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It’s several months after my last high-dose ketamine experience. I’m on a Zoom session with Sadaf, my integration therapist. We are talking about my people-pleasing and my desire to fit in. On the screen, in the background of my little video square, I see a copy of my own book on a bookshelf.

Ohhhh no…

In case you’re just joining, this is the third and final instalment detailing my first ever psychedelic experiences as part of a legal ketamine-assisted therapy program at Qi Integrated Health in Vancouver. Part 1 explained how and why I ended up doing high-dose ketamine, and Part 2 is my best attempt to describe what it was like and what happened during each of my three sessions.

I also want to note that this is my personal experience and not meant to reflect anything other than that. I am not advocating for the use of ketamine or trying to convince anyone to do it.

Apart from “what was it like?,” the most common question I get from other people has been “what did you take away from the whole experience of doing psychedelics?”

Short answer: a LOT. More than I expected… but not in the ways that I expected.

The Surprising Way Insights Arrived

I don’t know why, but when I have heard people talk about receiving insights during psychedelic experiences, my intuition about how these insights arrived was totally wrong. I had assumed there would be some God-like, booming voice that spoke commandments to me.

“STEVE! I hereby give you permission to RELAX!”

“STEVE! I hereby proclaim that you are now a watercolour painter!”

That is not at all what I experienced. It felt more like reading literature or watching a great movie or visiting an art exhibit. It’s a multi-layered experience that becomes richer the more you look beneath the surface. The surface level is what’s happening. For me, that was a rollercoaster ride down through a sea of colours and patterns, an infinite void, spinning wheels of organic matter, and a series of mining and tunnelling images.

There is meaning buried in layers below the surface, though. I feel like I’ve returned to my English degree, searching for symbolism, metaphors, and themes, finding meaning in the patterns, and interpreting all of it into a cohesive narrative.

My third ketamine experience was literally about descending below the surface, passing through layers of rock and shale, and ending up in a cavern of white light. My post-experience insights arrived by metaphorically digging down through layers of accumulated cruft to find a cave filled with deeper meaning and significance.

So I’m going to share my insights as they arrived, layer by layer.

The First Layer of Meaning: Existential

On my first trip, I descended downwards until I ended up in an infinite, eternal void and briefly thought I was dead. (FUN!) My life on Earth as a physical human being could not have felt farther away. And yet, here I was. Conscious. Without a body or an active thinking voice in my head. It felt like I was experiencing existence at its purest state.

It made me question whether there is consciousness outside the physical body, whether there is existence beyond death, and whether the entire concept of time is irrelevant or misunderstood. Was THIS eternal void the actual nature of existence and was my life just a dream or simulation?

So, you know, just minor stuff.

In the second session, there was a boatload of death and decay imagery, but there was also rebirth. It felt very much like a grim, dark version of The Circle of Life from The Lion King.

And my final experience involved this digging down through the layers of rock until I found myself in a warm, inviting cavern of light. My first read was that there was a permanent “cave” of pure existence buried under layers of reality.

Loss of Control

There was a literal loss of control on every journey. I have sadly prized control as a superpower for most of my life and I was terrified to give it up. And yet, when it was stripped away, I felt calm, peaceful, and lighter. It was wonderful. Message received!

Is THIS What Enlightened Meditation Is Like?

I now also more deeply understand what successful meditation might feel like. There was no sense of time. No future. No past. Just pure presence.

I’ve tried many times to do a meditation exercise from Sam Harris where you try to glimpse that you don’t actually have a head—specifically that your consciousness is not located behind your eyes, which is what it has always felt like for me. These ketamine experiences gave the feeling of consciousness outside of my head, and indeed, outside my entire body. And I’ve found that I can now return to that more easily because I’ve now experienced it.

The Second Layer of Meaning: The Midlife Journey

Let’s go deeper…

Next, I wondered if all three trips were symbolic of my midlife journey.

Was the visitation to the infinite void me feeling lost after leaving the company I co-founded, turning 50, and having my youngest kids go to university? Was the feeling of being dead a metaphor for the death of my previous stage of life?

Was the second trip a reminder that we all constantly go through little deaths and rebirths of our identities, and that when one stage of life ends, another begins growing soon afterward? The shattering of the field of glass felt like the destruction and disintegration of my LEGO Business Man front, the destruction of my Type A/Achiever/Striver character, and so much more. Those traits may have served me well in past stages of my life, but it now feels like they’ve past their “Best Before” date. The spinning dirt thimble spitting out an endless supply of greenery represented the birthing of new things, the beginnings of the new me, a new identity, and a new phase of my life.

The descent through the layers of rock, tunnelling deep until I found the magical Cave of Love, symbolized that this new ‘rebirth’ phase should be a return to my core self.

Tunnelling down to experience this self-acceptance felt like a message to return to creative, self-expressive work, instead of… Zoom-based marketing consulting.

I have repeatedly wondered what advice my 18-year-old self would give his 54-year-old self about whether to be a writer/creative type or a Zoom-based marketing consultant. My 18-year-old self would assume he was being trolled because the answer is so obvious. Is there any young person in the history of time who has grown up wanting to be a Zoom-based marketing consultant?

One of my little mantras heading into the experience was “Release. Relax. Reconnect. Return.”

• Release: It seems that the release was the release of my previous ‘inauthentic’ identity elements.

• Relax: It was indeed very relaxing and almost a relief to do this.

• Reconnect: I felt like the Cave of Love was indeed a reconnection with myself.

• Return: After some mild panic about being dead in my first experience, I did return to my body, as evidenced by this newsletter. 😜

The Third Layer of Meaning: The Fixer

Are you ready to go really deep?

A big part of the post-experience process included semi-regular integration therapy sessions with my counsellor, Sadaf. I met with Sadaf every month or two and dug deeper into what the experiences meant at the very core.

During my intake assessment with Sadaf, before any of the ketamine experiences, I shared why I wanted to do it.

• I’ve felt lifelong pressure to succeed, strive, and fit in.

• When I left media, became an entrepreneur, and then a consultant (!), I lost touch with my creativity and have had enormous difficulty giving myself permission to be a creative person or artist.

• I find it really challenging to give myself permission to RELAX because I feel like I gain self-worth or success from doing more and more and more.

Continuing with the mining metaphor, after the ketamine experiences, we dug deeper and deeper into where my Type A, achiever, striver personality came from. We explored my lifelong aversion to conflict and tendency to be a people-pleaser, peacekeeper, and mediator.

Sadaf identified that I fit the role of a “Fixer,” a person who is constantly trying to control everything so there are never any problems or conflict. Talk about Sisyphus trying to push that rock up the hill…

We went deeper and deeper, into my past, into my childhood, and into distant memories. We excavated layers of societal conditioning, cultural narratives about what “success” means, school systems based on compliance and achievement, and more.

When I hit on something that felt relevant, Sadaf asked me where I felt it in my body. It was always in my throat. Not my stomach. Not my chest. Always my throat. Like my voice was being choked.

Relatively recently, we reached our own version of the Cave of Love, where I understood where these “Fixer” parts of me have come from.

It’s felt like I’ve been stifling myself for a long time, or trying to be someone in order to please other people. It’s felt like I’ve been burying my authentic voice and self, which might be why I always felt everything in my throat—I wasn’t comfortable being myself. Like my real voice was getting stuck in my throat, afraid to make it out into the world.

Creativity for Hire vs Personal Creativity

Here’s my theory of my career as it relates to creativity. There are two different types of creative work. There’s creativity for yourself, making the art you want to make. And there’s creativity for hire, where you get paid to put your creativity to use for someone else’s business outcomes. I have been very fortunate to have a career rooted in “creativity for hire” and I’ve enjoyed most of it immensely.

I’ve always wanted to do more personal creative work, but I have kept returning to creativity in service of the goals of others. What I’ve realized is that I’ve used business as an armour or shield to protect my creative self. I’ve been using my creativity, but it’s most often been doing a job for someone else. There is a thick layer of insulation between my authentic self and the creative work I’ve made professionally, and I don’t think that’s an accident. If people don’t like the show I produced or the episode I directed, it doesn’t feel great. Ultimately, though, it’s not about me. It’s about the project I was hired to create.

When I put out work that is a true expression of myself, though, there’s nowhere to hide. I’m fully exposed. And if people don’t like the personal work I put out, I’ve believed deep down that it would mean they don’t like ME. If I put my heart on my sleeve and people hated it, it would mean that they hate ME. That I’m not good enough. And that’s seriously scary for someone who avoids conflict, people-pleases, and attempts to build self-confidence through never-ending achievement.

This Isn’t New: Shadow Careers and Beards Pointed the Way

My very first piece on this Substack was about Shadow Careers. It was about hiding behind creativity for hire. Again, intellectually I KNEW what I had to do, but I couldn’t embody it.

Now, after all this work and excavation, I feel like I can.

A weird aside… who knew ketamine and growing a beard could provide similar insights? My beard experiment also ended with the symbolic death of LEGO Business Man Steve, letting go of what people think of me, and more comfort with letting go of control. This is officially a running Midlife Field Guide theme.

The Greatest Irony

It’s now time to return to my video call with Sadaf. We are discussing this idea of my authentic self being buried, my lifelong desire to ‘fit in’ and my fear of being judged or rejected for being different.

I look up at the screen and see myself in one of the little video boxes below Sadaf. Over my shoulder, strategically placed for all my video calls, is a copy of my book, Earn It. I have a flash of insight. My heart instantly sinks. My throat tightens up. (The throat!) I can’t believe the irony!

I wrote an ENTIRE book about the incredible power and value of standing out from everyone else, doing things differently, and embracing your authentic self. For years, I have championed being unusual and weird. I have spoken at conferences about how doing the opposite of everyone else is a better strategy than copying what’s successful. I have implored others to embrace “Creative Bravery” and make the boldest creative choices possible.

I co-founded a company called “The Department of Differentiation,” whose sole purpose was to help companies celebrate what makes them authentically unique from everyone else.

I am a genuine EXPERT in standing out, being different, being authentic, being weird, and being creative.

And when I look in the mirror, I’m the cobbler with no shoes. I haven’t given myself full permission to do what I’ve helped many, many others do: be my authentic, weird, different self.

Ironic? Funny? Sad?

Yep.

I’m Done?

As Sadaf and I sift through all the crap we excavated over many sessions, I feel clarity, I feel my energy returning, and I feel excited to do some creative work, both personal and ‘for hire’ with clarity about the distinction between the two.

I ask Sadaf what to do next. Should we keep digging? Keep exploring? Keep analyzing?

Sadaf pauses. She looks right into the camera at me and then very calmly says, “You don’t need to do anything. There’s nothing for you to fix anymore. You’re done.”

What?

I’m done?

I realize almost instantly that she is releasing The Fixer from active duty.

What a relief! A HUGE relief.

(I also realize that during all these sessions with Sadaf, I am STILL trying to “fix” or “succeed” in figuring out every single aspect of my life and identity.)

Since this session, I’ve already noticed significant changes:

• I’ve started reading fiction again, after a LONG time of exclusively focusing on non-fiction

• I’ve generated loads of ideas for personal creative projects

• I’m less anxious, less rushed, and less obsessed with optimizing everything

• I’ve got clarity about the type of work I want to do, and the work I don’t want to do anymore. Almost like the universe has been listening, more creative work has started showing up on my doorstep.

• Overall, I am letting go of control more often and seeing a bigger perspective? “Does this really matter much in the grand scheme of things? (aka eternity ☠️)”

• I can still feel “The Fixer” itching to get in the game sometimes, but I recognize it and have mostly been successful in keeping it at bay

What a gift that I don’t need to analyze my life forever. I don’t need to excavate forever. I don’t need to figure absolutely everything out. I can just live my life and enjoy it instead of trying to ‘win’ it.

With the words, “You’re done,” Sadaf helps me achieve the one thing I’ve never been able to do: RELAX.

There’s nothing I need to fix. I can RELAX.

I’m done.

A huge thank you to Sadaf Naji for guiding me through all this, Mark Haden for advising me and connecting me with Kiem and Meredith at Qi Integrated Health, and to Gabor Maté for being so open to talking about this with me and connecting me with Mark.

Do you have any questions about undertaking this sort of psychedelic experience? Anything you’d like to know that I haven’t shared in this, or the previous parts of this experiment?

And what’s your version of seeing Earn It over your shoulder? Are you an expert in something that you have trouble doing yourself?

Let me know!

Thanks for reading,

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

This is Part 2 of my experiment with Ketamine-Assisted Therapy. You can check out Part 1 here to find out how and why I manifested running into Gabor Maté in a ferry line-up, and how that encounter led me to Qi Integrated Health, counsellor Sadaf Naji, and three ‘heroic’ doses of ketamine-assisted therapy.

Dose One—Visiting an Infinite Void

At the conclusion of the last newsletter, I watched a needle full of ketamine enter my shoulder.

I put on a set of bluetooth headphones, which are piping in gentle EDM music, pull up the weighted blanket over my body, slide on an eye mask, and lie back in the chair.

The drug is now inside me and I begin wondering when I will feel something and know it’s working.

It doesn’t take long! The drug takes hold in under a minute. The weave on the inside of the eye mask suddenly comes alive and begins rippling. My visual field is quickly taken over and I begin seeing patterns.

The Sound of Entering the K-Hole

There is a distinct sound that happens for me (and I think happens to many others) when this dissociative state takes hold. For me, it’s a synthetic, mechanical sound of tension and pressure being ratcheted up and up and up, and then released. The pitch of the sound gets higher and pulses faster and faster. It’s a bit like a DJ building up the energy higher and higher before the big drop.

The sound is eerily, deeply familiar, but I can’t quite place it. It’s something akin to the THX sound or “the Booj” sound you know and love from movie trailers.

And when the sound pressure does give me a big release of the built-up tension, I begin feeling like I am on a quickly descending rollercoaster. The rollercoaster makes a sharp left and I’m confronted with a giant, bright purple wall of pulsing, furry textures, almost like a 70s shag carpet that’s come to life.

The rollercoaster turns again, and there is a bright orange wall of flowing textures that resemble seaweed wafting back and forth in the ocean tide.

Behind the bright, vivid colours and detailed imagery, everything else is blackness. Throughout this first journey, there is a lot of purple and orange.

Nothing I see is of the earthly world. There are no people. There are no recognizable objects. There is nothing recognizable at all. Just colours and patterns.

At some point in my descent, I become aware of several things I have never experienced in my life.

I am conscious and very aware of what is happening. And yet, I am not in control of what is happening at all. It’s like someone has plugged an HDMI cord into my brain stem and is feeding me a full HD, surround sound feed. It’s like an IMAX art film but exponentially more immersive.

I also realize that I have no body. I don’t know where my body is, and I hope someone put an interstellar AirTag on it. It’s almost like when the HDMI cord got plugged into my brain, my entire body was unplugged at the same time.

Without a body, there is no way to control my experience. At all. I can’t turn my head to look around. I can’t speak. I can’t even be sure that I have a body to return to.

I also don’t really have thoughts in the same way I am so used to. I am aware of a lot of things, but there aren’t really thoughts. There is no voice in my head. There is no analysis of what’s going on. It’s just… deep awareness.

This is pure, real-time experience and I’m not in control of any of it. I have to just go along for the ride, wherever it takes me. I exist and I’m aware that I exist, but maybe not as a human on Earth?

The feeling of descent continues for an unknown period of time. I end up feeling like I’m at the bottom of the rollercoaster, whatever that means.

This is where I get seriously freaked out.

‘The Bottom’ is an endless black void. It feels like eternity. Infinity. There is a small, pulsing orange light with little fragments of orange energy bursting out and firing into the void.

Somehow, I know that the orange light is… ME.

I feel completely alone in eternity. I feel like I’m at the very bottom of the ocean and my body and Earth are a tiny air bubble on the surface. My body feels SO far away and insignificant. This feels a lot like The Matrix, where the world of Earth and people is an illusion and this unending blackness is actual reality.

I have a strong sense there is a “me” that is not my body. It’s not my voice. It’s not my personality. It’s just… existence.

I wonder if I am dead, or if this is what happens when you die. When I get the sense that I might actually be dead, anxiety spikes and I take a HUGE breath and exhale. This is the first time I have any connection with my body. I know that I have been holding my breath for a long time, and even though I know I just had a huge breath release, it feels like the body doing the breathing is still very far away.

It’s a bit terrifying.

Thankfully, my anxiety quickly fades and I go deeper into the experience.

I have an urge to return to my body so I know I am actually still alive. However—and this is bizarre!—there is also a part of me that doesn’t want to return to the ‘hassles’ of being in a body and all the travails of being a human in the modern world. I’m a bit unnerved to have this realization.

Returning to the Bag of Meat

After an unknown period of time, I start to feel like I have fingers. I try to move them, and it feels like I’m puppeteering someone else’s fleshless bones, clacking them against each other. Soon I can feel my tongue in my mouth. I start to move it around and I feel teeth, but again, they feel like someone else’s teeth. It is phantasmagoric. (Out of necessity, I have been Googling synonyms for ‘surreal’…).

Bit by bit, my body comes back online. I go in waves of recognizing parts of my body, and then sinking back into the visions, colours, and patterns of the experience. Sadaf has told us about this stage, known as The Shallows. The Shallows are between here and there. Tendrils of connection between two vastly different realities.

My thoughts slowly begin returning. I realize (again, shockingly) that the return of my active brain arrives with a tinge of disappointment—it was a wonderful break to have nothing coming from the voice in my head.

At some point, one of the songs in my headphones ends. This must be the end of the experience and I struggle to pull my eye mask off. One of the nurses comes over and tells me that I’m still in the experience and that it’s not over yet. I open my mouth to tell her that I understand and to thank her, but all that comes out is, “HASHAFABABAKA” or some such mumbling nonsense. It would appear that, indeed, the experience is NOT yet over, as I have not regained the power of speech. I put the eye mask back on and sink back in.

After drifting in and out a while longer, Sadaf rings a bell, signaling the actual end of the experience. I can’t believe 90 minutes has passed by.

Snacky McSnackerson

I take off my mask to find a tray of snacks beside me. Salted popcorn, juicy grapes, bitter dark chocolate, and a jar of chia seed pudding. I snarf down all the snacks and the flavours explode in my mouth. It’s like my senses are in hyperdrive.

I look around the room and the others are groggily coming out of it. I seem to be the only one eating my snacks. I am still fuzzy-brained, and despite having ‘visited’ death and eternity, I feel incredibly calm, grounded, connected, and light. And I want to devour more salty popcorn!

I don’t fully know why travelling to an infinite void filled me with peace and calmness, but my guess is that it made me realize how small and insignificant so many of the things I worry about in my regular life are. “Nothing matters as much as I think it does” comes up multiple times in my head.

When you’ve visited the eternal void, answering email doesn’t feel so urgent!

I also wondered whether the experience signified confronting a fear of death at midlife (or a lifelong fear of death) and whether getting a peek at existence without the surface layer was a way to normalize it or show that it will all be ok?

The group does a debrief of our experiences. Unfortunately, everyone else woke up to the sounds of me noisily wolfing down my snacks. They all found my post-trip noshing and perkiness incredibly annoying. Mental note: next time, eat my snacks quietly and subtly.

Sadaf tells the group that if we are feeling well, we should consider spending some time in nature later today. Apparently, your neuroplasticity is strong after doing psychedelics and being outdoors or creative can be very powerful.

One mildly entertaining post-ketamine anecdote: I tried to shoot a video debrief when I got home, spilled tomato juice all over my sweatshirt, and put it in the washing machine. I forgot to take off the wireless microphone on the sweatshirt and it went through the wash AND the dryer. (Somehow, it might still work!) This is why they tell you not to drive or operate heavy machinery after doing ketamine…

That night, I take a walk by the ocean. The moonlight bathes everything in a magical glow. The leaves of the trees feel like they are exploding with colour. And I am very, very calm and chill.

Wow.

Dose Two—A Black Hole and A Spinning Wheel of Greenery

Between each session, I have a short call with the physician about dosing. I tell her about my brief panic about being dead in the first experience and she gives me some perfect advice that becomes my mantra for the future sessions: “You’re on a return ticket. You always come back. Remember and trust that this is a return ticket.”

My intention for this round is four R’s: Release the stress and control, Relax into the experience, Reconnect with myself and remember that I am on a Return ticket.

A week later, we are all gathered in The Grove again. I assure everyone I will tone down on the loud snacking. Sadaf takes us through a wonderfully calming meditation that includes asking us to focus on a colour we see in the room. I choose green, because there are tree stumps with green shoots coming out of them throughout The Grove. The lack of anything organic in my first experience makes me lean into these green leaves. It’s also a sign of life and growth.

