone of Uncertainty.

A place that most people want to vacate as quickly as possible. However, learning to stay in the ZoU for longer, by force or by circumstance or both, is where the magic happens. It just seems to be the way it is.

The thing is, most people, including me, don't like to give up control and certainly don't like uncertainty. Yet, each time I paddled deeper and longer into the ZoU, for which travel is naturally primed, wonderful and unexpected things happened.

Like.....stumbling onto a trance-like street processional because I got lost. Or being interviewed (go to :58) on Globo TV (equivalent to CNN) in Rio de Janiero during Carnaval during a 7-hour long bloco parade, after which I found out the reporter was poking fun at me because I stood out like a typical gringo tourist. BTW, from that moment forward I overhauled my tiny nomad wardrobe to blend in better by opting for solid-colored clothing with no writing (and no tell-tale branded baseball hats, the most obvious sign of being an American abroad). 

Country counts (humblebrag, 65+) and photo ops are not what it's about for me. They're a byproduct sure, but what matters most is how travel is the ultimate fast lane to personal growth. 

Travel reveals how fortunate we are to be a part of the natural world, and to be in awe of its power, scale, and beauty. The smallness I've felt so many times in the presence of natural wonders (and human-made wonders) creates perspective, connectedness, and respect for forces well beyond our control.

Travel shows, with jarring clarity, the sheer diversity of what it means to be human as you experience other cultures. And yet, despite cultural differences that can shake you to your core, the commonality of what it means to be human also shines through wherever I've been. It's such a strange dynamic. The opposition of diversity and sameness exist simultaneously. One way that plays out is I still find myself judging other cultures based on my American-centric beliefs (the ones that I've not yet rooted out). 

It's the reflection that changes us. Without having anything to compare or contrast our version of the world to; there's little to reflect upon. This reflection is an awareness and insight into how the world works; one where our current perception of humanity deepens, expands, and teaches us the interconnectivity of people no matter where they live, what they eat, or what they wear.

Before I became nomadic someone said to me, go to the places in the world where it's rough around the edges. Far-flung places with dirt roads, winding tributaries of rivers, or high-altitude treks in the Himalayas. Do it now, while you're young and fit. And go hang out in Europe, they said, in your 60s or 70s, since it's easy to get around. That advice underscored my loose plan; which was to start in South America and let it ride from there.

Since I prefer nature, especially mountains, over cities filled with museums, I let nature be my travel guide seeking rivers, high plains, dunes, coasts, mountains, and jungles. Little did I know I'd end up not just traveling in Europe, but living in Europe—and well before my 70s.

The older we get, the more we tend to prefer our life to be a certain way. Control, comfort, and consistency replace experimentation, adventure, and uncertainty. In the months leading up to becoming a nomad, I convinced myself I wasn't running away from life, but rather I was running toward it. Similarly, I wasn't taking time off (from what exactly?), rather I was taking time on. All of these were vague, idealized rationalizations that sounded pithy, provocative, and woke at the time.

These rationalizations shifted for me as I slowly realized I traded one set of identities (traditional married suburban guy) for another (jet-setting nomad) and that the constant movement and excitement were a coping mechanism to avoid being still, grounded, and facing unprocessed emotional stuff.

In short, I became addicted to travel and all the ZoU moments inherently built into it. And yet, I didn't want to stop. I enjoyed not working but also began feeling like there had to be more than this hedonistic pursuit of adventure. If it wasn't for my finite amount of money getting depleted, I'd probably still be out there. 

Thankfully, because of my intrinsic anti-establishment perspectives and subsequent life choices, a big one is earning a Master of Science in Recreation, Park, and Tourism Administration in my mid-20s, altogether have allowed me to be time-rich for much of my life. Even when I was working, I vowed to never get consumed by my job or career. From an American mindset, choosing to be time-rich is like driving the wrong way on the freeway.

Personal growth is important, no matter where you pursue it. That's for you to decide. Travel happened to be my most effective and impactful growth path because of its very essence, especially the way I traveled—low-cost and mostly unplanned—providing me with more time in the ZoU than not.

The key is to not only turn off life's autopilot and fly manually but also to re-route the path. Because more likely than not, the flight path is not your own, even if you think it is.

