The unbearable lightness of late adulthood

An antidote to midlife malaise

Dear Friends,

I thought I was starting a sabbatical in November 2023. In hindsight, I was starting something else entirely: late adulthood—a new stage of life for me and a growing segment of the rich world.

Jonathan Rauch describes late adulthood as "a new period of life, in which many people are neither fully retired nor conventionally employed—a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take 'not-so-hard' jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God."¹

The old model was simple:

1. Youth: Squander your parents’ money, make terrible decisions, have fun

2. Adulthood: Stress, spreadsheets, and savings accounts.

3. Retirement: Bingo halls, cruise ships, nursing homes.

In youth, we dream of independence and opportunity.² As we get older, we grow nostalgic for the innocence and energy of youth. As they say: If youth knew; if age could.

But imagine another version of the above graph, where you start saving earlier, consuming less, and by 45 or 55, you enter this new period of late adulthood where income and expenses level out, and life is about something other than grinding away for a paycheck.³

You get out of the rat race, making just enough to get by. You cut back on expenses and focus on other things: relationships, health, creativity, curiosity, and spirituality.

The possibilities of how to structure your life begin to open up.

How to spend late adulthood

Which brings me to the question at hand: How do I want to spend the next two decades? Should I stick with nonprofit consulting, which I seem to enjoy? Or is that merely a comfortable distraction from something greater?

Over the past year, I’ve been sketching out alternatives:

Cycling Business

Next week, my friend Hugh and I are guiding our first cycling tour in Oaxaca with 16 cyclists. Oaxaca, long a hidden gem for bikepacking and enduro MTB, is finally catching the attention of road and gravel cyclists.

There are several business models to explore:

• Train local cyclists as guides and offer them a profit-sharing stake in the company.

• Partner with a local cafe to create a cycling hub with rental bikes.

• Test-run a seasonal cycling hotel by renting a big Airbnb for four months.⁴

I could direct a portion of the profits to work with Oaxaca’s head of transit (a cycling enthusiast) to improve the region’s cycling infrastructure. Or, I could support my friend Ro Alegre to bring more bicycles to children in Oaxaca’s mountain villages.

Vision: An international, tight-knit community of culturally curious cyclists enjoying epic rides while supporting safe cycling infrastructure in Oaxaca. Less screen time. More adventure.

PhD on AI’s Impact on Public Administration

AI and satellite internet will transform public administration in Mexico (and everywhere) over the next five years.⁵ Mexico has 8 million public-sector workers—most of whom could be replaced by AI tomorrow if not for the ensuing economic and political crisis.

I could finally get my PhD, studying under someone I admire like Guillermo Cejudo at CIDE, while leveraging my connections with Mexico’s digital transformation leadership.⁶ I could spend the next 4-5 years diving deep into Mexico’s digital transformation while contributing to international spaces on digital public infrastructure like Co-Develop, the Gates Foundation, and the OECD.⁷

Vision: Identify how AI can support—not replace—public-sector workers and improve governance.

Substack Writing Retreat

But do I want to narrow my focus to one topic for years? Or do I want to expand my intellectual community?

I’d love to attend a writing retreat, so why not host one? I imagine four to six retreats per year, gathering Substackers for creative growth and deep conversations over meals and walks in the woods. Each retreat could focus on a specific genre: politics, culture, tech, nature.

Vision: An international community of thoughtful, curious writers who balance online engagement with meaningful in-person connection.

Spend two years as an artist!

Maybe I just want to be an artist. Roll my own cigarettes. Stay out till 3 AM.

I’d develop an interactive exhibit at Oaxaca’s Contemporary Art Museum on Mexico’s groundbreaking (and now threatened) access to information law. Over four million freedom-of-information requests created an archive of 15 billion files—many now at risk of disappearing.

I imagine an AI-driven exhibit bringing these files to life, telling Mexico’s recent history through the lens of citizen FOI requests.⁸

Vision: A compelling art exhibit that captures the promise and limitations of transparency laws.

Adventures for creative men (in middle age)

A friend runs meaningful adventures for groups of solo women travelers. Is it such a radical, reactionary thing to offer the same to men?

Apparently not — this is already a crowded space with 177 men’s retreats listed on retreat.guru, including 30 in Mexico. Most fall into three categories:

1. Getting in touch with emotions.

2. Psychedelics.

3. Lifting heavy objects shirtless.⁹

I envision something different: a retreat for men who have creative ambitions but lack a supportive peer group to push them forward. Every man I know in his 40s wants this and doesn’t know where to get it.

Vision: An international community of men supporting each other’s creative goals.

Extras: Intergenerational Care & Fix the News

I have a few more ideas:

• An intergenerational-care community where older Americans receive affordable care while supporting education for gifted low-income students in Oaxaca.¹⁰

• A media/evaluation initiative I’d pitch to Fix the News—if I had more spare time.

Avoiding the Paradox of Choice

The risk of too much freedom is real. You can fantasize about escaping the 9-5 for decades, only to find yourself paralyzed by infinite options. Too many choices, unrealistic expectations, too many roads untaken.

What if I spend the next 20 years writing about ideas instead of acting on them? Or worse—what if I commit to just one and regret it?

Somewhere in between the two extremes is prototyping — trying something for six months or a year, then stepping back to assess. Right now, I’m prototyping nonprofit consulting and cycling tours, and I’m enjoying both. Will I enjoy them more than the other ideas?

There’s only one way to find out.¹¹

1. Rauch says late adulthood often begins in our 50s. Well, call me an early adopter.

2. As

Kiet T

has described

3. Even without contributing more, your retirement savings keep growing thanks to the magic of compounding.

4. Props to

Ted Nordhaus

for this idea.

5. Elon Musk replacing US government workers with AI is just the beginning.

6. Bureaucracy delayed Oaxaca’s first professional certificate program in public policy, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. But I refuse to give up. Every week, I meet talented Oaxacan youth and encounter a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy. I know there is a way to equip the former to improve the latter, though I don’t know if the traditional four-year university is the way to go about it.

7. I can imagine all sorts of mischievous ways to shake up the standard public policy PhD.

8. I’d pen a weekly column in the year leading up to the exhibit similar to Jason Leopold’s excellent FOIA Files column for Bloomberg.

9. No surprise that the meals in the first category are vegan and in the third category are paleo.

10. Older Americans benefit from cheap nursing, healthcare, and medication. Their money helps support K-8 education for gifted, low-income students. The older Americans teach young Mexicans English and vice versa. The last part of the business model is that tourist-parents can leave their kids at the care center to be taken care of and learn Spanish.

11. It feels basic to write out the central philosophical idea of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but at 19, it was revelatory. If life only happens once, Kundera observes, we can’t be held responsible for our decisions because we’ll never know the counter-factual if we had chosen something else. The only right choice is what feels right at the time.