The needle goes in and I’m off on another bonkers adventure into the unknown. “Release. Relax. Reconnect. Return…”

I feel warmth coursing through my body and then, BAM! I’m into it again. My visual field turns into colours and patterns again, but instead of green, and unlike the first time where there was an abundance of purple and orange, everything is dark red, rusty, or browny-orange.

Instantly, I am much more comfortable the second time. As Mark Haden promised with his sailboat analogy, I’ve been here before and I’m curious to experience it differently. I am not panicking. I’m in the flow of it.

It begins with a lot of death-themed cinematic scenes. I float above a Tron-like grid in space with a black hole in the middle of it, sucking in everything around it like a vacuum cleaner. Bits of rust and dirt and metal are pulled into the hole and disappear.

Then I’m flying like a worm’s eye drone, barely above the ground, through a field of grass. Except that every blade of grass is made of glass and is grey and transparent. As I approach the grass, each blade rips off and explodes into shards, almost like I’m a sonic wave or a nuclear blast ripping through and annihilating everything in sight. The fragments shoot off into inky black emptiness. It’s extremely visual and it feels like I’m flying. It’s also fairly bleak!

In the next scene, something shifts. It’s still dark. But for the first time, I see something that might resemble an entity from Earth. It’s a rotating mass of organic material—dirt, sticks, rocks—and as it rotates, green leaves and shoots spin off of it endlessly. It is the first sign of life and renewal I have had in these entire two journeys so far.

I have an image of a giant tree trunk growing out of the floor in The Grove, with multiplying green shoots and leaves flowing out of the base of the trunk and covering everything. I have another image of the base of a giant tree trunk in a forest. It is raining and dark, but greenery is similarly shooting out of the bottom of the trunk and covering the forest floor. Everything is wet and vividly green.

I see a giant red cedar tree rising up and up against a sea of blackness. My daughter is named Cedar, and somehow, I know that this is her.

As I hit The Shallows again, it is very familiar and much more comfortable. Sometimes, I feel like I’m back in my body listening to music on a headset. And then I’m dropped into another experience, like flying through an endless sea of skeletons, zooming through the gaps in their ribs or between their skulls and bodies. It is almost like an infinite storage locker of skeletons. FUN!

It feels a lot like symbols of death and rebirth. What is this experience trying to tell me?

I hear the bell ring to signify that the ceremony is over. I pull off my eye mask and headphones and I’m back in the room. I feel exceptionally calm and relaxed. There was no panic this time. There was no anxiety. I released into having no control. I released into letting my body disappear. I released the worry that I might not come back to my body. I just accepted that what was going to happen was going to happen and experienced it fully.

And it felt great.

Later, I write in a journal: “There is something so deeply familiar about the sensations, sounds, and experiences that is not just from last week—it’s almost like tapping into a pre-existing state of being that I’ve known but totally forgot about.”

I feel the urge to write, to paint, to draw, to play music. I have an especially weird urge to try to paint some of the things I saw in my experience today, but I have no painting supplies, no canvases… and no painting talent whatsoever. So I reluctantly abandon my analog instincts and try to recreate them with AI prompts in Gemini, which are the images you see in this post.

Dose Three—The Return of Gabor and a Cavern of Light

On a bit of a whim, between session two and session three, I head back up to the island where I had run into Gabor Maté earlier in the summer. I want a couple of days to think about everything I have experienced so far. Lo and behold, I have another Gabor sighting! I leave him in peace and do not disturb him again, but seeing him feels like some sort of symbol as I approach my final session. Is he a talisman sent by the universe to help me wrap my journey… or does he just spend a lot of time on this island?

Oddly, on a walk in a forest, I see almost exactly the same visuals that I had in my last ketamine experience: giant tree trunks surrounded by wet greenery, shimmering with bits of the remaining daylight. These are the actual photos I took and I can’t tell you how eerily similar they are to the visions I had in the last session.

Back in The Grove a few days later, I am the most comfortable I’ve been yet, and I am genuinely excited about the voyage ahead. Sadaf’s opening meditation is about connection and disconnection. What are the things I want to connect with more and less?

My intention for the third session is to let answers emerge that are already lurking deep inside me somewhere. Releasing these inner answers, I believe, will be a way of reconnecting with myself.

The needle goes in. My body disappears.

I am floating high above a rocky surface, almost like a military drone. Below me, there are large holes in the ground. Soon there are sites that look like mines.

Next, it feels like I’m in a mining elevator going down. I’m descending through layers of dirt, shale, and rock, going deeper and deeper below the surface. At the bottom, I enter into a tunnel system, where it feels like I’m on a roller coaster again.

Eventually, I emerge into a spacious cavern filled with white light. It is majestic and bright and, not to get too hokey, but exceptionally warm and welcoming. It felt like… home? Right at that moment, the music in my headphones fills my ears with a song whose chorus is a synthetic repetition of the words “I love you.” This cavern is clearly a magical place and I want to stay here forever. I’m SO comfortable here. It’s the exact opposite of the eternal void from my first experience.

When I realize that I am beginning to enter the Shallows and can start feeling parts of my body and my brain coming back online, I am genuinely disappointed to have to return to reality. More than the other two times, coming back to my body feels like disconnecting from the experience… and I don’t want to come back. I could feel my monkey mind clawing to regain control and I didn’t like it. Eventually, though, Steve-Brain successfully returned and I was back in The Grove.

It was at this point that I had my most embarrassing moment with the rest of the group—even worse than the noisy snacking incident. During our debrief, I mentioned the magic of the white cavern of light and how the soundtrack was perfectly synced, with the “I love you” track playing when I was in there. I was informed that there was no song on the playlist with “I love you” lyrics. It was 100% part of my experience.

There is a lot for me to unpack about why my brain decided to create an “I love you” song for me in the cavern of light, and we will get to that soon. But discovering this in front of the rest of the group was, in the moment, quite mortifying. (Isn’t it nice that Steve needs to tell himself that he’s loved in his magic cavern???)

Now What?

So that’s a lot, right? A lot of imagery. A lot of themes of death and rebirth. A lot of annoying snacking sounds. And from journey one, being terrified that I might never return to my body, to journey three, being somewhat disappointed when I did.

You might well and justifiably be wondering, that’s great that you left this plane of existence and visited eternity and black holes and caverns of white light, but what’s the point? What did you learn?

It turns out, I have learned a hell of a lot. What does finding a cavern of white light after tunnelling through layers of rock have to do with my Type A achiever/striver personality? What does visiting death and seeing organic rebirth have to do with figuring out midlife?

Here are the answers in the last instalment of the Ketamine Experiment! (And again, here’s the first instalment if you’d like to check out how and why this all happened.)

Thanks for reading!

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

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As soon as Geoff and I decided to conduct all these personal experiments on ourselves to try and figure out midlife, I knew that I wanted to try psychedelics.

I have been a really straight-edge nerd when it comes to drugs and, outside of alcohol, I haven’t done much of anything my entire life. However, after reading ’s book about psychedelics, How To Change Your Mind, and after listening to Dr. Gabor Maté talk about the healing power of psychedelics on podcasts, I’ve become highly curious about purported experiences that involve losing your sense of self and feeling connected to everything in the universe.

On the flip side, I’ve always been a bit of a Type A, striver/achiever control freak. For most of my life, control has been something of a superpower, where I could see what might go wrong or turn into a problem in the future, and then plan to make sure that it didn’t happen. So the thought of giving up control of my mind and my consciousness is just about the scariest thing possible.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I have realized—with help from people like and —that control is an illusion and a foolish pursuit. I’ve been trying to embrace uncertainty and attempting to let go of control, but I’m (unsurprisingly) not very good at it…

After deeply thinking about whether to give up control of my mind, I came to this question: do I really want to go to my grave never having experienced something that might be quite profound and helpful?

I Ask the Universe to Send Me to Gabor

If I am going to do this, I want to be as safe and as legal as possible. I want to be in good hands. And that is how I start thinking about how cool it would be to try and connect with Dr. Gabor Maté. Gabor lives in my hometown of Vancouver and also spends time on a nearby island that my family loves to visit. I begin having a recurring daydream that I am going to somehow meet Gabor on this island and that he is going to help guide my first psychedelic journey.

Then, almost exactly a year ago, on Canada Day (July 1, 2025), I am in a ferry line-up going to this island. In the car directly in front of me, the driver door opens and a man gets out to go for a stroll.

It’s Gabor.

I have a small panic attack. I’m not ready to talk to him yet! #controlfreak. Is this the universe conspiring to make my psychedelic dreams come true? Soon, he returns to his car. I am frozen, trying to muster the courage to talk to him.

I take a deep breath, get out of my car and walk up. His window is open. I say something barely intelligible, apologizing for disturbing him in the ferry line-up, but curious if I can ask him a question about psychedelics. He and his wife, Rae, could not be more friendly. He gives me his phone number and tells me to call him in a couple of days.

It’s a long couple of days waiting to call. Again, I have to summon the courage to pick up the phone and dial. I take some calming breaths while it rings, but immediately relax when he picks up and continues to be exceptionally warm and generous.

I explain the Midlife Field Guide and my curiosity around having my first psychedelic experience. Gabor jokes that he is closer to ‘end of life’ than midlife and has a very busy calendar, so he might not be the best person to work with directly.

Instead, he introduces via email to Mark Haden, an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, who is a well known expert in the field of psychedelic medicine. He is also the Clinical Supervisor for the Psychedelic Treatment Program at Qi Integrated Health.

The Sailboat in the Middle of the Ocean

We set up a video call and, like Gabor, Mark is very generous with his time. When I lay out my hopes for doing this, he doesn’t hesitate.

“So would I recommend you take psychedelics? Absolutely yes. But I would recommend you do it thoughtfully, skillfully with carefully managed scenarios where you choose the set, the setting, the dosage, and the context. Then, yes, you will probably answer some of your midlife crisis questions.”

The best part is when he asks me about what other sorts of drugs I have done. When I tell him none, he asks, “Are you serious? Well you are going to have a fascinating and hopefully insightful experience!”

Knowing my novice status, he offers to help me explore a protocol of Ketamine Therapy at Qi Integrated Health. If I meet the diagnostic criteria, doing ketamine in Canada is legal, it’s medically supervised, and the onset and duration of the experience is very predictable and safe.

Mark tells me that the recommended best practice is to do a set of three separate ketamine sessions over the course of a month. Doing three sessions has an interesting rationale that Mark explains with a sailboat analogy.

“Imagine for a second that you are walking down the street of your life and you wake up suddenly and you find yourself on a small sailboat in the middle of the ocean. You go, “What the hell happened?” And you spend your time trying to figure out where you are and you eventually figure out you’re on a small sailboat in the middle of the ocean.

“And then—Poof!—you go back to your regular life and think, ‘That was kind of strange.’

“A little while later, you’re walking down the street of your life and you wake up and you find yourself again on a small sailboat in the middle of the ocean. This time you know where you are. So you become really interested in the rudder and the sail, and you realize you can actually go back and forth and up and down and round and round. And then you go back to your regular life.

“Later, you wake up and you find yourself back on the boat. This time you know where you are. You know how to sail and you see an island way off in the distance. You say, ‘I want to go there.’ So now you become interested in navigational skills.”

Mark says it’s the same with your first psychedelic experiences.

“The first few times you do it, it’s just, ‘Wow!’ But after a while, you kind of learn to use them as tools.”

With my panicky mind, Mark also tells me that ketamine is the least anxiety-inducing psychedelic experience. It activates very quickly and doesn’t last as long as other alternatives like psilocybin or ayahuasca. The control freak likes to hear this predictability!

We wrap the call with Mark offering to introduce me to Meredith, who manages the psychedelics program at Qi. He assures me with a pronouncement:

I am officially EXCITED to do this!

Fear and Panic Set In

At least, I am officially excited until I make the mistake of telling my parents about my plans to visit another plane of existence. To say that they are horrified and deeply concerned about my judgement would be putting it mildly. “Why would you do this?” “It sounds VERY dangerous!” “This feels like a big mistake…”

I start to second guess myself and this whole decision.

So I do nothing. I sit on it. I can’t get myself to follow up with Meredith and book an appointment at Qi.

For months.

However, as I do more and more of these Midlife Field Guide experiences, I realize that the best results are coming from paying attention to what is making me uncomfortable. And I again started asking myself, “Are you really going to die without ever having had an experience that you’re really curious about?”

I talk to my wife, Debbie, about it extensively. Despite being nervous about me doing it, she is very supportive.

Another deep breath. I book an appointment.

Soon, I am in the medical evaluation process, where a physician assesses whether I met the criteria to do ketamine in Canada. With my anxious control freak mind, and some high stress about a family member’s health situation, I am given the green light to do ketamine-based therapy.

“Therapy” is an important word to highlight. This is not an “experience” in the woods or in someone’s basement. This process is specifically designed to use psychedelics in conjunction with therapy to help you make changes. This is exactly what I am looking for in my state of midlife confusion.

I can’t believe I’m going to do this. (And neither can my parents!)

Assessment and Preparation

Soon, I have a session with Sadaf Naji, a counsellor who will be guiding the ketamine sessions and also integration therapy after each of the three journeys. It is very comforting meeting Sadaf. I tell her a lot about why I want to do this:

• I’ve felt lifelong pressure to succeed, strive, and fit in.

• When I left media, became an entrepreneur, and then a consultant (!), I lost touch with my creativity and have had enormous difficulty giving myself permission to be a creative person or artist.

• I find it really challenging to give myself permission to RELAX because I feel like I gain self-worth or success from doing more and more and more.

• Most of all, this #controlfreak is very nervous about giving up control of the place that exerts control for a living: my mind.

Sadaf knows exactly what to say, and encourages me to enter this set of experiences with curiosity. She suggests asking myself, “I wonder what might happen?” instead of “I hope this fixes me” or “I expect insights.”

I also have an appointment with a physician about dosing. We are doing ‘heroic’ doses, which create a dissociative experience of being outside your body. You can choose a light, medium, or heavy dose. The dosing level is determined partly by your weight and partly by your choice. I choose to go right up the middle in the Goldilocks zone—not too small, not too big.

The Night Before The Trip

Before I know it, the date of the first experience is upon me. The day prior, Sadaf leads a preparation session. This is where I am confronted with another component of this adventure: I’m not doing this alone. It’s a small group of five people doing this together. We introduce ourselves and share a bit about why we’re doing this. At first, I am worried about doing this in a group.

What if I do something horrid, like poop my pants while my brain is on a boat in the middle of the ocean?

Some words that come up in the preparation session:

• Release

• Surrender

• Let go

• Receive

• Show me what I need to know

We are encouraged to think about an intention for our journey. If you are a regular reader of the Midlife Field Guide, it might not surprise you that this is where I land with my intention for the first session:

“Reconnect with my authentic self. Shed the layers of societal conditioning that have built up. Let go of control and relax into the comfort of embracing my true, core self.”

That night, I sleep restlessly. Even though ketamine has been used daily in hospitals all over the world for decades and decades, I am still incredibly nervous. What if it changes me forever? What if I see things I can’t unsee? How will I handle giving up control over my most precious asset—my own mind?

Entering The Grove

I wake up on the morning of the first session and write down some of my thoughts. Most interesting is this:

“I need to watch out for my intention becoming an expectation. Be careful not to measure whether the experience is successful or not, and instead just be open and experience it and see what happens. Man, it would be nice to just let go of stuff and finally be able to relax, without feeling guilt or shame about not being productive.”

After reassuring my parents and my family that I will contact them as soon as I’m done, I head into the clinic. Like me, everyone participating is clearly nervous about what we are all going to experience together. Nurses give each of us a medical check to ensure we are ready and able to go forward.

Then, we are ushered into a room with a two-storey ceiling called The Grove. There are five upholstered lounger-style chairs arranged in a circle, complete with bedding and a side table. The room is filled with stumps of real trees, covered in bright green vines. The lights are low and there is very chill, new agey music playing in the background. Just being in this room, I feel like the journey to departing reality has begun.

We settle into our chairs, pull weighted blankets up over ourselves, and Sadaf begins the proceedings with a short meditation. It is calming and lowers my anxiety about what is about to happen (although I do briefly imagine what my parents would think if they could see me in this room right now).

Then she rings a bell and the nurses give us each a small metal tray holding a needle and a green vine. I roll up my sleeve and take a deep breath. I can’t believe I am about to do this.

3… 2… 1… the needle slides into my arm. My lifelong iron grip of control over my mind begins to slip away.

Here’s part two of the Ketamine journey, where a square control freak details what it’s like to have your consciousness hijacked, your body disappear, and to visit death and eternity.

And this is the third and final instalment of the experience, with everything I’ve learned from doing this.

Thanks for reading!

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

We did it.

Two Saturdays ago, flanked by 20 or so beloved friends and family on stage, in front of a jam-packed theatre, Suz and I performed our 25th Anniversary Fiddler on the Roof Spectacular.

It was a triumph. And not in the sense that it was in any shape or form a polished Broadway-worthy production, in fact, a close friend called it “amateur…but in the best possible way.” It was a triumph because we imagined it, shaped and refined it and then manifested something even grander than our original vision.

But let me back up a bit.

It’s the night of the performance and I’m waiting backstage for my big entrance. In our version of Fiddler on the Roof I come out on stage first, all alone, as Tevye, the main character in the show.

I’m ready to recite Tevye’s opening monologue. It’s something I’ve been obsessively practicing for months. I’d even printed it out and stuck it to the front of my fridge so I could rehearse every time I was in the kitchen. It’s a monologue I know, something I can recite backwards and forwards. And yet, during the dress rehearsal when I came out on the stage, I blanked. Totally blanked. It was the performance nightmare I’ve heard other people talk about, only this time it was actually happening to me.

The experience of having my brain blank out during the dress rehearsal had been haunting me ever since. It was bad enough to have it happen in front of our cast and crew, but what if it happened on the big night?

It’s almost showtime and Suz and I are in the dressing room getting ready. We hear people milling about the main room, but it’s impossible to tell how many. About 15 minutes before opening curtain, our director comes in with an astonished look in her eyes. “There are A LOT of people out there,” she tells us, “people are grabbing drinks and seem relaxed, so it should be a good crowd.”

There was a theatre full of people waiting for a show. Our show. And if I blanked out... well, I’d just have to figure it out. It was time to breathe.

A friend volunteers to help us warm up. We do a few rounds of belly breathing, and then she encourages us to squat down and feel the floor, to be reminded that the earth can hold us and we won’t fall through.

A few minutes later, as the band begins to play, I stand behind the curtain waiting for my cue. I squat down again and feel the ground. “This stage can hold me,” I say quietly to myself. And I feel oddly... relaxed.

Then it’s time. I part the curtains and walk out into the spotlight.

The sound I hear from the crowd is amazing. Huge applause mixed with hooting and hollering, all before I say a single word. As my eyes adjust to the stage lights, I see familiar faces in the audience. A packed house, full of friends and family from all stages of my life. All there to witness this spectacle with curiosity and love. I feel totally held in this moment.

Once the applause dies down, I begin to speak the words I had so tirelessly memorized over the past many months. I feel loose, relaxed, and delighted. I don’t blank out. I’m in a flow state of joy. It is magical.

With my monologue complete, Suz comes on stage and is met with the same loud burst of applause. She recites a monologue, and then we break character and explain that we aren’t doing a traditional Fiddler on the Roof show, but instead we are telling the story of our relationship and using our love for the songs of Fiddler on the Roof to help tell it.

The show takes the audience through the journey of our relationship, from our first kiss, to our original wedding vows, to brutally honest moments when separating felt almost inevitable. It all builds to a surprise recommitment ceremony live on stage, with vows spoken from the heart. Our story is interwoven with a cast of about 20 people singing along to hits from Fiddler on the Roof.

In the days and weeks leading up to the performance, I wondered if I’d feel let down once the show was over. After all, Suz and I had been working on it for the past year or so, and the amount of work that went into a one-night-only performance was bonkers. Would I miss it? Would I feel unsatisfied?

Now that it is over and a couple of weeks have gone by, I feel beyond satisfied. There were definitely a few hiccups in our performance, but none of that matters. To me it was perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing.

And unexpectedly, writing and performing in a show that was all about me and Suz’s relationship, warts and all, has truly brought us closer together. It has transformed our relationship. I feel like we’re on another honeymoon.

Ever since the performance, we’ve been getting messages like this:

What a joyous (!), playful (!!!), moving and special experience this was. The whole show was a true spectacular. Truly spectacular… The energy in the room was amazing. I’m still singing Fiddler songs in my head…. Congrats, you beautiful people. You pulled off an incredible thing.

___

We are still humming and singing the tunes and basking in the warmth and the love of your… pausing here to find the right word, show? Sacred ceremony? Fun gathering of friends and family? You managed to curve and blend them all and take us all on a delicious ride of music, dance, joy and love!