Finding Love on the Road

Love knows no borders. Before I figured that out, I tried dating internationally as a nomad. It was frustrating and confounding. After a couple of failed international romances complicated by geographical boundaries and their cultural mismatches, I realized it was another moment in life where going against the grain was a lonely and desolate place.

While the maverick mindset I'm advocating is slowly growing, it was, and still is, a tiny minority. So my dating pool was effectively the size of a thimble. It wasn't until I was brave enough to winnow down my OKCupid profile to "Seeking fellow midlife nomad not interested in money but pursuing adventure and freedom", believing such a person did not exist, that I found her.

Finding Dora three years into my nomad life wasn’t a planned milestone on my life’s timeline. I thought I'd not get married again. Our finding each other, I believe, was a result of becoming clear with myself; even if it meant being alone for the rest of my life. She has become the co-author of my story, weaving love into the pages from across the globe.

We joined forces and nomad-ed around the world for several years, blending our lives and love for animals by becoming 5-star rated petsitters as we trekked and adventured around the world. Then the pandemic sidelined us forcing us to become semi-nomadic for the last couple of years. Only recently, we decided to put a pause on our nomadic life, settling in Lisbon for a while. We'll return to our former lifestyle in a few years or so.

Lessons Learned

Before planning big life moves, sticking it to the man, or whatever it is you want to do, it all starts here. Your health is your wealth. Perhaps cliche but for me, it's an absolute truth. Without your health, what do you have, really? Work is not the end all, be all. Work is for money. Money is for exchanging agreed value to survive by buying products and services. How much money is needed to live without worry? Turns out not a lot. Studies show after 75K/year happiness does not improve.

Especially living outside of the States. Not only free from the higher cost of living spurned by capitalism run amok, but because Europe (and other places) value and weave into their laws and culture a more balanced approach to life. Leisure. Recreation. Mandated vacation time. Having studied all this in grad school, it makes perfect sense I ended up in Europe without even planning to do so.

Chasing recognition or money for money's sake are, in my opinion, dead ends. I mean that literally. They can easily shorten your life expectancy causing great harm to the body expressed by chronic stress, cardiovascular disease, and other age-related maladies that are often quite preventable. 

This is why I'm convinced retirement isn't a golden ticket; it's a golden cage. I've known, through my own experience of my workaholic father dying at 66, that trading time for dollars doesn't make you rich; trading conformity for courage does.

What's bonkers to me is working excessively and obsessively during the first half of life, jeoparding your health for money, often well beyond what's needed. Making the second half of life shorter and full of unnecessary age-related issues caused by the first half of life's choices. 

Some people and movements, like FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) and Post-Achievement, have figured out a happy medium. They've rebalanced their lives to either stop working earlier without compromising their health through passive income or other means.

Or, my preferred path, by recalibrating what money means in their life giving them more time-freedom to live life now rather than later—where the 'later' is probably already trending toward a shorter lifespan and healthspan due to the ravaging of the body in their early years. Midlifers choosing this recalibration have organizations like the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) that are helping people navigate this transition, focusing on the unique facets of midlife.

Focusing on your health isn't selfish, especially if you have a family. Your health should be your primary focus so that you're around for as long as possible, healthfully, to play with your great-grandchildren and not be a burden to your family.

Advice To Become a Midlife Maverick

- Challenge the traditional career path and the idea of retirement. They're outdated scripts.
- Don’t wait for your "golden years" to cash in on life.
- Challenge the societal and cultural norms.
- Redefine success by remembering that you're not running out of time; you're running into it. 
- Consider a gap year or gap month. Take your freakin' vacation days. Did you know that the United States is the only Western country to not have federally mandated vacation laws? If you're fortunate to have vacation time, take it!

Get Out There. Redefine Midlife. Age Boldy.

So, fellow trailblazers, let’s retire the concept of retirement and embrace the Midlife Renaissance. Work yes, but play more. Life is a masterpiece, and it’s time to paint outside the lines.

The world is your canvas, and the prime of your life is the perfect palette, especially if you're practicing healthy living. Longevity protocols can and should be started anytime—with benefits occurring no matter how young or old you are. So now, go create your masterpiece, because the second act is the main event! And your health now and into the future allows all this glorious life-affirming stuff to happen to its fullest.