___

How are you guys doing? I am still sitting with the magic of the evening and the beautiful work of love and art you co-created…. I left the evening excited. Inspired. Energized to create, and co-create.

___

I expected the laughs, and I assumed it would be touching because we’d all be in on the joke, but you two had to go and make it genuinely moving… If theatre should be about community (and shouldn’t it?), your Spectacular was one of the best theatre productions I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of. Congrats on creating a welcoming, inclusive, and yes, hilarious, piece of art — not bad for your 25th!

___

So what does this all mean, and how has it changed me?

As part of the performance, we revisited the original vows we wrote when we got married 25 years ago. They were sweet and idealistic, full of the kinds of things you might say to your love in your 20s. And now, in our 50’s, we stood facing each other again and said vows to each other as the people we are today. Having built a life together. Having faced loss, and knowing there is more loss ahead. Having created and nurtured two totally amazing children, and all the ups and downs that come with that.

The journey of our relationship certainly isn’t unique. Staying in love with someone over the long term is really, really hard work. Early in the process, we were talking with one of our writing mentors, who described the central theme of Fiddler on the Roof as “Love through the ages and love through the changes.” It was something that really stuck out to us, and that we kept coming back to while writing the show. Our love is not the same love that it was when we were in our 20’s, but it’s also not completely different.

The other night, Suz and I were reflecting on what the 20-something-year-old versions of us would say if they could see us today. We imagined they’d be amazed at what we’ve built. At the life we’ve created, the kids we’ve raised, and the sense of play that is still forefront in our relationship and in our lives. The younger versions of us would be tickled that we actually rented out a theatre, wrote a show, convinced friends and family to come out and play with us on stage, hired a full band to accompany us, and then filled the venue beyond capacity.

In the weeks to come I intend to write more about how this process has changed me, because without a doubt it has. In the meantime, I want to share an excerpt from a piece written by our dear director and friend . She wrote a note in the program for our show, that beautifully describes our journey:

Director’s Note:

…This process has been something rare[r]: people showing up for people they love, for no other reason than love. We don’t do that enough. And right now, when so much feels fractured and loud and uncertain, when community is simultaneously the thing we most crave and the thing that keeps asking us to work harder to protect it, choosing to gather around something that matters feels almost like an act of resistance…let this evening be exactly what it is: a love letter from two people who clearly know how to go all in — on a story, on a celebration, and on each other.

Now that we’re on the other side of this project, the question that keeps coming up for us is: How do we transfer the same spirit we experienced throughout this process to the rest of our lives? How do we keep the creative energy we felt in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the show alive every day? And how do we feed the spirit of play and community that enlivened us on so deeply the night of the big show?

Until next time,

- Geoff

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

This is Part Two of my attempt to run a Half Marathon at age 53. You can find Part One here, but here’s the TLDR summary:

Before last May, I had never run a race. I’ve always hated running. My wife, a passionate runner, persuades me to enter a 10 km race in September, and in the excitement, we also sign up for a half marathon in February. Debbie gets injured and pulls out, after I’ve committed to a training plan and coaching with my friend Greg. Greg is horrified by my heart rate while running and is concerned I’m going to die. My friend Todd jumps in to do the race and train with me… until the Seattle Seahawks reach the Super Bowl and Todd gets tickets for him and his son to go. The Super Bowl is on the same day as the half marathon, so my broken body and I will have to do the half marathon alone.

My Body Is Telling Me To Quit

It’s been a week. Since completing the full half-marathon distance in training last weekend, my body has been a wreck. My hips are INCREDIBLY tight. My right hip feels like it’s going to give away or collapse going up and down stairs. I have been limping for much of the week. I’ve pulled in another amazing person to support team, Erin at Studio 19 Pilates. She helps me stretch out, activate the right muscles, and limber up to stay mobile. It’s an uphill battle…

Every week, a new part of my body fails. This training is pushing my rotting carcass to its physical limit. I am supposed to run on Wednesday and can barely walk, so I bail. I am supposed to try running again on Thursday and opt to shift to an indoor cycle for 30 minutes instead. On Friday, I run 5 km in a torrential downpour and my hips are killing me again.

I am worried that I have injured myself and that I’m going to do further damage if I run another half marathon in two weeks. I know I’ve already finished a run of half marathon length with Todd, so I’ve already completed my larger goal and done it with my friend. But I would feel like a loser pulling out of the race with under two weeks to go.

I don’t really know whether it would be dumber to quit or to do the run.

On Saturday, I really begin wrestling with the decision to pull out of the race. Todd and I are scheduled to complete our last big run before the pre-race taper week. 10 km around the seawall in Stanley Park.

That’s right. Todd is going to the Super Bowl, but he’s still going to do the last big training run with me. What kind of awesome friend is this?

I wake up early on Sunday morning. It is pissing rain.

We head out and all I focus on is short, fast little strides. I feel like an imbecile shuffling along the seawall, but my hips are surviving. It’s a miracle!

Right now, after finishing the 10 km with Todd with less pain, I feel like the race is back on, full steam ahead. I’ve got a full week to recover and make sure I’m in the best shape I can possibly be in.

Yesterday, I was SO close to quitting and pulling out.

And now… I think I’m going to do this.

Race Day!

As an older athlete trying to do something stupid for my age, I wake up at 5:30am to discover that Lindsay Vonn’s heroic Olympic comeback ended in a horrific crash in the first 13 seconds of the downhill final and she had to be airlifted to a hospital.

This does not feel like a good omen!

Regardless, I spring into action, popping two Aleves, slathering myself in Voltaren, kneading my hips and doing thirty minutes of stretching activations.

Nothing I can do at this point except do the run.

Just before I head out the door, I get one more enthusiastic message from Todd, who is in San Francisco for the Super Bowl.

I get a ride to the start line with Clement and David, two of Debbie’s friends. They are better runners, so they start much further ahead in the waiting pen than me. I dump myself in the group targeting a finish time of 2:15. They will be finished and gone by the time I’m done, but I’m okay with that. Clement is going to work a full shift in a hospital directly from finishing the race. I tell him that I will likely see him in the ER—I’ll be the one being paddled.

The day before the race, over 50 mm of rain fell in Vancouver. Today, though, it is a meteorological miracle. It is about 5 degrees Celsius and sunny when I leave the house and gets up to almost 10 degrees during the race.

I pop in my AirPods, cue up the Midlife Field Guide Running playlist, and suddenly we are off! Being that far back in the pen, you have to walk to the start line inside a giant crowd, and then when you hit the start line, everyone starts running.

I feel really good and calm, but I actually start a bit too fast, so I consciously slow down after the first kilometre. I end up ahead of the 2:10 running group and behind the 2:05 running group and that is pretty much where I stay. I just run in my own space and try to find little open pockets where I’m not feeling crowded or in anyone else’s way.

After a few twists and turns through the downtown core, we emerge out of the high-rises to the waterfront. Vancouver on a sunny day is just about the most beautiful place in the world, and running a half marathon along the ocean on a mint day is instantly a pretty magical experience.

My pre-race plan was to take walking breaks at every water station. The idea was to have a gel while walking and that I’d start running again when I finished the gel. As I approach the first water station, I stop, grab a baby cup of electrolyte drink, slam it, and start running again. No gel. No walking.

What am I doing?

The next water station, I do the same thing. I tear open a caffeine gel after about 10 km and slurp it down while I am running. No stopping.

It is about this point, about halfway through the race, that I see a police motorcycle with lights flashing coming towards me in the opposite lane. What is going on?

I find out pretty quickly that the police were clearing the way for the leader of the race, who was already on his way back to towards the finish line. He rips by me in the opposite direction, running faster than I could run in a 100 yard dash. Except he’s running that pace for a full 21.1 km.

It is at this point that I really start feeling my glutes and hips tightening. Every time I feel the strain, I try to remind myself to take smaller, faster steps, to try to glide instead of stomp, and to keep my head held high. When I forget this, I can feel the impact rumble through my hips and jar my stabilizing and support muscles.

I get to the magical turnaround point and feel the energy boost. I know I am going to make it. At some point in here, my hips and glutes magically loosen up… probably because of pure exhaustion. They just gave up.

And kilometre after kilometre, I keep going.

My soundtrack is giving me some pretty funny songs for the last few kilometres. “Got Something To Live For” by Barney Bentall. YES!

As I get closer and closer to the end, more and more people are on the sidewalk cheering runners on. I keep hearing, “Let’s go, Steve!” “You got this, Steve!” “Keep it going, Steve!” It feels like I’m a celebrity runner and everyone is cheering me on! Every time I hear my name being called, I turn in surprise, trying to figure out who it is that knows me.

Then I realize that my name is printed in giant letters on my race bib…

They are yelling everyone’s name as they run by. #idiot

Next song: “The Old Man Down The Road” by John Fogerty. ON POINT and hilarious!

After I pass kilometre 20, I come up on one of Vancouver’s iconic public art installations, a huge chandelier hanging from the underside of a bridge. There are loads of people cheering the runners on. Why? Because you make a hard left turn and have to run UPHILL before a sprint to the finish line. It’s not a mild incline. It’s UPHILL.

I feel an infusion of energy and bolt up the hill. For the first time in the entire race, I start taking full strides once I reach the top. I do not micro-step. I do not penguin scoot.

I RUN to the finish line and it feels GREAT!

I cross the finish line to “Bust A Move” by Young MC. (Note: I do NOT “bust a move” when I finish, even though my lovely wife, Debbie, is there to cheer me on 😊)

I grab my finisher’s medal, which is gorgeous, snarf down a banana and a bag of chips, and head home with Debbie.

The winner finished in just over an hour and a minute. I finished in TWO hours and five minutes. The fastest runner ran twice as fast as I did. I am still mind-boggled that someone can run that fast… and that I can run that slowly.

But I really don’t care. I did it. I didn’t walk at all. I beat my dress-rehearsal half marathon time by ten minutes. And I finished one of the hardest athletic challenges of my entire life.

Even better, Todd and his son got to see the Seahawks win the Super Bowl!

The Aftermath

That afternoon, my legs just freeze up. The hamstring in my left leg cramps and is rigid and angry. I have great difficulty going up and down stairs. I take more Aleve, I have a hot shower, and I sit on the couch for hours and hours.

But I feel such a huge wave of relief that it is over.

I didn’t realize how much anxiety had built up around this for me. It’s been MONTHS of training. It’s been looking at my calendar every week and seeing runs scheduled four or five days a week, and every one of them manifested some level of anxiety for me. And the looming race generated a low level of persistent anxiety. I wasn’t sure if I could do it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it.

It takes a long time for me to fully recover from this—three weeks later, I am still feeling it! Since recovering, I’ve done a few 5 km runs and my body has been fine.

I’m honestly not sure my body can take running this much or this far or this regularly. But things that felt impossible to me a year ago are suddenly easy and normal: I can run 5 km like it’s a warm-up run, and I can run 10 km without much of a problem. In September, 10 km was my equivalent of doing the half marathon.

Continuing to do 5 km and 10 km runs is feasible. And maybe at some point I will want to do more? But right now, I’m just basking in the glow of doing something I did not think I was physically capable of.

My biggest takeaway from this whole journey is not about running, though. It’s about friendship and generosity.

One of the topics that gets written about over and over again about men at midlife is the importance of friendships and community, and I can tell you without a doubt that doing this race has been a surprising and wonderful way to deepen friendships and community.

I keep thinking these Midlife Field Guide experiments are about the thing itself: the race, the no-drinking streak, the standup set. But the best ones are really about who shares the experiences with me. Debbie. Cedar. Greg. Lishan. Renata. Erin. Todd. Thank you all!

While my running may be slow, awkward, and facing an uncertain future, my friendships are world-class.

That is more than enough.

Also, I didn’t die, Greg!

That’s it for the Half Marathon experiment!

• Is there anything you don’t think you could physically do that you’re curious about?

• Is there anything daunting you are considering that would easier if you did it with a friend?

If you’re enjoying the Midlife Field Guide, I thought you might also enjoy a terrific newsletter and a very funny book.

The Calm Society is a newsletter from my friend Cameron Uganec. Cam’s thesis is that the world is organized around productivity and optimization and that we need to rethink that if we want to enjoy quality of life (especially in this AI-driven era.) YES!

Me, But Better is a very funny and smart book from journalist . It’s about the science of personality change, but it’s all written through a series of personal experiments on her own life. (If you’re reading this, you can probably guess why I wanted to read it and enjoyed it so much!)

Next up, things are about to get WEIRD as I travel to an alternate dimension, visit eternity, and return to tell the tale. Plus… Geoff’s epic Fiddler on the Roof production takes place and you’ll get the full rundown!

Stay tuned…

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

What A Chicken!

Last fall, my inner “Chicken Voice” did something really stupid.

During the training for my first-ever running race, the Eastside 10km in September, my wife Debbie and I signed up for the First Half, a half marathon in FEBRUARY in Vancouver.

This was dumb. But signing up for the race is not the stupid thing.

After completing the Eastside 10km, I stopped running for many weeks and secretly planned to bail on the First Half. I was gassed after doing 10 km and there was no way I could imagine doing over double that just a few months later.

In November, however, my friend Greg reaches out with this text:

“Are you still keen on running the First Half 1/2 marathon? Was going to prep you a program this week so you can start training! Race is 13 weeks away…”

THIS is the stupid thing: I reply to Greg,

“It is still in play! I’m behind on my training but still thinking I’m going to try and do it. This is a great reminder about how close it is - gah! 😊”

Why do I say yes to doing this??? I am too much of a chicken to tell Greg that I want to bail on the half marathon, especially when he is offering to create a customized training plan for me. Then, before I can back out, Greg offers, “I’m volunteering to coach you through this one!”

In the spirit of everything I’ve been doing with the Midlife Field Guide, when a very generous offer shows up to do something out of the ordinary, I double down and commit to doing a half marathon.

I talk with Debbie and we decide to do it as a couples adventure. We can train together, we’ll get lots of time doing a shared activity, and we’ll have a shared milestone at the end. This boosts my motivation a lot.

That is, until Debbie pulls a hamstring muscle very early into our training. It is bad enough that she has to stop running for many weeks, which ruins all the training timelines for her. She is not going to be ready in time. Debbie pulls the plug on running the First Half.

Suddenly, I am committed to doing something I don’t really want to do… without my running partner. (Also, I am kind of jealous that Debbie has a very good excuse to not do the race…)

The Training Plan

Greg recommends that I get a Morpheus heart rate monitor to train so that I know which heart rate zone I am in at various phases of my runs. He kindly offers to look at my running data from the Morpheus and give me feedback as my training progresses.

This generates quite a bit of drama.

When I get Greg’s plan via a very detailed Excel spreadsheet, I get more excited about the prospect of seeing if I can do it. I have never put in the work over several months to prepare for any sort of physical challenge like this. I picture myself like Rocky Balboa, in an extended montage of training sequences while ‘Eye of the Tiger’ blares inspirationally (although the montage just features me running in slow motion, not punching meat carcasses.)

Greg is a long-time racer and is in the best shape of pretty much anyone I know at our age. His plan includes four runs a week: a couple of slower pace, lower heart rate runs, one run with some increased pace, and one long run.

Greg is very encouraging, and despite the tight training timeline, he continually assures me. “You can be ready in 12 weeks easy,” Greg texts early on. Then a few days later: “Follow the plan and you will cruise in sub 2 hours, no problem. A half is totally doable for you.”

Greg will soon be forced to adjust his expectations!

Greg Becomes Worried I’m Going To Die

For my first run, I am supposed to run at an easy pace for six minutes, then walk for one minute, and repeat that pattern four times. I do the run and it goes well. I wear my new Morpheus monitor and share the heart rate data with Greg.

I am quite alarmed at his response:

“ I’m surprised how quickly your heart rate jumps to +140bpm… There is no way your heart rate should go to +140 in the first five minutes of a slow jog.”

I figure it is an anomaly and do not fret about it. However, after my second run, Greg texts me and says “I’m quite worried about your high heart rate.”

As a result, I also become quite worried about my heart rate. I have to slow to a snail’s pace to keep my heart rate down in the right range. It feels like I am trudging, not jogging. And certainly not running!

My heart rate becomes a recurring theme. I do a run, send Greg my heart rate data, and he shares his concerns that I am going to die during my next run.

I tell Greg that I am getting a full cardiology evaluation done as part of my Ultimate Midlife Medical Test experiment and he replies, “Show them your run heart rate profile. Something doesn’t seem right to me…”

After my medical, I share the good news with Greg:

“The cardiologist yesterday said no problem with the heart rate as long as I don’t stay in overload for extended periods of time. Got full echocardiogram, ECG, and stress test, and everything is totally normal. It just might be that I’m not in running shape yet…”

I keep up with the training plan, running very slowly. Greg continues to encourage me, but obviously knows from my run times that I am not going to break any speed records. He texts, “keep adding volume, but also try and sneak up the pace of the time you are running.” I am not able to sneak up the pace without skyrocketing my heart rate.

Meanwhile, Greg is travelling a lot for work, and I see him doing all sorts of runs in exotic locations like Zurich and Sydney. His times and heart rates are ridiculous and I need to keep reminding myself that comparison is the thief of joy! It is also a reminder that Greg has been running and doing endurance events for a long time and this is the first time I’ve ever done it.

In early December, with winter setting in, darkness enveloping more and more of the days, heart rate concerns, no one to run with, and the holiday season looming, I begin to fall off the training plan.

Coach Greg notices and gives me a hard nudge.

“I think it’s important that you start building distance. Need to start making your weekend run a long one and add 2 km per week so you can build up to the 21 km in Feb. Run fitness requires 30 km/week volume.”

At this point, I am unsure if I’m going to be able to motivate myself to do this. I am getting close to pulling the plug.

That is, until I receive another exceptionally generous offer.

Just at the point when I am going to quit, Todd comes to the rescue.

Todd Joins The Party

Todd has been an amazing friend of mine for many years. Like Debbie, he is a longtime runner and does a few races annually. I have been telling Todd about my runs, the training plan, Greg’s concerns about my heart, and how Debbie had to bail on the race due to injury.

I am shocked and humbled when Todd offers to jump in and not just do the half marathon with me, but also to be my training and accountability partner. YES! And just like that, I’m back and committed.

We start running together and it works really well. We have under two months to go before the race, so the schedule is ramping up considerably.

Here are my journal entries heading into race day…

December 14.

In pouring rain, Todd and I complete my longest run ever at this point, 10.55 km. (No laughing!) Greg is alarmed.

It is unclear to me whether:

1. I am a medical miracle/freak show

2. I am about to have a massive heart attack, or

3. Greg, the elite athlete, is not used to dealing with ‘normal’ humans who are not high-performance endurance racers

The Support Team Grows

Around this time, my knee starts to hurt and hip flexors have become VERY tight, so I essentially assemble the A-Team of running to help me. There’s Lishan, who is not only an amazing trainer but also an elite athlete who has competed in the World Ironman Championship in Kona, Hawaii. There’s Renata, another high-performance athlete who is a physiotherapist. Between Greg, Lishan, and Renata, I get an updated training plan, a series of exercises and stretches, nutrition and hydration protocols, dry needling, and massage. Renata even accompanies me on a 7 km run to see if there is anything in my running form contributing to my knee and hip pain. Going to repeat that: my physio went running with me.

The advice from everyone is consistent. Take smaller, faster steps and avoid having my feet plant too far in front of my hips. I try this out and feel like both an old man and a penguin at the same time.

More important than worrying about looking ridiculous, though, I am mind-boggled and grateful for how many wonderful people—Greg, Todd, Lishan, Renata—have generously jumped in to help me in this journey.

Training with Todd

Over the next many weeks, Todd and I run together. And run. And run. Every weekend, our longer run becomes longer than the last one. In what becomes a recurring joke, Todd and I celebrate at the point where each successive long run becomes my new longest run ever. We high five and announce, “New longest run ever!”

I feel like some sort of test pilot pushing new extremes on my crappy body: “We’re entering unexplored territory!”

As the distances increase, so does my pain. My right knee hurts. So does my right ankle. Then my left knee and hamstring. My hip flexors are incredibly tight.

12 km. 15 km. 17 km. We are like the postal service: we run in wind, sleet, rain, or snow (thankfully, just frost).

After an agonizing 17 km run on January 4th, I get an ominous message from Todd, who is a lifelong mega-fan of the Seattle Seahawks.

I am not worried. What are the odds that the Seahawks make it to the Super Bowl?

I am confident I will have my running partner with me on race day. (Cue ominous foreshadowing music…)

Mud Bay

Next up… 19 km (!!!). Todd suggests a new location for our run. Mud Bay. Sounds less than appealing. “It’s a bit of a drive out there, but it’s a beauty run. Leave at 7:30 so we are there for sunrise…” texts Todd. There for SUNRISE???

I have been DREADING this run for the last two weeks. Despite all my stretching and a taper week last week, I can still barely go up the stairs.

This past week, I caught myself again starting to fantasize about pulling out of the half marathon entirely. Telling myself no one will care if I didn’t run. Telling myself that I am going to injure myself doing these long distances and it isn’t worth it. Convincing myself that I might be already injured and making it worse by continuing to train. That Todd is going to pull out because the Seahawks are going to make the Superbowl and that I won’t be able to do it without Todd.

I am trying to get myself to quit.

But Todd is committed and making the plans for the runs. I would not have kept going if not for Todd.

We drive out to Mud Bay and arrive just before 8am. It is 4 degrees Celsius. We start running and chatting. It turns out, you have some really great, meaty extended conversations while you’re on a run with someone. It’s a surprising bonus I did not expect from running at all. It also passes the time, distracts from the running, and quiets your thoughts about how much longer you have left or that your body is tired.

Most of the runs we are doing are out and back routes and Mud Bay is the same. 9.5 km in, we pass a bunch of bald eagles sitting on power line poles, turn around, and start heading back. There is a real lift in my spirits every time we hit the turnaround point. We are heading towards the finish line instead of farther away from it!

With about 5 km left, I randomly start getting sharp pains on the inside of my left knee. I try to run differently, pushing my knee to the outside on every step. I try pushing off more with my big toe. It settles down, but then with about 2 km to go, I get a bolt and my left leg almost buckles.

I keep going because we’re so close. I get a little bit of a final wind of energy and we finish the 19km. I can’t believe we did it.

Later that day, I treat myself to one of the greatest gifts imaginable: a foot massage. It is AMAZING. After all this running, it is something akin to a religious experience.

I’m sure that tomorrow I am going to start dreading the 21km we have to do next weekend. But right now, I kind of KNOW I can do 21km. I text Todd, “That was pretty epic today. Proud of us!” He replies, “BOOM!”

The Practice Half Marathon

Todd is going to the Seahawks NFC Championship Game on Sunday. He suggests a pre-dawn run, after which he will drive down to Seattle for the NFC Championships with his son. We’re going to run the real route and full distance so we can mentally steel ourselves for the actual event.

It starts VERY early. I am humbled and impressed by Todd doing this, even though I’m not feeling that way when he picks me up at 6:45 am, in pitch black, with heavy frost covering the ground and a temperature below the freezing mark.

I’ve already been up for an hour preparing.

After past calf cramping and knee tightness, I’ve put compression socks on both my calves and patellar knee bands on both legs below my knees. And I’ve got my bright orange Earn It toque and winter running gloves. Just getting out the f***ing door is a full-time job.

Also… I look like an idiot.

We drive ten minutes to the downtown start of the course and hit the pavement.

There is no one out this early. (Duh!) We’re running beside the ocean, which is dead calm. We can still see the stars sparkling in the clear overhead night sky. I’ve never run in these conditions.

Never this cold. Never this dark. It’s eerie, but also fun.

As is now our usual routine, we run at a pace of about 6 minutes / km, which allows us to pace ourselves for over two hours of running and to be able to chat while we do it. At this pace and level of training, Greg has relaxed his concerns about my heart exploding mid-race.

We have our first gel break at the 5 km mark, and an older guy who was running behind us for a while stops with us to chat, informing us that he’s just returned from Maui, where he did a half-marathon. And he’s planning on running 32 km today as part of his training for the Boston Marathon.

In ONE minute, this guy’s massive humble-bragging has already made me feel like I’m not even doing a real run today… even though it is my first ever half marathon length and the longest run I’ve ever done. Hate him!

On a more positive note, the sun comes up over the ocean as we are running through Stanley Park. It’s spectacular.

It is so cold out, though, that even by the halfway point, I am still wearing my neon orange toque. As always, the turnaround point is magic. Immediately, I start counting down to how long I have left.

With about 4 km left, it’s finally time to remove the toque. As I pull it off, something is off. It weighs a ton. Oh… it’s SOPPING wet with sweat. I could have wrung it out and filled up a small water bottle. SO GROSS!

As we get closer and closer, I know we are going to make it. Suddenly, we hit the Plaza of Nations parking lot and we’ve run 21.1 kms.

A half marathon. Holy s***!

I could barely run 5 km 6 months ago. I got passed by strollers and corn in a 10 km race 4 months ago.

I might be more fit than I’ve ever been in my whole life right now.

Todd and I celebrate and recap the run on the drive back home. I never would have done this if it wasn’t for Todd showing up and pushing me to keep going and I’m so grateful to him as a friend who is going through this experience with me.

That is, until that evening, when the Seattle Seahawks win the NFC Championship game, sending them to the Super Bowl… along with Todd and his son.

I’m going to have to do the race on my own.

F*#&ing Seahawks!

In the next edition… my body attempts an insurrection to stop the damage being inflicted on it. Will I make it to the big race day?

Find out in the final instalment of The Midlife Field Guide, Half Marathon Edition!

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

Hello fellow midlife adventurers!

At first, this experiment is going to seem contradictory.

I have celebrated 2026 so far as a period of “No Measurement.” It’s now June and I still haven’t returned to wearing an Apple Watch, an Oura Ring, or a heart rate monitor. I’m still not posting workouts on Strava. It all continues to feel great.

BUT… especially as I am now firmly in “middle age,” and I know that my body is changing and that a not insignificant number of people around me are discovering serious medical issues, I don’t want to bury my head in the sand and suddenly end up with a health condition that was entirely preventable or manageable.

So I got a barrage of midlife medical testing. I’m so glad I did it, because after a couple of very surprising results, I’m being forced to eat a little bit of crow around not measuring things related to my health.

Here’s how it went down…

My physio friend, Renata Szado, told me about a company called Georgia Healthcare Centre, a private clinic in Vancouver focused on preventive health assessments. Renata offered to introduce me to Ehsan Malaki, the founder. I set up a meeting to find out more and get a tour.

Ehsan used to work in Silicon Valley and it shows. He’s built a company that is focused on prevention instead of reaction, and he’s assembled a team of private healthcare professionals and cutting edge technology to do it.

I told him about the Midlife Field Guide, and wanted to know what tests I should do at this age and stage. Ehsan very kindly offered to give me a ton of tests so that I could share what I learned with all of you in the Midlife Field Guide community.

(Disclosure: Georgia Healthcare Centre provided this assessment to me at no cost so I could write about the experience. They did not pay me, and this piece reflects my own experience and opinions.)

The Body Scan

I arrive at the clinic early morning, with no breakfast or coffee. Not gonna lie, I’m a bit nervous, because at this age, you start wondering if there’s something bad going on inside you that you don’t know about.

First up, the body composition scan. I did a DEXA scan a number of years ago and it was a big contraption that involved lying down on a raising platform while a big scanner moved back and forth across my body.

Here, however, I walk into the room and see this vertical device with a small footprint that looks like one of those scales that can also measure your height. I hop on, grab the handles on the side-rails, and prepare to be there for a while as it scans me. It is over before I know it. The whole process takes about two minutes, and yet, as I will find out, it captured OODLES of data about my body.

The Physical

Next up is the full physical exam with Dr. Payman Nabai. This is decidedly anti-tech. It feels like a throwback to a previous era of seeing a family doctor, when the doctor could take time to ask lots of questions, get to know you, and also do a THOROUGH physical exam. Like… THOROUGH.

It is SO thorough that at one point, it gets awkward and uncomfortable. Dr. Nabai kindly assumes (hopes?) that I am under 50 and when I inform him that I am 54, he regrettably informs me that I might want to consider a prostate exam. I ask him what is recommended. If you’re over 50, the recommendation is that you should get a prostate exam. We both kind of shrug, realize that neither of us really wants to do this, but that it is the right thing to do.

So I curl up in a ball, pull down my pants, and lube up. Thankfully, he is gentle.

As it turns out, I have a slightly enlarged prostate, which is normal for this phase of life. The impact? I can expect occasional difficulty fully emptying my bladder, reduced stream wattage, and more frequent night urination. ✅✅✅

It’s a strange phase of life when you come to accept that you are deteriorating and that some things are not ever going to go back to the way they were in your prime. I don’t really want to imagine what ongoing deterioration of my prostate will mean.

Dr. Nabai and I both clean up, and I am off to the next set of tests.

Eyes, Ears, Lungs

Back into the tech-zone, where I meet Negin, the medical technician. I have three tests done in a relatively small room that on first glance, appears to have no medical testing equipment in it. It’s just an office with a desk and a couple of chairs.

For my vision test, I expect the giant eye-testing machine at the optometrist and I’m surprised when Negin gives me an Oculus Rift to put on. I have a full eye exam done on a VR headset and it is much more like playing an immersive video game than being in a doctor’s office.

Then Negin gives me a tiny tube plugged into her laptop via USB. I blow into it a couple of times and get a full spirometry breathing test in minutes.

Finally, I have a hearing exam, which is done entirely on an iPad with headphones.

All this feels like the medical equivalent of replacing your 1970s hi-fi stereo system and speakers with an iPod and AirPods.

While I definitely have some age-related deterioration, eyes, ears, and spirometry tests turn up nothing worrisome.

The Dietician

I am ushered into another office next door, where I meet Olya Voikin, the team dietician. We have an extended conversation, where she asks me a lot about what I eat and drink, how much I eat and drink, and my general lifestyle.

I learn a TON in a short period of time. Olya instantly recognizes that I am having way too much sugar (thanks, oat milk and Ben & Jerry’s Tonight Dough ice cream!). Sugar is the first of several massive red flags for me.

Olya made me laugh when she told me:

”A Clif bar is 20 grams of sugar. It has that cliffhanger picture on the bar because it’s for somebody doing intense physical activity. It’s not for the regular person sitting in an office.”

On the flip side, I am also not getting enough protein. For my age, height and weight, I should be having somewhere between 100-150g of protein every day. That feels like a LOT, but as we age, our muscles begin to deteriorate. She tells me that not only do we need to eat more protein, we also need to lift more heavy weights more often. (This foreshadows my next red flag…)

So it’s not even mid-morning and I’ve already got a significant lifestyle change on the menu… a menu full of protein and with much less sugar.

Fitness and Mobility

I leave Olya’s office and go to the next door down. Here I meet Dr. Neda Khaledi, the kinesiologist and exercise physiologist, where I get a full fitness and mobility assessment.

Much like the physical, Neda spends a lot of time with me, asking all sorts of questions about my activities, my lifestyle, my past injuries and surgeries, and more. (As I get older, I feel like I could fill a keynote speaking slot with the list of everything that has gone wrong with my body…)

Then Dr. Khaledi takes me through a complete functional movement assessment, which includes a variety of different challenges, from balancing on a single leg to single leg lunges, and from squats while holding a bar above your head to single leg lifts. We wrap with an extended plank and a grip strength test, which end up being the only tests I crushed today. I plank for over 3 minutes (thanks, pilates!) and my grip strength means I should be able to open any tight jar lid for the foreseeable future. BRING ME YOUR STICKY JAM JARS! (Oddly, grip strength is an indicator of longevity because according to research by Harvard Medical School via JTECH Medical, an 11-pound drop in grip strength correlates with a 17% increased risk of dying from heart disease.)

Otherwise, I have some mild issues with an ankle and a shoulder, but nothing major. I’m feeling pretty good about the state of my body at this point!

Dr. Khaledi then walks me through the results from my earlier body composition scan. I am somewhat of a beanpole: I’m 6 feet tall and my weight generally sticks around the 170-175 pound range. The waist on my pants is generally 31 or 32 inches. I have always considered myself pretty trim and healthy. I exercise a lot, play lots of tennis, do weekly pilates and weight training, and even started running (poorly) in 2025. So I expect a full green light and gold star on my body composition scan. I do not get it.

I am SHOCKED.

I am at the high end of normal for fat! I am at the high end of normal for weight. I am at the high end of normal for BMI. My visceral fat is at the high end of normal.

Apparently my body frame masks the fat I’m carrying, which mostly gathers around organs (visceral). This is bad. It turns out “skinny” and “healthy” aren’t the same thing.

To make matters worse and more humiliating, I am way below average for muscle mass. Another red flag!

Dr. Khaledi tells me ”in your age population, you’re at the 20th percentile—maybe 80% of your population has more muscle.”

WTF???

While activities like tennis or running are great for your cardiovascular system, they don’t build muscle. And your muscle starts wasting away at midlife and accelerates as you get older. (Hence the protein issue highlighted by Olya…)

I am 100% going to have to do more strength training coming out of this.

UGH.

The Heart

In the same room, I then have an ECG test, which is a recording of how your heart is working, and a stress test that involves hopping on a treadmill while connected to a bunch of wires. It starts off at a snail’s pace and gradually increases in speed and elevation. You only do the test until you reach 85% of a heart rate threshold. Your heart, blood pressure, and blood oxygen level are all being monitored throughout. I briefly worry about falling off the treadmill connected to all the wires and ripping all the testing equipment down onto the floor, but I stay calm and carry on.

The results of these cardiology tests get sent to Dr. Majid Pourmand, who I meet with later. (Dr. Pourmand is also Instagram-famous - 191k followers!) Yet again, I have an extended, non-rushed conversation with him about my health. After a physical examination, he opens up what looks like a 1990s era laptop, but is actually a portable medical testing device that does an ultrasound of my heart in his office.

The results? A normal ECG, a negative stress test, and a lower-than-average resting heart rate. Dr. Pourmand basically told me to keep doing what I’m doing, which is a huge relief after my body composition surprise.

The Gut Microbiome Shotgun

Ehsan also tells me about two specialized sets of tests that they can conduct, a gut microbiome shotgun test, and genetic testing.

Genetic testing is apparently not for everyone, because it will tell you if you are genetically predisposed to certain types of cancer or other illnesses. Some people want that information and like to know. Some people find it anxiety-inducing to know. I am in the latter camp and decide not to find out.

During COVID, I discovered a small growth on my thyroid and had to wait a few weeks to get a biopsy of it. It was benign, which is great, but I did not sleep well while I was waiting for it. I feel like if I found out I was predisposed to some type of illness and I couldn’t do much about it, I would never sleep or relax, and would likely spend most of my waking hours trying to get AI to find a preventative cure.

However, I do decide to do the gut microbiome test, which will tell me which bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites are living inside me and whether there are any changes I should make to my diet or lifestyle as a result. I have a lot of random night itching that I have never been able to figure out. So much that I basically trim my fingernails down to nothing so I don’t claw myself in my sleep. Maybe this will help me figure out what’s causing it?

So I go home and poop on a swab, put it into a little bottle of liquid, and return it for shipment to a gut microbiome lab for testing.

When I get the results, another shock: my microbiome scored 36.4 out of 100, which they politely file under “Not Good!” Here are the highlights of what was found:

• My good bacteria are running low. One key probiotic strain is almost non-existent.

• I have early signs of antibiotic resistance.

• I have a bacterial signature that basically screams “too much fat, not enough plants.”

As a result, I am going to start ingesting a lot more fermented foods. (Not like RFK Jr and his “ferments” obsession though…)

VO₂ max

A week later, I’m back in Dr. Khaledi’s office. Even though I’m apparently overweight and under-muscled, I still cling to the idea of myself as an athlete. I am curious about the VO₂ max test. VO₂ max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use per minute, per kilo of bodyweight (mL/kg/min), measured at peak effort.

This measurement keeps coming up as a marker for long-term health and as something that you can improve with concerted effort. As someone who had childhood asthma and has trouble with endurance sports, I am worried that this is going to be another big red flag about my midlife health.

I strap on headgear that covers my nose and mouth with a tight seal. It’s like something a deranged orthodontist invented in his basement. Also… I look a LOT like Bane from the Dark Knight and instantly have the urge to start talking in a menacing growl like Tom Hardy. It is a teeny bit claustrophobic, but then again… I’m also pretty brave.

Once everything is connected, I hop on the treadmill.

It starts off with a breezy walking pace. I pass the five minutes of walking by looking out the window and staring out at people watching TV in a neighbouring condo. I hope they don’t look over and see my Bane-like figure observing them and call the police.

At the end of five minutes, Neda asks me for a fatigue level from 1 to 10. I’m at a 1.

Next, we begin a series of stages that last three minutes each. Each stage gets faster and includes an increasing incline on the treadmill.

My fatigue level rises to 2 out of 10.

Then, next stage, a 3.5 out of 10. Next stage, moving to jogging speed, a 6 out of 10.

Faster jogging with increased incline, and I’m at 8 out of 10. By the end of the three minutes, I’m breathing hard and my heart rate is skyrocketing. I look at Neda and decide to stop the test.

First impression? That escalated quickly! I thought I was going to be on the treadmill for 45 minutes or an hour, but the combination of the increasing incline and the speed really hit me hard and fast. I feel like I kinda failed at this test.

However, in a pleasant surprise, my VO₂ max landed at 54.2, which puts me in the 91st percentile for my age (!!!). The childhood-asthma kid who’s terrible at endurance sports is, apparently, fitter than 9 out of 10 men his age. I did not see that coming!

Reflections on a Proactive Approach to Healthcare

What strikes me about my two days of testing is that everyone here has a different perspective relative to the traditional medical system, which primarily deals with medical problems occurring right now. At Georgia Healthcare Centre, though, the team is clearly focused on prevention and longevity. They want to find out what problems might happen or are likely to happen… and address them before they become problems.

It’s the difference between being proactive and reactive. In an ideal world, you’d do both, especially for your health.

And being proactive instead of reactive brings me back to measurement. An Oura Ring and Apple Watch could not have told me about my higher than expected visceral fat, my wimpy lack of muscles, my crappy microbiome, or my overconsumption of sugar and underconsumption of protein.

For my issues, the Oura and Apple Watch were noise, and these tests were true signal.

There is a huge difference between constant measurement and meaningful measurement.

Dr. Nabai nailed it when he said this to me during my physical exam:

I now know what I should worry about, and what I shouldn’t worry about. And at this stage of life, and when I think about what “Future Steve” would counsel me to do, I don’t think I can afford not to make the necessary lifestyle changes.

An unexpectedly big part of the Midlife Field Guide so far has involved committing to doing things that I didn’t really want to do, because they’re either unpleasant (see “running”), giving up something that I enjoy (see “booze” and “phone”), or forcing me to change the way I think (see “no measurement”). And yet, every time I make these changes, I’m very happy I did.

So these medical tests have provided me with the next wave of changes to bring into my life. Sugar reduction. Protein packing. Microbiome rebuilding. Lifting more weights. I’ll report back when I have some results!

How about you? Have you been avoiding a physical health exam? What would you want to know, and what would you not want to know?

One huge caveat to everything I’ve shared here. Georgia Healthcare Centre is a private healthcare company. I live in Canada, where we have one of the better public healthcare systems on the planet. This type of proactive testing is not offered for free to Canadians. I need to acknowledge how very fortunate I am to have been able to get all these tests done, because they are expensive and I’m conscious that not everyone can afford to do them.

Thanks for reading.

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal midlife experiments.
Subscribe for free!

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It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me over here at Midlife Field Guide HQ. There’s been travel mixed with life events that have kept me occupied over the past few months. In fact, to prove the point, I’m actually on a bullet train whipping its way between Tokyo and Kyoto as I type this. Fancy, huh? :)

But there is something I wanted to share with you. An update on me and Suz’s 25th anniversary Fiddler on the Roof–inspired production that’s pleasing me to no end. If you’re new to this adventure, you can read about it here, here, and here.

The big headline that’s tickling me right now is that it’s going well. Really well. Thanks to the help of some amazing writer friends who have kicked our asses in just the right ways, Suz and I have pushed ourselves and have now written something that we’re genuinely proud of. It tells our story, the story of our lives together, woven in somewhat absurdly with the songs of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s certainly not what we imagined when we started this process, but it feels totally right. And the strangest thing is that when we stand back and look at what we’ve written, it actually feels like a “show.”

My previous collaborations with Suz include some not-small-at-all things, like raising a couple of kids and making a home. These were all creative projects, but this is the first time we’ve been true creative collaborators on a project like this. She’s helped me with my writing many times — her editing of each and every Substack post I write has pushed me to be far more honest in my writing than I ever imagined I would be, something I’m grateful for every time she sits down, reads my work, and points out my blind spots.

And, frankly, I have a few blind spots.

In my twenties, fresh into my career, I received feedback from an employer that I had this quirk: the two of us would have a conversation, we’d agree on something, and then I’d go off and do it my own way anyway. I remember telling my mother about this feedback, and she could totally relate. Apparently, parenting me was very much the same experience.

I assumed that co-writing the script for our anniversary musical event would follow the same pattern. The two of us would discuss, and then I’d take the lead and go off and figure the thing out. And while it’s true I’d never written a play before, I had written plenty of scripts for documentaries and podcasts, so out of the two of us, I arrogantly assumed I was going to take the lead.

It was during one of our first writing sessions that my assumptions were proven totally wrong. We were away for a weekend and on the first night we spent time roughly sketching out the show. We weren’t going to be able to continue the next day because Suz had an online meeting she needed to attend. I told her no problem, I’d carry on without her.

When I told her that, she looked hurt. She replied, “Weren’t we supposed to be writing this together?”

I was taken aback. What did she mean I couldn’t just charge ahead and do it myself? How else were we going to get this done? But, of course, she was right. This was our project to do together. Just like raising kids, it needed to be a true collaboration in order to work. At that moment, I realized that I couldn’t just do the thing I always do and assume that I would be able to simply take control.

And so we started to find ways to truly collaborate. As we pitched ideas back and forth, there was often laughter and ease, and sometimes our sensibilities would bump up against each other and tension would ensue. There were times when Suz would want to stop and workshop a scene until we felt thoroughly done, and in those moments there were parts of me that would flare up with a desire to charge ahead. I’d say, “Let’s figure it out later!” even if I wasn’t exactly sure when “later” was going to be.

The benefit of doing this with someone I’ve chosen to share my life with is that we were able to use the same tools that we use in our relationship to resolve our creative conflicts. When conflicts came up in our writing process, as opposed to brushing them off we took the time to debrief them with care and intention — and not surprisingly, the conflict had nothing to do with the writing, and everything to do with long-standing dynamics that we both carry. It’s a process that has not only made us better writing partners, but better partners as a whole. These conflicts and resolutions have opened up another avenue for dialogue between us, and we’ve been able to unearth some pretty powerful behaviors that we both carry and recognize for their weaknesses as well as their beauty.

Coming face to face with my old patterns, not listening, assuming that I could always just barrel ahead, has made me better in other parts of my life too. I see these patterns clearly now. I recognize my strengths and my limitations. And because of what I am learning about myself from this Fiddler project, I’ve been able to sharpen my capacity to listen and to honour other people’s unique gifts.

I look at the script now and am proud to say that it truly reflects both of our sensibilities. It’s playful, it’s honest and it’s uniquely us. There is a wisdom and ease in the writing that has been achieved through living decades of a life together.

There was a moment a couple of weeks ago while Suz and I were lying in bed, talking through ideas for the show. I was tired and wanted to go to sleep, but she was in the flow state and wanted to keep going. At one point she got so excited she literally bolted up out of bed and started pitching me ideas right then and there from the foot of the bed, wildly demonstrating her points through exaggerated arm gestures. I was so attracted to her in that moment, in a way that went beyond anything physical. It was the sight of her lit up. Passionate. Alive with something we are making, together.

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Last weekend, I went for a bike ride that no longer exists.

It’s actually been a while since my last post here, when I wrote about the end of my month of “no measurement” and shared my “Traffic Light Dashboard” for how I want to measure my life going forward.

Why I Haven’t Written In A While

The month of no measurement was more of a revelation than I expected it to be. I knew going into it that I had a strong desire to take all the devices that tracked me, gave me data, and scored me and hurl them all into the ocean. I didn’t expect that actually doing it would be such a relief.

I also didn’t expect that it would make me start to question why I was doing many things in my life, including the Midlife Field Guide.

Most of us live in a world where we’re taught to try hard to be successful, to achieve lofty goals, and to ‘win’ at whatever is important in our lives. And yet there’s never a finish line. There is only more. And more. And more.

I’ve (sadly) been hard-wired in “achievement mode” as long as I can remember, but I’ve never properly stepped back to question why.

Abandoning the scoreboards that I had paid a lot of attention to (sleep, health, social media, Substack numbers, etc) felt like a giant weight lifted off my chest. I don’t want to go full tin-foil hat here, but taking a break from everything really gave me clarity around how much we are all being programmed, conditioned, guilted, and manipulated into doing things that are not in our own best interest.

It made me deeply rethink the notions of success and achievement.

• What am I doing because other companies or people have made me think I should do it?

• What am I doing because it feels like I should be ‘successful’ at it?

• What am I doing because I actually want to do it and enjoy doing it?

One of the hardest things I thought about was this Midlife Field Guide. I got into my head. I worried about the origin of the project, which began with the dream of building something big that might be my ‘next chapter’ career-wise.

I worried that the experiments were making me seem like a weirdo or one of those insufferable longevity optimizers who secretly just want to sell you supplements.

I was worried that I was doing it in public for attention or ego or to show the world that I had not disappeared, and was still doing unconventional creative work.

Worst of all, I worried that the entire premise of this project was off-base.

The description at the top of every post includes this phrase: “Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?” The more I thought about this wording, the more I worried that I was yet again trying to ‘achieve’ and be ‘successful,’ this time at midlife.

At the heart of all of this lies the cliched reality show question: am I here for the right reasons?

The Revelation on Wheels

Last weekend, my wife Debbie suggested that she and I go on a bike ride and grab a bite to eat. It was a shockingly nice spring day here in Vancouver and it instantly felt like a great idea. So we dusted off our bikes after a winter in the garage, pumped up the tires, and headed out.

I was missing several things. I left without an Apple Watch, an Oura ring, or anything to connect to Strava. (Strava is a popular social network for athletic endeavours, mostly used for publicly posting runs and bike rides.)

I felt a bit naked pedalling off down the road without all my stuff.

Usually, when I go out for a bike ride with my regular group of guys (the “Dad Squad” bike gang), we stick to a few tried and true routes that are popular with cyclists. On this ride with Debbie, though, we were heading to a destination neither of us had been to before. It was not a standard bike route, so we stopped periodically to make sure we knew where we were going.

We ended up cruising down a variety of residential streets, going pretty slowly and talking as we biked. For a stretch, we were riding through a neighbourhood that we hadn’t ever spent much time in, and we were looking at all the unusual home designs and noting that everything looked like a time capsule to the 70s or 80s. The birds were chirping, celebrating the arrival of spring.

And that’s when it hit me.

I felt like a kid riding his bike around the neighbourhood for the first time… since the 70s or 80s. We were just riding our bikes… for fun.

We weren’t tracking our routes or segments. We weren’t timing our rides or measuring the distance we were riding. We weren’t going to post the ride publicly for others to see. We weren’t comparing ourselves to other cyclist who have ridden in this neighbourhood.

We were just riding. And it was liberating. I felt like Elliott in E.T. more than a M.A.M.L. (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra).

I often feel a bit of dread about going on a bike ride, often because of all the things that were not on this ride: timing, tracking, measurement, and public posting. On a “normal” bike ride, the ride ends with uploading it to Strava, tagging the people you rode with, and checking to see if you hit any personal bests on segments of your ride. And then you get to watch “kudos” dropped on your ride from other people ostensibly celebrating your amazing feat of athleticism.

How did I get to the point where going for a bike ride wasn’t really about the fun of riding a bike, but was about ‘how well’ I rode a bike? Or how I compared to other cyclists?

Just riding a bike for the simple joy of riding a bike was a lot more fun and meaningful than setting a new PR racing around Stanley Park.

There’s a common refrain among people who use Strava—if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. I’m sure it was some marketing genius at the company who came up with this line, but I’ve heard it from so many people, most often as peer pressure to get others to join and post their activities. I’m not trying to slam Strava, and I know it’s a useful product if you’re genuinely training for a particular event or performance target, but a better version for me right now is this:

“If it’s not on Strava, it’s probably more fun than if it was.”

Since that ride with Debbie, I’ve dusted off a cruiser bike that has been sitting unused in our garage for years. I’ve started doing errands and little rides on a bike built not for racing, but for… cruising around. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom here in Vancouver and it’s been glorious.

There is magic in a bike ride that ceases to exist as soon as it is done.

Stop Managing, Start Living

The most important insight out of all of this for me has been that I have regularly turned fun activities into a means to an end. I’ve felt like whatever I put my time and energy into has to end up turning into something else: success, achievement, status, scoreboards, followers, revenue, optimal health, and whatever else you can think of.

Living midlife, or any other stage of life, with a sense of urgency to “figure it out” or “optimize” it so that you’re not “wasting” your precious time feels foolish and short-sighted. It’s often at the expense of enjoying the real-time life that you are living right now.

I am trying to shift from “figuring out” midlife to embracing midlife. I want to stop optimizing and measuring what matters and instead deepen my questioning and understanding of what really matters.

A Shift In The Midlife Field Guide

Oddly, the bike ride answered my ongoing questions about the Midlife Field Guide. I’ve framed the Midlife Field Guide as a project, but my life is not a project. I viewed the experiments as a means to an end, as if doing enough of them would lead me to all the answers I’ve been looking for, and getting a gold star in Midlife Studies.

But the bike ride reminded me about why I wanted to do the Midlife Field Guide in the first place—I was excited about it and it made my life more interesting.

So, I want to keep going with the Midlife Field Guide, but with a shift. I’d now just like to focus on experiencing each experiment fully instead of figuring out “The Ultimate, Integrated Midlife Framework” (TM).

I don’t want to “win” midlife or be “successful” at midlife. I’d just like to be the author of my own midlife story and enjoy this phase of life while I’m in it.

Life is to be lived, not managed and measured.

If this resonates with you, here are a few prompts to go a little deeper:

• Do you have a version of Strava in your life?

• Have any of your fun hobbies turned into performance?

• What are you doing just for fun?

Thanks for reading this edition.

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

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Hello Midlifers!

In January, I conducted an experiment: Stop measuring everything in my life. No Apple Watch. No Oura Ring. No step counts, sleep scores, or productivity metrics.

Now the month is over. Here’s what happened...

My Month of No Measurement

Not measuring anything for an entire month generated deep concern from several of my apps, who feared something catastrophic had happened to me, with my health declining precipitously, my steps reduced to zero, and no sleep whatsoever.

I loved getting these notifications.

It made me feel like I’m some sort of rebel. “I’m doing ALL SORTS OF STUFF, but I’m not giving you any data about it! My life and my activities are suddenly a SECRET!”

(It’s a secret to me, too.)

I don’t really know how I slept in January.

I don’t know how many days I closed my rings, hit 10,000 steps, or was “ready.”

I don’t know whether I gained or lost followers on my social media accounts.

And you know what? It feels great. Turns out that nothing happens when you stop measuring. Except for relief. It’s like a big exhale. Whew! It’s genuinely been a big release of stress and daily metrics-generated anxiety that I did not know I was carrying. I don’t have to do this anymore. I can just live my life and pay attention to how I actually feel.

Do I feel hungry? Eat.

Do I feel tired? Sleep.

Do I feel brain fog? Stop working.

On January 23, I even cancelled my monthly Oura ring subscription. I very quickly realized that I don’t miss the daily health dashboard. It’s a great product, but I just don’t want to be tracked or measured anymore, or scored for my sleep.

I decided to listen to my body instead of an app.

And I will see a doctor for check-ups and anytime anything feels off.

I will confess that I DO know our subscriber numbers on Substack, but I have an excuse: if you want to write or publish a newsletter, the stats are literally at the top of the writing home page. I hadn’t realized it before, but almost the full space above the fold on the Substack dashboard is filled with… growth metrics. The message is clear—as a writer, your primary focus should be on more people and more views.

Up and to the right!

Much like the insights generated by my 5-Week Phone Fight, I have come to realize how much I am being shaped by the data collected about me and the scoreboards and dashboards that I’m presented with.

‘ENOUGH!’ to ‘Never Enough!’

It’s not just Substack. Every dashboard is about more. More growth, more optimization, more efficiency.

The data and the scoreboards constantly tell me that I am “never enough.” I’m never fit or healthy enough, productive enough, popular enough, wealthy enough, or successful enough. Oh, and my posts aren’t clickable, openable or shareable enough.

And the only solution is MORE. Forever.

‘Never enough’ hit me hard at the end of 2025. I felt like a failure, and I got myself into a pretty deep funk. My book was not a runaway best-seller. My keynote speaking died down after the mania of my book launch. As you can tell from the graph above, the Midlife Field Guide grew consistently, but there has been no hockey-stick growth curve yet.

Scoreboards almost always tell you how you’re doing relative to everyone else. And with pretty much everything on the planet, almost no one is the best at something. There is always someone who’s healthier, wealthier, smarter, more talented, more attractive… you name it.

I felt like a failure because at the end of the year, my feeds were filled with celebrations of how many books other people have sold, how many speeches other people gave in 2025, how big other people’s follower counts are, and other markers of success worth sharing publicly. It’s easy to fall prey to comparing yourself to impossible standards that make you miserable.

I let other people’s scoreboards affect my self-worth and my mood. With some time and reflection, I see things very differently.

I love my book. I’m hugely proud of it. And the goal was never to be a best-seller. It was to make the best book I possibly could for a very specific group of people, and I believe I did that.

I had a GREAT time giving talks in Copenhagen, New York City, Athens, Chicago, Toronto, and Vancouver last year. I loved every engagement, and I’m excited to do more. Plus, I probably wouldn’t even be happy living in hotels as a road warrior speaking all the time.

And so what if the Midlife Field Guide hasn’t gone viral, because it has changed my life for the better in so many ways. I have heard so much positive feedback from people in this community who are making changes in their own lives because of it. People starting phone detoxes, extended breaks from alcohol, and avoiding scoreboards as a result of the writing Geoff and I are doing here.

Until I stopped measuring, it was hard to realize how much ‘never enough’ has shaped me. Everything has become a competition, and we only validate the winners.

These are the ways “never enough” dashboards impact me:

• Anxiety: Checking scores created a daily cycle of stress I didn’t realize I was carrying

• Shame: More often than not, the data made me feel bad about myself

• Comparison: Every metric compares me to others—including extreme outliers I’ll never (or should) compete with

• Addiction: Gamification (streaks, challenges, badges) keep me checking obsessively

• Control: These companies are shaping my decisions and my life with their strategic dashboard choices.

Scoreboards Make Everything a Means to an End

I’m not suggesting all measurement is bad. Medical testing, structural testing on engineering projects, safety testing standards on cars—these are all essential.

However, if something really matters to us personally, measurement kills the magic.

For me, I love creating things. I love writing, producing audio and video shows, and performing. I also love playing sports. When I pay attention to follower counts or growth rates or revenue from my personal creative work, or judge my sports activities against everyone else, those activities cease to be things I do for fun.

They become a means to an end.

And this month, I realized I’ve been treating too many things I love as a means to an end.

ENOUGH!

Check Your Scoreboards

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about the ideas in my book, encouraging readers to “Pay Attention to What You Pay Attention To,” because whatever we pay attention to shapes how we spend our lives.

In 2026, I have a new, adjacent insight: pay attention to the scoreboards you pay attention to. The scoreboards, dashboards, and data you measure will indeed shape your decisions and your life.

Here’s an interesting exercise:

• Visit each of the apps, dashboards, and scoreboards that collects data about you

• What choices have the designers made about which behaviours are being rewarded?

• How many of these dashboards are designed to:

  • Get you to keep checking them daily, or even more frequently, likely for their benefit more than yours?

  • Compare your data to other people, making you feel worse about yourself?

  • Encourage never-ending growth, making you feel like you are never enough?

• How valuable are the insights generated?

• Which ones are beneficial for you? Which ones are beneficial to the companies that created the dashboards?

I Want Fewer Experts and More Coaches.

It’s not just the data that has been a negative influence in my life. It’s also the cultural narrative of success and achievement. No matter what dashboard you are paying attention to, there is a guru or celebrated expert who will tell you how to “win.”

And that is where we come full circle back to where this whole experiment started, with listening to Arthur C. Brooks on the Tim Ferriss podcast and realizing that the advice being given was completely unrealistic for an average person.

At this stage of my life, I am tired of listening to “experts” with their own fountain-of-youth protocols telling me what I need to do.

It’s all made me wonder, why am I doing what I’m doing? And what truly matters?

I am coming away from a month without metrics with a very unusual conclusion.

I’m less interested in advice right now and more drawn to questions. I want fewer experts and more coaches.

The difference? Experts give you answers. Coaches help you find your own.

I know many fantastic coaches and therapists, and they all have one thing in common: they are curious instead of certain. They ask questions instead of prescribing solutions.

Michael Bungay-Stanier’s category-defining book, The Coaching Habit, is launching a special 10th anniversary edition and I highly recommend it. And maybe, when it comes to data, scoreboards, and dashboards, we can find clarity by using one of MBS’s essential questions: “What do I want?”

Once we know what we actually want, then we can decide whether the things we’re tracking and measuring are helping or hurting.

Designing My Own Dashboard

So at the end of my metrics-free month, I am left wondering about what role measurement should play in my life. And that got me thinking about my podcasting days at Pacific Content. Our CFO, Rob Leadley, had a high-level dashboard that included, among others, the following questions:

• Am I loving my work?

• Am I making good money?

• Am I loving my life?

The scores for each question were traffic light colours: green, yellow, or red.

🟢🟡🔴

Nothing else.

Green meant everything is great. Nothing needed. Yellow was a warning, but nothing urgent. Worth paying attention to and discussing how to get it back to green. Red was an urgent problem. Red meant we needed to talk about it immediately and craft a concrete plan. If something was yellow or red, we could access and dig deep into the data, but it was a conscious choice.

It was simple and very effective.

I am going to apply Rob’s thinking to my own dashboard. None of the things I have considered are quantitative. If something is going to shape my behaviour, and therefore my life, these are the factors I’m going to consider:

• Am I spending quality time with good humans?

• Am I making healthy choices (without becoming obsessive about it)?

• Am I having fun?

• Am I making a difference?

• Am I learning, growing, and staying curious?

• Am I loving my life?

Green. Yellow. Red.

🟢🟡🔴

I think that’s enough for me.

Going forward, I have no plans to resume wearing my Apple Watch or Oura ring. I have no interest in regularly checking follower counts, growth metrics, or open rates.

I’m going to use Rob’s 🟢🟡🔴 idea and my own intuition to guide my decisions and behaviour.

And I’m going to keep asking more coach-like questions (What do I really want?) and try to refrain from offering unsolicited advice or solutions to others 🤪

(If you’re looking for some terrific coaches to follow or work with, check out Peter Reek, Natalie Ruskin, Andrea Rathborne, Jen Moroz, and Michael Bungay-Stanier.)

Are there any dashboards you’ve started questioning? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading,

Steve

(P.S. Since sending this post out via email, I’ve had many people tell they would like this basic dashboard to exist… so I built it! Let me know what you think if you decide to give it a try! https://trafficlight.midlifefieldguide.com/ )

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

I have a complicated relationship to dancing.

I remember the first time I really let loose and danced. Sure, I had moved my body to music before this, but this was the first time I felt immersed in it.

I was thirteen years old at a friend’s backyard birthday party. He had dragged his bulky stereo system outside, and a gaggle of preteens had gathered around it, moving to the best that 80s pop had to offer us.

It was nighttime, with very low lighting. Something about the darkness helped me feel less self-conscious and I found myself moving to the beat in a way I never had before. I felt free, feeling the music in my body and then letting myself go with it. Even now, those memories carry a sense of liberation.

The next day, I told a friend about it. About how free I had felt and how much fun I’d had. Her response would linger longer than I expected.

“You know,” she said, “you dance funny.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You didn’t once move your hips.”

It’s one of those moments that may have been intended as constructive criticism, or at least as constructive as a thirteen-year-old can manage, but it certainly didn’t land that way. The fact that I remember that conversation so clearly tells me how impactful it was. It was deflating. From that point on whenever I dance, I am deeply self-conscious, particularly about whether or not I am moving my hips.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about trying things that I hate. After decades of being immersed in a story about how much I hate yoga, I went to a yoga class. And you know what? I didn’t hate it. I also shared that I’m traditionally not a joiner. Going to a one-off yoga class is one thing, but signing up for something that requires showing up every week is something else entirely.

So a few months ago, when my wife and I started imagining something fun we could do together as a couple, a dance class was not high on my list. But given my current experiment of challenging the things I think I hate, I was willing to try. A few nights later, we were browsing the website of a dance studio near our house.

I had walked past this studio countless times while walking my dog at night, but I had never been inside. My eyes were always drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. At night, they turned the studio into a kind of dance class fishbowl, where anyone passing by could see exactly what was happening inside the brightly lit rooms. How would I feel being one of the dancers on display? I wasn’t sure. But the convenience of the studio outweighed my fear of public awkwardness.

The studio offers many styles of dance classes, but aside from salsa, I hadn’t heard of any of them. After some Googling, we signed up for a Bachata class because, according to Google, Bachata is good for beginners, easier to learn than salsa, and generally considered sexier. All of which sounded great to me. 🙂

A few weeks later, we were taking off our boots, slipping on our running shoes, and walking into the studio. The giant street-facing windows mercifully had their shades drawn. I was quietly relieved.

The instructor, a trim and friendly man in his fifties, had us line up facing the mirror and showed us a few very basic steps. Three steps to the left and a tap. Three steps to the right and a tap. I fixated on the instructor’s hips, which flowed easily, and then on my own reflection, which did not. I glanced around and saw that I was not alone in my clunkiness.

With the instructor’s encouragement, we learned a few more steps on our own and then partnered up. Bachata is a traditionally gendered dance with clearly defined leader and follower roles. We were not expected to identify in any traditionally gendered way, but still there needed to be a lead and a follow. I was assigned the traditional lead role, and my wife explored the role of follower.

As the class went on, we began rotating partners. It felt good to dance with people who were clearly much more experienced at this dance form than I was, as well as some who, like me, were beginners. With practice, I felt competent with beginner movements and connected to my body. It simply felt good to move. When the class ended, I was surprised that I was now looking forward to next week.

During the next week, I practiced the steps we had learned at home. It was still a very self-conscious process. I stood in front of the mirror staring at my hips as I counted each step carefully, making sure everything was perfect. By the time the next class rolled around, I was ready.

We learned more steps in the second class and danced with our partners and others from the group. Bachata still felt foreign to me, but I was starting to understand the basics. Even when I couldn’t nail the moves, I at least knew what I was doing wrong. That week I went home and practiced again, counting carefully and making sure my feet matched the numbers in my head.

By the end of the third class, I was feeling pretty good about my Bachata skills. I wasn’t the best in the room, but I also wasn’t the worst. As my wife and I walked home, I shared my growing confidence. She listened and then said, “I’m glad you’re feeling that way, but what I’d really love to see is Bachata Geoff.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. She explained that I was dancing in a very self-conscious way, and that she would love to see me stop trying to dance perfectly and actually embody the movements.

I was suddenly back in that backyard at thirteen. I had felt free in my body, only to be told I was doing it “wrong”. Once again, in a moment where I thought everything was connecting for me, rather than praise, I was being told that I was a bad dancer.

I replayed that conversation in my head all week. Why would she say that? With only one class left in our month of Bachata, I was not looking forward to going back.

On Tuesday night, we tied our boots anyway and headed up the street with a dark cloud hanging over me. Her comment was still very much echoing in my head.

When we arrived, I noticed something new. This time, the shades covering the large street-facing windows were raised, exposing our dancing to anyone passing by. “Great, now everyone can see what a terrible Bachata dancer I am,” I thought. But the class was only an hour long, and it was our last one. Once it was over, I never had to take another Bachata class in my life. So I resigned myself to just getting through it.

By this point, we had learned all the basic movements, and this class was about stringing them together. After a quick review, the instructor played music and called out patterns. No matter who I danced with, my wife or anyone else, I felt stiff and wooden. Where was “Bachata Geoff”? Maybe all those comments were right. Maybe I really was a bad dancer.

And then something shifted. I realized that I didn’t need to do this. I chose to do this. And whether I ever danced Bachata perfectly actually didn’t matter.

I began to experience the negative voices in my head differently, questioning the way I had first interpreted them. Was being told I didn’t move my hips actually helpful? Would moving from my hips help me drop more fully into the flow of the dance? And maybe finding “Bachata Geoff” was actually an invitation to enter into a state where my body could respond to the music, rather than simply moving robotically, counting steps, and chasing perfection.

As we rotated partners, I stopped comparing myself to others. I focused on the music and the sensation of movement. I may not have executed the steps exactly as taught, but it didn’t matter. I was leading, and my partners, including my wife, were happy to follow. It felt freeing.

By the end of the class, I felt good. I wasn’t suddenly a great dancer, but I was present in my body, moving without overthinking every step. I had shown up, stayed with the discomfort, and let myself be in the experience. With the windows open, anyone passing by could see my wife and I moving freely across the dance floor and I welcomed it.

Beyond the classes, I haven’t yet tested my Bachata skills in the wild, and I’m not sure if I ever will. But being challenged to find “Bachata Geoff” was transformational. It was an invitation to fully embody whatever practice I am engaged in. To let it move through my body, into my heart, and out into the rest of my life.

Testing the stories I carry about the things I think I hate, or think I’m no good at, has opened me up in unexpected ways. Are there more Geoff’s living dormant inside me waiting to be discovered? Stay tuned…

XOXOXO,

Geoff

Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
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Hello Midlifers,

Welcome to the final instalment of my stand-up comedy experiment: The Live Showcase!

(In case you missed the first two parts, I am attempting to overcome past demons that have convinced me I’m not funny. I’ve been doing a stand-up comedy course… with my 23-year-old daughter, taught by professional comic Katie-Ellen Humphries. So far, it’s been nerve-wracking, joyful, and a source of immense parental pride.)

We’ve done a crash course in comedy: four weeks of classes to develop five minutes of original material. The grand finale of the course is a student showcase in front of a live audience at Chill X Studio in Vancouver.

Will either of us choke, blank, or bomb? Can I exorcise my comedy demons on stage?

Here’s how it went down…

Anxiety Comparison: Improv vs Standup

I have not been this nervous in a LONG time. And that is surprising to me.

When I was younger, I performed improv weekly… for years. And you would think that going up on stage with NOTHING planned planned must be more anxiety-inducing than going up with fully scripted material, but for me, the opposite is true.

With improv, the audience knows you have nothing planned in advance. It’s a high-wire act with no net, so expectations are set appropriately. Improv is often scene-based, where a story unfolds on stage, and audiences are happy to see where it goes without requiring gut-busting laughs all the time. And when you are funny in improv, it’s almost like you’ve pulled off a real-time magic trick, so the laughs are generally pretty big.

Stand-up is different. Audiences are showing up expecting to laugh A LOT. They know that writing and rehearsal have usually been done. They know that every word has been deliberately chosen to generate laughs. And because everything you’ve prepared leads to a punchline, it’s very, very clear when and where audiences are supposed to laugh, and it’s very, very obvious when they don’t do it.

Plus, you’re up there all alone. In improv, if things aren’t going well or you’re having an off night, you’ve got a whole team of others to support you and bring a dead scene back to life. If you’re tanking doing stand-up, you kind of have to keep trudging through your material and hope it gets better.

Bottom line—it is much easier to bomb in stand-up than in improv.

So yeah, my mind is filled with worry about bombing in front of a live audience. Or forgetting my material.

Parental Nerves

I’m not just nervous about me, though. As a dad, I’m also nervous about Cedar performing live. I imagine how confidence-shattering it would be to fall apart on stage in front of an audience and REALLY hope her first time doing this is a positive one. This could be an evening of celebration and empowerment, or an evening of embarrassment and self-judgment.

A Week of Panicky Preparation

Between our last class and live show, Cedar and I spend a lot of time preparing our sets.

We huddle around the kitchen table, swapping out words, trying different turns of phrase, and riffing on alternate punchlines. I am very conscious that I haven’t spent such extended time doing something creative with Cedar since she was much younger, and I’m savouring it.

We both feel the pressure of the showcase, and we are trying to keep busy making improvements to our material to keep our nerves at bay. Cedar has added a few gems to her set about her ex-boyfriend, including a new punchline to her bit about getting a call from him in jail. I can’t wait to hear all this in front of an audience.

On the day of the show, we awkwardly rehearse in front of each other in the living room several times. For me, this is about burning the material into my mind and proving to myself that I can do the whole thing without any notes. I hope I can get it to the point where I know the material so well that I can focus on the audience and being reactive. At this point, I feel like we could each deliver each other’s sets because we know them so well!

Cedar and I talk about hitting certain words, pausing for effect at certain points, and a few other aspects around delivery. I am having a lot of fun doing this creative work with my daughter and I’m very aware of how unusual and special these moments are.

Soon, it’s time to leave the house. I am doubly nervous. I’m nervous that I’m going to bomb. And, as a dad, I’m nervous about Cedar’s performance, too. I REALLY hope it all goes well. #anxiety

It’s Showtime!

We arrive at the venue, and it’s no longer the bright and cheery class environment. The lights are down, music is playing, and there are about 60 chairs lined up for the audience. The comedians gather side-stage, and it’s hard to hide that we are all extremely anxious. It’s also clear that everyone is pulling for each other to do well tonight—I love the camaraderie of this group and how kind everyone is, despite having only known each other for a month.

Soon, audience members start arriving. Seats get filled. Cedar and I say hi to our family members and try to be social, despite our stomachs being filled with butterflies and our brains being filled with thoughts about remembering our material. There are several surprise arrivals, friends who saw the posts on social media and have showed up to support Cedar and me tonight. Heartwarming… and higher stakes to not bomb!

Before long, the house is packed and standing room only. Katie-Ellen gives us a pre-show pep talk and tells us her job is to get this crowd fully primed to bust a gut for each of us. It’s a great confidence booster! She heads up to start the show, and she delivers. She brings so much energy and charisma, and it’s clear that the crowd is here to have a good time and laugh.

Our first few classmates hit the stage, and they are great! I am mildly ashamed to admit that I have a hard time fully focusing on each set, because in my mind, I am panicking about remembering my own material and nervously hoping Cedar does well. I lean into the enjoying the comedy… and then drift back into worrying mode.

Suddenly, it’s Cedar’s turn. I give her a big hug, tell her to crush it, and she’s off to the stage and walks into the spotlight.

Cedar’s Performance

For me, as a dad, it’s like time slows down as soon as Cedar gets on stage.

I really want her to nail her set after all the preparation and hard work she has put into this class.

Early on, it is clear that she has won over the audience. They are starting to laugh before she even gets to her punchlines. When she hits the first big joke, about her graffiti artist boyfriend not being Banksy, but just being a d*ck who writes the word “Benzo” on bus stops, the room fills with laughter.

It is such a confidence booster for Cedar to get this first big collective laugh, and I can see her relax and lean into enjoying the rest of the set. Side-stage, I relax, too. She’s not only got this, she’s nailing it.

She wraps up a bit about her boyfriend calling her from jail with a new punchline, and again, huge laughs. You can hear people clapping as they are laughing!

She moves into her own naivete when her boyfriend’s parole officer suggests he is unsuited to work that involves being around other humans, and she thinks it just means he’s an introvert. Again, huge laughs!

At this point, Cedar is smiling and laughing on stage herself as she delivers the material. I can’t even tell you what an amazing experience this is for me, watching your daughter own the stage, with full support of the crowd, and having a great time doing it. My heart was bursting.

She cruises through the rest of her set with ease. The crowd cheers at the end when she shares that she is no longer dating this dude, and then she drops her closing punchline, which gets a final huge laugh.

Triumph!

She not only did it, she killed it.

She comes off the stage to huge high fives and hugs from her classmates. I give her a big hug. She is beaming.

I am in awe.

If you’d like to check it out yourself, here is Cedar’s full standup set:

Stepping Into The Spotlight

Quickly, I am back in panic mode about my own upcoming visit to the stage. A couple of our classmates are between Cedar and I, so I have more time to ruminate about things like:

• What if I bomb?

• Will I be able to be fully celebratory for Cedar if I’m personally crushed by bombing my own routine?

• What if I forget my material? What if I forget my material? What if I forget my material?

I briefly forget my opening and have to genuinely focus to remember how to start this thing that I’ve practiced dozens of times.

It’s a blur. Suddenly, Katie-Ellen is up on stage calling my name, and I’m up on the stage.

I take out the mic, put the stand at the back of the stage as we’ve all been trained to do, and try out a new, more personalized opening to the set based on Katie-Ellen’s recommendation. Instead of a “cold open” into a joke, I start by informing the audience that they are looking at my first-ever beard. Instant cheers and clapping! This is a great confidence boost off the top and I’m already grateful to Katie-Ellen for her advice and guidance.

Early on, I feel like I’m talking too fast and rushing through some of the lines, shutting down some of the audience reaction too quickly. I try to listen for reaction, pause, and resume as it’s dying. I get my first laugh on a Jason Momoa punchline about my beard. It feels good to hear big laughs!

I move into a dark Ernest Hemingway beard roast and get a mixture of laughs and groans, reminiscent of my Anthony Jeselnik-style joke that bombed in the class. I’m honestly okay with this because I like this joke, it’s my sense of humour, and it doesn’t feel like a “dad joke” to me. Still, I hope I haven’t lost the good vibes by delivering this one!

Needless to say, delivering your set on a stage, in a spotlight, to about 60 people is very different than doing it for Cedar in our living room. You can’t really see people because of the light in your eyes and because everyone else is in the dark, but I still try to move my eyes around the room and see individual people as I deliver the material.

I try out a new bit about how my external appearance hides the stupidity of what is going on in my brain with the analogy of a fancy leather briefcase… filled with crayon drawings of monsters and poop. It works!

I’m honestly feeling pretty good and much more comfortable and in the moment that I thought I would. There are real, honest-to-God laughs from the audience and, not gonna lie, it is a huge relief that allows me to relax and enjoy being up here on stage.

I go through some jokes about how the beard makes me look more dangerous, which includes a couple of bits of getting unmanly prison tattoos. In hindsight, I have a little tag at the end of one of them about intimidating people in the prison yard and gym lockerrooms that I should have cut—the original punchline landed and the tag kind of diluted it.

As I move through the rest of the set, some jokes land better than others, but it’s all happening so quickly that I just keep trucking along and enjoying the experience. Before I know it, I’m coming to the closing section. I tell a somewhat gross joke about injuring my wrist so badly that I required reconstructive surgery (which goes over shockingly well!), move into the betting pool my kids have about my sexuality, and wrap with one more punchline that goes over well. (You can check out the video below for the actual jokes…)

Wow.

Didn’t blank.

Didn’t bomb.

Felt comfortable on stage.

Had FUN doing it.

I return back to side-stage and high-five with Cedar. We both watch the last two of our classmates perform and they do a terrific job.

The night could not possibly have gone much better. I can’t believe it!

And even though I am mildly terrified to share this, here is my full standup set from the live showcase:

The Gift of This Comedy Class Wasn’t About Being Funny

After the show is over, Cedar is swarmed by friends and family, celebrating her performance. (I get lots of very nice feedback, too, but I am just soaking up Cedar’s triumph.)

Our family heads out for a post-show ice cream and recaps all the highlights of the night. Cedar knows she killed it on stage tonight and I can feel the amazing energy radiating from her, knowing she has done something really scary and delivered the goods. It is really special.

I have grown so much doing this course, from watching a room full strangers be vulnerable and transform into hilarious comedians in a month, to seeing all of us discover our own unique voices, and from rediscovering my confidence on stage to seeing my daughter find hers for the first time.

There are three whopper insights that I’m going to take away from all this, though.

Whopper Insight #1: The ‘Am I Funny?’ Verdict

I got an answer to question that was the impetus for this experiment: can I be funny, or was that TV executive right that I’ll never be funny. I feel like I proved to myself that I can still be funny, even at age 53. I didn’t embarrass myself. I got lots of laughs. And I had fun doing it.

So I'd like to keep doing comedy. Maybe open mic nights with Cedar? For fun. Because I genuinely enjoy the process of writing and performing.

That's enough.

Whopper Insight #2: The Surprising Empty Nest Magic

As this is the Midlife Field Guide and all, midlife is a weird and uncomfortable time to be a parent. When your kids become adults, you're not really 'parenting' anymore—at least not the way you did for two decades. As you enter your empty-nest phase, there is a mixture of excitement for your kids and your own next phase of life, but also a mourning. The most essential job of your life—the identity that defined you—is done. And it's not coming back.

I was wrong.

Writing jokes at the kitchen table. Rehearsing in the living room. Watching her find her voice on stage. Sharing a spotlight together. Doing this course with Cedar was one of the most magical father/daughter experiences I’ve ever had. And it came at a time when I thought magical parenting experiences might be over.

Doing stand-up with Cedar has given me new hope for what relationships and experiences can look like for parents and adult kids. It's not about parenting anymore—it's about doing meaningful things together as adults. Learning together. Taking risks together. Celebrating each other.

I'm officially inspired. I'm going to do more of this type of stuff with all my kids.

Whopper Insight #3: Passing the Torch

My daughter is funnier than I am. And I couldn’t be happier.

Comedy badge unlocked!

And Cedar—thank you for doing this whole project with me and letting me write about it. I hope it wasn’t too embarrassing to do all this with your dad. I can’t wait to watch your comedy journey continue!

Thanks to all of you for reading about our stand-up comedy adventures. I’m curious:

• Have you had any unexpectedly magical moments with your adult children? Experiences that made you realize parenting isn't over—it's just different now?

• Have you returned to any creative dreams you'd buried? What happened when you finally tried?

Let me know in the comments below!

A huge thank you to Katie-Ellen Humphries for making this entire experience so special. You’re a fantastic teacher and comedian! Thanks so much to everyone else in the class—it was a real treat to do this with all of you and share in your comedic journeys.

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

My 23-year-old daughter, Cedar, and I have had just one week to write three minutes of original stand-up comedy. It has been stressful, anxiety-inducing, and also… lots and lots of fun. We are outside the venue, nervous. We both take a deep breath and head inside to perform our own original material for the first time.

What we don’t realize is that we are also doing something much more profound: we are finding our voices.

Welcome back to the Stand-Up Comedy Show: Part Two of the Father/Daughter Stand-Up Comedy Experiment. After a number of confidence-crushing experiences when I was younger, I am doing this experiment to find out if I am capable of truly being funny.

Here’s where we started. Here’s where we’re at… It’s week two of our comedy course with professional comic Katie-Ellen Humphries. We are lucky to have her teaching us: she is a regular performer and producer on CBC’s The Debaters, has a comedy album, and tours all over the place.

Everything Is Potential Material

Almost instantly after last week’s opening class, Cedar and I have new mindsets. We are looking around and seeing the world through a different filter: potential material. We keep interrupting each other in conversation to say, “Write that down! That’s a joke!” And I find myself frantically opening up my phone to write notes at all times of day, in all sorts of locations, as jokes, stories, observations, or bits pop into my head.

Together, Cedar and I have spent a lot of time sitting at the kitchen table, writing.

• Tennis Grunts: Professional tennis players are now all grunting vocally when they hit a ball, and wonder what it would be like if other sports or daily activities employed this strategy. Hitting a golf ball: “Ha-aaaaaaah!” Tying my shoes at age 53: “Ha-aaaaaah!”

• BBQ Dude Talk: At every communal BBQ, every guy is on the same script: ‘That looks good—what time should I come by? HAHAHA.’ Every time.

• Strava Posts: I also vent about the fitness social media app, Strava, which is like Facebook for exercise. I’m trying to figure out why so many guys use their workout titles to express their suppressed creativity.

  You see someone post, but instead of calling it “5k Bike Ride with Peter,” they title it: “Dipdy dip whirlies with Pig Boy.”

  And then there are the people who feel the need to track everything, not just workouts. I’m scrolling through my feed expecting to see marathons, and instead, I see:

  Activity: Washing Dishes Distance: 0.0 km Heart Rate: 94 bpm Calories: 14 Kudos: 0

Cedar and I write and write and write. And I second-guess everything, unable to choose what material to perform…

The Only Way To Do Comedy Is Your Way

At the start of one of the classes, Katie-Ellen shows videos of a variety of different comedians. They are nothing like each other. They don’t follow the same joke structures. They don’t have the same pacing, the same kind of delivery, or the same energy. Some are patient storytellers, building scenes and characters in the audience’s mind, while others do rapid-fire set-up, punchline bursts. Some are highly relatable and charismatic, while others are unusual oddballs who are fascinating to watch.

I’m pretty sure Katie-Ellen has a point in showing us all this: there is not a single way to be a comedian. In fact, it seems the best comedians have developed their own unique styles and approaches. And because of that, Katie-Ellen’s approach to teaching comedy is more about helping us find our own comedic voices than about learning and workshopping traditional joke structures. I greatly appreciate this!

I learn this lesson (again)—the hard way—at the start of Week Two…

Maybe Don’t ‘Steal Like An Artist’ With Comedy?

Katie-Ellen starts each class with a group conversation, sometimes with a creative prompt and others with a game or exercise. Last week, she asked us each to prepare one very short setup and punchline. So this week, we go around the room reading our short jokes. Many of them are legitimately funny!

Cedar is by far the youngest person in the class. I know she is finding it nerve-wracking, but she delivers a good bit about what it’s like to become a regular at your local coffee shop and the barista knows your name and favourite beverage. Then she reveals that she has the same relationship with her bank. She shows up, the teller smiles, greets her by name, and says, “So how’d you lose your debit card this time?” She nails it!

When it is my turn, I do not ‘find my own comedic voice.’ Instead, I feebly attempt a joke in Anthony Jeselnik’s unique style: shocking misdirection.

“Christmas Trees are a lot like puppies.

It’s so exciting to head out and choose the perfect one. And it’s so magical to bring it into your home. You dress it up and take photos of it, and you give it water and take care of it.

And then, in a few weeks, the novelty wears off, you forget to give it water, and it dies...(beat)

And then you dump the carcass in a recycling bin in the alley.”

My joke does not get the reaction I expect. There are several groans. I hear oohs and aahhs and other uncomfortable vocalizations from my peers. Yikes! (Maybe I’m NOT funny?)

It is an instant comedy lesson: an amateur attempt to imitate a world-class comic with decades of honing his style and voice is going to be… lame.

I’m no Anthony Jeselnik.

Safe Creative Feedback

Then we sit in front of the stage and, one by one, we go up the stage, grab the mic, and do our three-minute sets. Katie-Ellen suggests we bring our phones up on stage, turn on the Voice Memos app, and record our sets. This is a great way to hear what you ACTUALLY sound like and to hear the audience's reaction, so you can improve your material. She also gives every performer extensive notes and suggestions that are both constructive and kind.

I don’t think there is a harder task than giving and getting feedback on creative work. You want people to learn and improve their craft, and you also want them to feel good about themselves and their creativity. Katie-Ellen does an amazing job of bringing a bunch of strangers together, getting them to be very vulnerable in front of one another, and giving really terrific, empowering feedback. I know the comedy world can be mean and cold-hearted, but the culture Katie-Ellen has created in her class is the exact opposite, and I’m very grateful for it (for myself and my daughter!).

Cedar and I both wait until close to the end to get up on stage. She goes up just before me, visibly nervous.

She spends the entire three minutes roasting an old boyfriend of hers, while simultaneously making fun of herself for being blindly optimistic and missing massive warning signs that this dude was going to be a truckload of trouble. The huge contrast between her onstage cheeriness and the darkness of this guy and their relationship generates a lot of laughs.

The highlight joke in her set is when she discovers he is a graffiti artist and imagines that he is like Banksy, only to quickly discover that he’s just “a d**k who writes ‘BENZO’ on bus stops.”

BOOM. Katie-Ellen and the class love this joke. I am beaming as I watch my daughter perform and thrilled to see the response she is getting. Watching your daughter discover she's genuinely funny is one of the most unexpectedly moving experiences I've had as a parent.

Suddenly, it’s my turn. Even though this is a safe environment and there are less than ten peers in the room, I am very nervous.

I open with jokes about my dismal performance running my first-ever race, the Eastside 10km, some of which I work into my Midlife Field Guide write-up about the race. Then I do a bit about what I would do if I were a billionaire. It’s a very detailed description of how—with unlimited money—I would set up my entire life around… foot massages.

The running material definitely goes over better than the foot massage billionaire fantasy, which I later realize is because there aren’t really any punchlines—just a weird, vivid fantasy about masseuses in scuba gear rubbing my feet in a hot tub.

Katie-Ellen encourages me to embrace that I’m a writer and to own my personal turns of phrase and language choices. She also gives great advice about the power of doubling down on things like Dad-joke puns: when you really commit to something that could be lame (like puns), it becomes much funnier. It is really insightful and personalized advice.

Overall, it is so much fun to watch our varied cast of characters get up and do their stuff. Everyone truly is different. Every set has laughs. And some lines continue to stick with me because they are so funny.

One guy has brilliant deadpan timing and kills me. He starts his set by asking the audience, “How’s everybody doing?” All of us clap and cheer, or yell “Good!” He pauses, sighs, and says, “Must be nice.” SO GOOD!

Comedy Takes Over Our Brains… And Our Worldview

Katie-Ellen sends us home with upgraded homework: come with FIVE minutes of material for Week Three. She gives us the choice of either refining and extending our existing material, or writing a new set.

Cedar had such a good reaction to her set that she decides to keep honing her set, which is a great choice. I decide to keep writing and try to craft better material than my Week Two effort.

Cedar and I spend the week deep in comedy-land. I find myself thinking about jokes and material all the time. In the shower. While I’m walking. While I’m waiting in line at the store. While I’m driving.

When something unusual happens, my brain is suddenly trying to figure out if there is a joke or a bit or a funny observation to capture from it. It’s genuinely fun to be in this mindset because you’re seeing the world through a different lens. It’s like you’re suddenly a philosopher or anthropologist studying human behaviour, but with an attitude.

Insight alert!

Honestly, thinking this way brightens my day. It’s like finding your own creative interpretation of the weirdness of the world. Or finding funny stories in everything around you.

I’m pretty sure I am insufferable to be around during this time because I am constantly trying out new material on others, even if they didn’t always know I was doing it.

I’m pretty sure Cedar is doing the same thing. I can tell she is workshopping ideas by sharing them with others to see what kind of reaction she gets, and most of the time, she gets laughs. It is a real treat watching this.

Prepping For The Live Showcase

The next two weeks, the gang assembles back at Chill X Studio. We are in full preparation for our upcoming finale: a live showcase with a paid audience. Each of us will perform five full minutes of material during the showcase, with Katie-Ellen emceeing.

Each week, we go deeper. Not just into comedy, but into ourselves.

It’s clear that everyone is taking this much more seriously. A lot of work has gone into memorization, physicality, reworking sections of material, or creating entirely new material. Once again, it is a joy to watch each person’s comedic journey unfold week by week.

This may sound obvious, but everyone is drawing material from their own unique lives:

• The actors find ways to utilize their acting chops.

• The clown infuses her set with clowning material.

• The chef’s set is filled with amazing details about life in a restaurant.

Standup is a powerful way to tell your story and find your voice!

Cedar’s sets keep getting stronger. Her nerves become less noticeable with each week. She adds new details that bring the bits to life. And her sense of timing and delivery is really impressive. It is fair to say I am blown away watching my daughter find her voice on stage right in front of me.

Finding My Material By Looking In The Mirror

Like everyone else, my new set comes directly from my life. Everything is about being at midlife. Shocker!

I talk about growing my first-ever beard at age 53, which many of you are already familiar with. I have had so much negative feedback about it making me look old that I decide to open with a series of roasts… of myself.

Some of the anti-beard feedback jokes I try out don’t make it to the final showcase, including:

• “You look like Santa with an eating disorder.”

• “You look like the before picture in a Just For Men commercial.”

• “You look like the Dos Equis guy… if he was the LEAST interesting man in the world.”

• “You look like a reject from the X-Men mutant academy - half man, half skunk.” Which is nice because the beard has a white stripe… and it smells like something died inside it.”

I talk about how I used the beard to go undercover as a ‘real man’ but was worried I was going to be found out as an impostor. And I wrap with a series of examples of how, even with the beard, I’m not much of a “manly man.”

I really have fun with this set and decide to keep workshopping it to perform in the live showcase.

My worst fear is getting up on stage and blanking, so as we progress week to week, I’m trying to figure out how to reduce my material to bite-sized words so I can fit the set onto a little note card I can reference if I get lost. In the third week performance, I definitely need it. I briefly lose my train of thought and attempt to casually wander to the stool to have a glance at the card. It works!

Smart Notes From a Pro

Week after week, Katie-Ellen’s feedback continues to be great.

I am ashamed to admit that, as someone who once had a podcasting company and has worked in audio for a long time, I have a recurring issue with mic technique. I can’t seem to keep the mic close enough to my mouth. I’m like a modern day Larry “Bud” Melman!

Katie-Ellen also helps me identify the lines and concepts that stand out, like “I may be in a grown man’s body, but I’m still running little boy software.” She also has bang-on suggestions for re-ordering some of the beard roast jokes and suggests that I keep the material fresh by working in new roast jokes with each performance. This is such a fun suggestion!

She has one killer note that (foreshadowing alert!) works out well in the live showcase: change the way I start the set. At this point, here is my opening:

“You CANNOT go up to someone you don’t know and make fun of their physical appearance. It’s NOT okay to say, “Hey, your eyes are REALLY close together. You look like a caveman who hasn’t discovered fire yet.”

It’s NOT socially acceptable behaviour.

There is ONE exception to this rule: beards.”

And then I go into the beard roast jokes.

She suggests that I start with something more personal, about me and the beard, right off the top. It’s a great idea and I commit to figuring this out before the big showcase.

Finally, she tells me the set is fun because it’s clear I’m having fun delivering it.

This is a huge confidence builder heading into the big showcase!

The REAL Comedy Test Awaits…

It’s the end of Week Four. Cedar and I have invited friends and family to the finale, and so has everyone else in the class. I’ve even promoted the show on social media. There’s no backing out.

For the past month, I’ve been asking myself: Am I funny enough? In one week, I’ll finally find out.

It’s just going to be us, a microphone, a spotlight… and over 50 people expecting us to make them laugh.

And you’ll get to see the video. (Next time… on the Midlife Field Guide!)

GULP.

Thanks for reading—see ya next time!

Steve

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Welcome to The Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

Experiment: Can Geoff challenge himself to revisit the things he’s hated for decades to see if those stories still hold true at midlife?

Have I ever told you how much I hate yoga?

I also hate taking classes. Group things are just not my thing. I’m not a joiner and never have been.

That goes for team sports too. But not only do I hate them, I’m also no good at them. Which makes me hate them even more.

And roller coasters? Hard pass. Nothing is worse.

I could go on and on about the things I hate. These hatreds feel foundational to who I am. I’ve carried most of them for decades. They’ve shaped me, and they’ve limited me.

Some of them I can trace back to the exact moment they were born. The stories still live in my body and feel just as real now as they did then.

When I was ten, my cousins took me on a roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland that was famous for its massive drop. As soon as the ride began I became totally convinced that I was too small for the ride and that the harness would never hold me. I spent the rest of the ride in a full panic, praying that I wouldn’t get flung out. Forty years later I still hate roller coasters and haven’t been on one since.

For years I’ve also felt an aversion to signing up for any sort of class. In my early twenties, a personality test told me I wasn’t the type to naturally join things, that instead I needed to be invited into an experience in order to feel comfortable. It’s a story that I’ve been living by ever since. The irony is that the test itself was part of a course that I chose to take.

As for yoga, I’m married to a trained yoga teacher who taught for years, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to embrace the practice. But for the most part it’s never felt like my thing.

A couple of decades ago I did finally follow her to a class. It wasn’t exactly beginner-friendly, but I was assured that no one would judge me.

From the first minutes of the class, it became clear that compared to me, everyone else had been practicing for what seemed like forever.

While everyone around me looked serene, I felt anxious. I spent the whole class watching other people and their perfect poses and concluding that yoga simply wasn’t my thing.

When I add up all these stories, all these things I hate, the list is way longer than I’m comfortable with. I like to think of myself as someone who is open to new experiences. I’ll try almost any food put in front of me. But somehow that adventurousness hasn’t extended to all the parts of my life. When I reflect now I realize that the root of all of these aversions is fear.

Over the years I’ve done my share of therapy, and I know these stories once served a purpose. But they may no longer serve the person I am now.

These stories have both shaped me and limited me. Not that I’m necessarily grieving all the roller coasters I’ve missed, but still. These myths were formed when I was a different person. I’m 51 now, and I’m starting to wonder if any of these “truths” are actually true for me anymore.

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions (which I realize may also just be a story I tell myself…), but this year I’ve decided to challenge the narratives that have shaped me. To re-experience the things I “hate” in order to see if those stories are still true for who I am today.

A week ago, my wife was heading to a yoga class. Nothing was remarkable about this, until she paused at the door and looked at me. I like to think she saw something shifting in me. And before she left, she asked a question she hadn’t asked in decades: Did I want to come with her?

It may not sound like a big deal, but to us, it was. Yoga had always been one of those things she did alone. But this time, instead of defaulting to the story that I hated yoga, I paused. And then I said yes.

She was shocked. And even as the word left my mouth, my mind filled with all sorts of reasons for why it was a bad idea. But I managed to quiet them and ten minutes later, armed with yoga mats, we were walking down the street to a local studio.

At the front desk, we were greeted by one of the kindest faces I’ve ever encountered. She was thrilled it was my first class at the studio (I didn’t mention it was only my second class… ever.) She showed me around and, and as if reading my mind, she told me I’d probably see people moving in the class in ways that might not feel right for my body, and that was okay. I could do as much or as little as I wanted. Nothing I did would be wrong.

Inside the studio, my wife had saved us spots in the back corner, something that felt like a gift. In the corner I could be as invisible as I wanted to be.

The room was full of candles and soft music. About twenty people were there. Other than me and one other guy, everyone was female and at least a decade (or three) younger than me. I felt out of place instantly.

Then the teacher, Knox* (*not her real name, but it was definitely something like Knox) began. Her age (she was in her 20’s), her tattoos (she was covered in them), her many piercings, everything about her felt foreign to me. And then she started teaching.

And something shifted.

Like the woman at the front desk, she reminded us that we could experience the class from wherever we were in our yoga journey, that we should adapt every pose to what feels right.

At some point in the class she walked by me. She must have seen that I was clearly a beginner, and instead of telling me that I was doing something wrong or correcting me, she instead caught my eye and gave a small wink and a smile.

It was strange, but in that moment I felt seen. Surrounded by younger, more experienced bodies, I suddenly felt okay exactly where and who I was.

It was a feeling that is beginning to define how I approach the world at midlife. Spending less time in states of striving and comparison, and more ok with just being me.

By the end of class, my body felt loose and calm. For the first time in my life, I got it. And as we put our boots back on in the lobby, I heard myself say something I never expected: I could actually see myself coming back.

So yes, going to a yoga class may sound small. But to me this whole Midlife Field Guide project has never really just been about things like yoga, or roller coasters, or team sports. It is about noticing the stories that quietly run our lives and asking if we still want to live inside them.

I’ve spent decades shutting myself off from experiences based on a steadfast belief in these old stories. I feel a desire at midlife to rewrite them, or at the very least test them out to see if they are still true to the person I am now.

This week I said yes to a mat and a room full of strangers. Next week, who knows. All I know is this: I feel an opening to everything right now. My body and spirit have an insatiable craving to face this stage of life in a state of being fully awake. I am done letting decisions I made at ten, or twenty, or even forty decide who I get to be now.

My goal this year is to put as many of these deep-seated stories to the test as possible to see if they still hold up. Consider this part one :)

Midlife Book Giveaway Winners!

A huge congratulations to all the winners of our Midlife Book Giveaway. Congrats to Julia, Jill, Christian, Joanne, and Robyn, and an extra-big congrats to our grand prize winner, Lana, who’s taking home an entire midlife library.

Thank you so much to everyone who entered and shared their midlife goals for the year. Reading about all the incredible things our community is working on was truly inspiring for me and Steve. If you haven’t had a chance to read them yet, I highly recommend it. You can find them in the comments section here.

And if you see your name listed as a winner but haven’t heard from us yet, be sure to check your Substack DMs for all the details.

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

Happy 2026, Midlifers!

On January 1st, I was ready to start the year with a fresh outlook. I popped on a podcast episode promising fresh insight into finding meaning in life—Arthur C. Brooks on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

I couldn’t make it through the episode. I had to turn it off halfway through.

I’m nervous to tell you why, because I’m part of the problem…

I’ve been a somewhat compulsive data/measurement/tracking productivity obsessive for much of my life. I have lived the “Quantified Self” to one degree or another for a long time. Counting steps. Tracking sleep. Optimizing workouts. Analyzing stats.

I’ve worn an Apple Watch every day for years and years and years. I got an Oura ring in 2020 and have worn it daily for almost 6 years now. I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with “productivity” and trying to get as much done as humanly possible every day. I have an endless backlog of tasks in my “To Do” lists, all organized in Kanban style on Trello and rooted in the David Allen “Getting Things Done” methodology. (This is why everything writes about being a recovering productivity addict resonates so deeply with me. Thank you, Oliver!)

Every day, through all these devices and systems, I have ended up with a series of targets, numbers, scores, or systems that, essentially, tell me whether or not I’ve had a successful day.

Over the years, I’ve become adept at “achieving” these types of successful days. There has been a major downside to this relentless tracking and optimization, though:

I have a really hard time relaxing.

Ever.

I always feel like I should be doing something—anything!—to move things forward, to get more things done, to raise the quality bar further.

And listening to Arthur C. Brooks talk to Tim Ferriss, I became deeply, deeply annoyed. I literally could not keep listening. And I knew instantly what I needed to do to start my year in a new, liberating way.

Stop. Measuring. Everything.

I’ve decided to spend January 2026 turning off every scoreboard in my life to see what happens.

Here’s why…

The Arthur C. Brooks Podcast Incident

January 1, 2026

Yesterday, I saw that Arthur C. Brooks was a guest on the Tim Ferriss podcast. As an author of the Midlife Field Guide and a fan of Brooks’ pandemic-era book, From Strength to Strength, I was curious to hear his thoughts on finding meaning in your life.

What I got is not what I expected or wanted.

I probably should have known better—right off the top, there is an ominous warning of what lies ahead. Tim tells Arthur, “Glad to see the vascularity in your arms is still visible even through the long sleeve shirt.”

Pardon?

The episode begins with an extended examination of Brooks’ morning routine, which could almost certainly pass as a parody of modern masculinity. I am going to summarize the episode up until the point I turned it off, and you can judge for yourself whether this is truly a path to meaning and happiness.

Arthur starts every day at 4:30 am with the Brahmamuhurta ritual, rising 96 minutes before sunrise to optimize his productivity and creativity. There is a detailed discussion of his hour-long workout and Arthur shares that “the most important room in my house is the gym.”

To make the most of every waking second (and with a 4:30 am wake-up, Arthur has more waking seconds than the rest of us), he maximizes productivity by stacking his thinking and exercise together, working out sans headphones. “That’s your most creative time,” says Arthur. “That’s like taking an hour-long shower. You get your best ideas if you work out without headphones.”

Brooks has logged every workout he’s done since his 30s. He is 61. He can track his own heart rate without a monitor, because “120 beats per minute is a really, really easy thing to ascertain, because I’m an old musician. That’s the speed of a Sousa march.”

Yes, Arthur! This sounds great. I will first study Sousa marches until I subconsciously absorb the 120 beats-per-minute cadence, and then develop the ability to match that pace to my own heart rate. That sounds much easier than wearing a heart rate monitor.

Arthur’s workout is followed by attending daily 30-minute Mass to connect with his spirituality, which he dubs ‘The Holy Half Hour.’ Then the nutrition begins. He ingests an unusually high dose of 15-20 grams of creatine a day, explaining that the first 5 grams are for “muscle protein synthesis or volumization of muscles” and the rest is to neurologically bank four hours of concentration, “to set myself up for optimal creativity.”

Even coffee has an unusual role in his life. He doesn’t use coffee to wake up, but to focus. The role of caffeine is “circulating adenosine to metabolize and to clear endogenously,” whatever that means. I think we can all relate when Arthur says he wants “plenty of open parking spots for the adenosine receptors, that I can then fill two to three hours after I wake up with caffeine.”

What does this mean? And what does this have to do with the meaning of life?

Brooks is a Professor of Happiness at Harvard. Yet this does not feel like a relaxed individual. It feels like someone who is confident they have life figured out, with every single second rigidly optimized for maximum yield. This feels like someone desperately trying to cheat death, a recurring and worrying theme in modern bro culture.

This is the quote that made me turn off the episode:

“I’m most comfortable when I’m sub-10 body fat.”

This is not repeatable behaviour for 99.9% of humanity. This is the sort of stuff that makes all of us feel worse about ourselves, not better. These are the examples that make the rest of us give up on happiness, healthiness, and meaning.

If I’m on the weirdly obsessive side and all this sounds impossibly unrealistic and unhealthy to me, I can’t imagine what this must sound like to people who are “normal” on the data/tracking/productivity scale.

TLDR: If this over-the-top shit is what we have to do to be happy, it’s just not possible… or worth it.

Miriam Toews on Living Forever

I have been reading Miriam Toews’ brilliant memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace, and this jumped out at me as a perfect indictment of modern masculine culture in 2026:

“I think of the words written on the wall of the women’s washroom in the recreation centre at the park, Trinity Bellwoods, near my home. Read that to me, said my grandson.

Only assholes wanna live forever, I said.

Only assholes wanna live forever? he said.

Later, I saw a guy getting into his car across the street from me wearing a T-shirt that said, Assholes Never Die.”

Just sayin’…

It’s Not Just Arthur. It’s Everywhere.

There is something tangibly and toxically masculine about morning routines and conversations like this. It’s about trying to dominate and control elements that are, by definition, not controllable… like aging and death.

There is no post-death scoreboard to enjoy. You can’t ‘win’ life. In fact, I’m pretty sure that manically trying to ‘win’ life and conquer death guarantees that you’re actually missing most of your actual life.

And yet, part of the reason I had such a strong reaction to Brooks’ morning routine is that I recognize too much of myself in his ritualized attempts at immortality. Obviously, I’m not doing things at his level, though—people like Arthur keep pushing the bar higher and crazier to the point where it is just… impossible. And ridiculous.

I know I’m not alone. This type of content is like the Siren’s Song to so many Type A nutters like me. I was genuinely disturbed when I realized thousands of people are going to listen to the podcast and adopt these protocols as a new definition of success for their lives. They will assume that Arthur has life figured out and that by copying his morning routine, they will, too. And it won’t work.

In that moment, I realized that I never want to live by someone else’s scoreboard again. And, at the same time, I recognized clearly that I have been doing exactly that for a long, long time. All of it done in the belief that measuring and optimizing everything will make my life… better? And, ironically, it generally makes me feel worse about myself.

It’s exhausting. So I’m done. (For a month, anyway.)

I don’t mean to pick on Arthur. This stuff is everywhere. Our entire culture is obsessed with the optimization of everything. Everything is a scoreboard.

What Does This Have To Do With Midlife?

Many of you are likely starting New Year’s Resolutions that involve capturing, measuring, and analyzing data about your lives. It might be weight. It might be fitness levels. It might be words written daily for your novel. It might be your productivity!

Peter Drucker famously wrote, “What gets measured, gets managed.” It’s quoted all the time.

So if it matters, you should measure it.

Or… should you?

One of the core principles in my book, Earn It, is to Do the Opposite. And I am ready to Do The Opposite when it comes to ‘measure what matters.’

In fact, the full Peter Drucker quote is less well-known:

"What gets measured gets managed—even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.”

Baboom!

My new mantra for 2026 and the focus of my first new experiment of the year is “Don’t Measure What Matters.”

My Desired Outcome

I don’t want every activity to be a means to an end. I’d like to just enjoy them while I’m doing them. I don’t want to judge every activity or everything I do through the lens of “Was it successful?” Or “Am I on track?” Or “Did I improve?” Or “How am I comparing to others?”

I want to just live my life and enjoy my activities without turning everything into a competition. I don’t want to evaluate every activity in my life through someone else’s scoreboard.

If something really matters to me, I don’t want to measure it anymore.

My Data, Not My Metrics

I have collected too much data for too long, in too many ways, about too many things. I used to think gathering as much data as possible was smart and helpful.

Now, I’m not so sure. None of these measurements is really of MY choosing. They are chosen by companies that want me to track these things. They want me to check my data every single day.

Their scores and scoreboards and dashboards and infographics and Year In Review data visualizations are all shaping my behaviour. Their scores are shaping my self-worth. Their scores are shaping my life.

When I pause and reflect, I realize that almost everything in my life has been turned into a competition or a game by companies eager to keep me using their products. And they have the power to determine how I feel about myself on a daily basis.

My sleep score stinks? I’d better rectify that and figure out why. Anxiety.

My Substack post is underperforming? I’d better figure out why and start questioning myself. Anxiety.

My heart rate is higher than my friend’s? I’d better stew about whether there is anything wrong with me physically and whether there is anything I should be doing about it. Anxiety. Shame.

The list of data that makes me feel worse about myself goes on and on.

I’m curious to find out what happens if I turn it all off for a month.

The Experiment: Arthur C. Brooks IS Making Me Change My Life

I turned off the Tim Ferriss podcast and knew exactly what I needed to do this January to kick off 2026 for the Midlife Field Guide.

No. More. Scoreboards.

I’m going to stop measuring… everything. (***Almost)

For the entire month of January 2026.

• No more steps to count.

• No more rings to close.

• No more sleep to track.

• No more follower counts to compare.

• No more open-rates to obsess over.

Questioning The Data

Most of the time, the data tells me what I already know.

Every single day, I wake up and see that I have had a high degree of restlessness in my sleep. Every single day, I get suggestions about how to reduce restlessness during the night. Nothing works.

So for at least six years, I have started every day feeling like I’ve failed at sleep and need to figure out how to fix it.

How has sleep become something that determines my self-worth? Why do I feel like I need to be ‘successful’ at… sleeping?

When the data is not the same as usual, there is rarely anything I can do about it, and there is rarely any change I need to make. (Looks like running a 10km race has lowered my ‘Readiness’ score the following day. Shocker!)

So if I’m learning nothing new and there is nothing I can do to change the data, why do I track it?

After years of daily data, my hypothesis is that I have already learned what I need to learn. My hunch is that the data is no longer driving better decision-making, and I should question why I continue to track it obsessively.

If the data makes me feel worse, is this capturing and analyzing actually having a negative effect on my life?

I’m not opposed to being curious about my health or well-being. But the volume of data and data-checking feels… absurd. Why not monthly? Or quarterly? Make sure I’m on track, without obsessing over it daily or hourly.

So no data. No tracking. No scoreboards.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one wandering around mumbling to myself like a conspiracy theorist, “Don’t Measure What Matters!”

Day One - January 1, 2026

I am nervous to do this. I know this is incredibly lame, but I have done this for so long that it feels quite stressful to willfully create an empty gap in the years and years of data.

First day with no Apple Watch for years and years and years. My wrist feels empty and light. I twist my hand to look at the time and see only a tan mark where the watch usually resides.

First day with no Oura Ring since the pandemic. My thumb keeps looking for the ring to twirl, but finds only skin and a callus.

I am panicked and also feeling a bit liberated. Much like ending my Wordle streak last summer, it feels daunting and stressful to end a long streak and consistent habit… until you do it. After you break the streak, you realize that it’s not bad at all.

I took a long walk on New Year’s Day along the beach. For the first time in forever, I have no idea how far I walked, how many steps I took, what my average time/minute was, or anything else. I did not close my Exercise ring.

I walked because I enjoyed being outside by the ocean. Don’t measure what matters.

I went to sleep without my Oura Ring on for the first time in forever. I got up this morning and had no sleep score to check. I paid more attention to how I am feeling. I had an okay sleep, and I’m 99% sure the Oura Ring would have told me the same thing.

I slept because I was tired. I woke up because I was rested. Don’t measure what matters.

I played tennis and did not turn on my Apple Watch to track it for the first time in years. I have no idea if my Move ring is closed, how many calories I burned, what my average heart rate was, or anything else.

I played tennis because I love sports with friends. Don’t measure what matters.

And you know what happened by not measuring anything on Day One? Nothing.

It didn’t matter. At all.

No matter how I sleep, I will feel how I feel in the morning. My body will know what I am up for doing and what I don’t feel like doing.

Also, I’m having fun playing tennis, not using tennis as a means to some other end.

It’s early days, but I have a feeling this will be as fruitful and meaningful as my Phone Fight. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading—let me know if you have any suggestions for data and measurement to ignore this month.

Here's my challenge to any of you interested in this experiment: What's one scoreboard you could turn off this month? Just for January. Just to see what happens when you stop letting a company's algorithm determine whether you had a 'good' day. Hit reply or leave a comment with what you’ll stop measuring.

Also, we will be announcing the winners of the Midlife Book Giveaway soon—go leave a comment on this post if you want to be entered.

Coming up soon on the Midlife Field Guide… Part 2 of my Stand-Up Comedy adventure with my 23-year-old daughter and Geoff begins exploring activities he hated in his childhood. How will the first trial runs of comedy on stage go? And will Geoff find a way to enjoy team-based sports? Stay tuned!

Steve

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(***The one caveat this month. I have resumed running again, training for the Vancouver First Half marathon on February 8th. I am going to put on my Apple Watch for my training to know how far and how fast to run because I’ve never done this before and need help. 😜)

Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

Hello friends,

Here at Midlife Field Guide HQ, we’re feeling pretty darn grateful.

Grateful that this newsletter has given us no shortage of excuses to take part in all kinds of weird and wonderful experiments at midlife. Grateful for the growth this project has experienced since we first launched into those experiments. And perhaps most importantly, grateful to you for reading and following along. This project has given us more than we ever expected, something we never take for granted, and we truly cannot say thank you enough.

So as a small gesture of appreciation, we’d like to give you a gift. Well, some of you anyway.

We made a list of five books that have influenced us on this journey, and we’re gifting them to members of this community.

Here’s how it will work. Below is a list of five books we genuinely love and want to give away. There are no product placements or contra deals here. These are simply books we think are so good that we want more people to read them.

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment below describing the kind of experiments you have planned for midlife, are currently planning, or have already done.

And honestly, if that feels like too much, a simple “I want a free book!” will also do just fine.

We’ll collect all the comments and draw names at random. The first five names will each receive one of these books. The sixth name will receive all five books. An instant midlife inspiration library.

Here are the books we love, and why they’ve inspired us.

The Surrender Experiment
by Michael A. Singer
At some point early in his life Singer made the decision to say “yes” to whatever life put in front of him, even when it made no logical sense. This opened up a new way of thinking about trust, timing, and letting go. It’s a powerful reminder that some of the most meaningful chapters of life begin when we stop gripping the steering wheel so tightly, and it’s opened us up to the magic that life has to offer when we open up and let it.

Shift: 7 Mindsets for an Inspired Midlife
by Peter Reek
Midlife often gets framed as a problem to solve, but Peter reframes it as a series of seven mindsets to embrace. It’s meditative, calming, and reassuring, like listening to a wise friend share insights that you remember long after the conversation has concluded. You can feel Peter’s deep experience in coaching on every page—there are plenty of thought-provoking questions for readers to consider for their own lives. It helped us recognize and name what felt off, and more importantly, imagine what might come next.

How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum
by Keri Smith
This book feels like permission in paper form. It invites curiosity, play, and attention to the everyday, all things that tend to get squeezed out by adult responsibility. It inspired us to treat our lives as something to investigate rather than manage, and to remember that wonder is a muscle you can actually rebuild.

The Pathless Path
By Paul Millerd

We just found this book a few weeks ago, and eerily, it’s almost as if it was written with the Midlife Field Guide in mind. Millerd has created a compelling thesis about the power of leaving the ‘default path’ and instead exploring your own unique journey, or “the pathless path.” Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all solution, he invites you to run small, curious experiments on your own life—sound familiar? 😜 Get curious about why you think you need to do certain things in your life. Try this. Notice that. Adjust. Repeat. It is a wonderful eye-opener about the sheer scope of ways you can choose to live your life, and the power of interrogating the status quo.

How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters
by Michael Bungay Stanier
This book is a gentle but firm nudge out of paralysis. Instead of waiting for clarity, confidence, or permission, Bungay Stanier encourages action as the thing that creates clarity. It’s been hugely influential in helping us move from thinking about experiments to actually doing them, imperfectly and in public.

A Favour?

We’re incredibly grateful for the growth this newsletter has experienced over the past year. It’s deeply satisfying to see this community grow month after month. While we appreciate being part of the Substack ecosystem, by far the most meaningful growth has come from people recommending Midlife Field Guide to others in their lives.

If you’ve enjoyed the Midlife Field Guide in 2025, we’d love it if you shared it. Please tell a friend or a neighbour, post it on social media, or shout it from the rooftops. If you do, feel free to tag us (@themidlifefieldguide on Instagram or @midlifefieldguide on Facebook), send a screenshot, or let us know in the comments. We’d truly appreciate it.

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Happy holidays to all of you. Here’s to a juicy 2026 of midlife experiments and exploration!

XOXOXOXOXO
Geoff & Steve

Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

Subscribe now

Hello Midlifers!

One evening this fall, I find myself on a stage with a microphone, looking out at a small group of strangers that I’ve just met. With zero preparation or planned material, I have to start talking.

There’s an additional catch. I can’t leave the stage until I’ve been up there talking for two full minutes. This sounds like a short time. If you’re the one on stage, it feels like eternity.

This was the culmination of the first week of my stand-up comedy course.

My Complicated Relationship with Comedy

Some of you may know that since this newsletter launched, I have written about wanting to do comedy a lot.

• Three years ago, I wrote about how my comedic dreams were derailed by this meeting with a TV network president.

• Then I wrote about wanting to experiment with comedy again.

• Six months later, I wrote about this confidence-shattering experience with a famous Canadian stand-up/late-night TV host.

• Then I wrote about comedy again… and again in this chat with .

The last post included the following cartoon because… after several years of talking about becoming a man of comedic action, I had not done much more than a few fun TikTok and Instagram videos.

Guess what? I am proud to officially announce that I will never have this tombstone, because… I’m doing a stand-up comedy experiment. (Also, because I’ll be cremated… baboom! 💥)

Field Notes + The Bonus Surprise

Over the last several years, my 23-year-old daughter, Cedar, has become a huge stand-up comedy fan. I’d like to think that my own love of comedy has something to do with it, but Cedar has found her own comedians, her own comedy podcasts, and her own unique sense of humour.

Cedar is really funny.

Last Christmas, to celebrate being comedy nerds, I bought Cedar tickets for two nights at the Great Outdoor Comedy Festival in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. At the time, the shows were nine months away, in September 2025. As the year progressed, we got more and more excited about our big outdoor comedy weekend.

The Fates Intervene

Not for the first time, it felt as if fate was hard at work on The Midlife Field Guide. This past summer, just as I was considering how to conduct an experiment to change my relationship with my phone, I was serendipitously sent ’s 5 Week Phone Fight Course. I took the course, and it was amazing.

Then, in early September, just as the comedy festival was approaching, I started thinking about comedy experiment ideas. Out of nowhere, a friend DM’d me an Instagram post about a stand-up comedy course in my neighbourhood starting in two weeks. What?!?!

Even though I am not a particularly spiritual person, I am taking these coincidences as signs from the universe. (Please know that I am not manifesting these things through any sort of incantations or affirmations, a la The Secret!)

I signed up for the stand-up course immediately.

Then, I signed Cedar up, too.

This was going to be the ultimate father/daughter experience.

We both got to see a raft of unbelievable professional comics right before the course started: Whitney Cummings, Bert Kreischer, John Mulaney, Nick Kroll, Mike Birbiglia, and Taylor Tomlinson. It was like we threw ourselves into a PhD crash course of world-class comedy. We were chock full of inspiration right as the course began.

The Experiment

Cedar and I will take Katie-Ellen Humphries’ stand-up comedy course. There are four two-and-a-half-hour classes, with a stand-up showcase in front of a live audience in the fifth week.

The experiment is to find out if I can be funny.

It’s also to see if my adult daughter and I can have an amazing time together doing something terrifying.

NOTE: This is not a normal father/daughter activity, like going to a concert together… or painting penguins. This has the potential to be horrifically embarrassing for one or both of us.

GULP.

The Hypothesis

I am going to be very, very nervous doing this. Not just because it’s a class full of strangers, but also because my daughter will be part of the course, too.

I’m very nervous that I’m going to discover:

• I’m too old to be funny

• I’m too boring to be funny

• I’m too un-traumatized to be funny

• And, worst of all, I’m just… not funny

My biggest fears are about doing this with Cedar:

• What if I have a great time, but Cedar ends up having some of the negative experiences I had when I was younger?

• What if I bomb on stage in front of an audience… and Cedar?

• What if my material is gross, inappropriate, and super awkward for my daughter to hear? (Teaser: this 100% happens and will be revealed in a future newsletter)

On the flip side, what if it goes well? For both of us?

It might just end up being the coolest father/daughter thing we ever do.

It might also end up as an incredibly awkward shared experience that alienates Cedar from her weirdo father.

I genuinely don’t know how this experiment will play out. What I do know for sure is that I’ll regret it if I don’t try this and find out what happens.

Observations

Meet The Comics

Cedar and I head down to Chill X Studio for the first class. We meet several other nervous-looking people as we head in. Cedar is by far the youngest person in the class, and I am not the oldest. Shocking!

The instructor is Katie-Ellen Humphries, a well-known Canadian comic who is a regular performer and producer on CBC’s The Debaters, has a comedy album, and tours all over the place.

She starts the class with introductions. The class is an awesome mix of people: actors, a chef, a clown, a balloon-animal artist, a musician, and more.

Yay! Boo!

We play a game called “Yay! Boo!” We go around the circle of chairs in order, and one person says something positive, after which the rest of us yell, “Yay!” Then the next person has to turn that positive thing into something negative, cueing us all to yell, “Boo!” For example:

“I spent the weekend soaking up the sun at the beach.”

“Yay!”

“Now I’ve got a discoloured mole on my face.”

“Boo!”

Even better is the reverse round, “Boo! Yay!” where one person starts with something bad and the next has to find something good about it.

"I got kicked out of school for using A.I. in an exam.”

“Boo!”

“But I used an A.I. lawyer to sue the school and get re-admitted.”

“Yay!”

This is a great way to get all of us thinking about creating ‘turns’—twists that an audience isn’t expecting. This is what laughs are made of.

Mic Technique for Dummies

Then Katie-Ellen gives us something I wasn’t expecting: a lesson in microphone technique. It is surprisingly useful!

For a stand-up, the microphone signifies status. If you have the mic, you have the power. Having a microphone stand in front of you weakens that power, so unless you decide to read from notes, most stand-ups immediately move the mic stand to the back of the stage, where it is out of sight and out of mind. We’ve all seen this move in pretty much every stand-up show or special ever, but I’ve never recognized the power of this ritual before.

We all get up and practice introducing ourselves, removing the mic from the stand, and putting the stand at the back of the stage. I instantly start feeling like a real comic. Who knew that a simple exercise like this could be so empowering?

Two Minutes of Terror

We round out the first evening with pure terror. Everyone has to go up on stage with no prep and talk for two minutes solid without stopping. Katie-Ellen sets a timer on her phone, and you can’t leave the stage until the alarm sounds.

As the first few people go up, I try to stay present and focus on their performances, but my mind keeps trying to plan something to do when it’s my turn. I know from doing improv when I was younger that the more I try to plan something, the worse it will likely be. Yet it’s still hard to stop my brain from planning as it desperately tries to avoid being embarrassed in front of everyone.

Cedar goes up on stage before me, and I can tell she is mildly terrified. She tells me afterwards that she thought she might freeze and “be unable to form words.” She had vivid visions of everyone staring at her in total silence. I confide in her that I had the exact same fears.

Once she gets up there, though, she quickly finds her groove and talks all about the inanity and drama of Vanderpump Rules for two minutes. I am beaming seeing her up there on stage.

In fact, I am so engaged with Cedar doing it that my brain stops planning and plotting. This was helpful because as soon as Cedar is done, I suddenly find myself up on stage. Gah!

Okay. Play it cool, loser.

Take out the mic. Say hello.

Move the mic stand to the back of the stage.

And… start moving your lips…

I know a lot of comics talk about things that bother them, so I decide to unload about how much my elderly neighbour makes me nuts.

I talk about how his car alarm went off at 4 am the night before, and he never went out to turn it off. Katie-Ellen’s timer has not gone off.

I vent about how he continually parks in my spot, making it impossible to charge my car’s battery. The timer has still not gone off.

I rant about how he leaves his recycling container uncovered on his back porch, filled with unwashed dog-food cans. Crows fly in and pluck out the dirty tins. Why does this affect me?

Crows are smart. They’ve figured out that if they wedge the dirty dog-food tins in the eavestroughs on MY roof, they can eat the chunks in peace. And because this is Vancouver, those cans fill up with rainwater. So every few weeks, I’m on a ladder, pulling out wedged tins, getting showered with putrid, cold dog-food water.

Suddenly, the alarm goes off, and my two minutes are up. I did it. Holy moly, did that feel like an eternity waiting for the alarm!

I actually feel disappointed that I couldn’t fully finish my Crow Dog-Food Tin story. I also feel a rush of adrenaline from being up on stage that I haven’t felt in a long time.

The Week One Debrief

As Cedar and I head home, we are both buzzing with excitement. She tells me she was so glad that it went well because she would have been “so embarrassed if my dad was the only person that found me funny.” The best!

We are already looking ahead to Week Two. Our homework? Write three original minutes of material to deliver on stage in one week’s time.

We are both terrified and thrilled to get going.

What did we write about? How did our first official “sets” go?

That’s coming up next time… on the Midlife Field Guide! 🎤🤪🤮

The Shift Sessions Talk

While this is definitely not stand-up, I did get some laughs during my first-ever talk about The Midlife Field Guide. It took place at ’s epic book-launch event, The Shift Sessions, and I had so much fun doing it. Here’s the video of the talk—I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks for reading! In addition to the next parts of the stand-up comedy experiment, and I are planning a year-end Midlife Field Guide giveaway that we’re excited to share with you soon.

Steve

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide

One year. Two Gen X friends. Countless personal experiments. Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?

(A project from The Creativity Guild)

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Hello Friends -

As some of you know, this June marks my and my wife Suz’s 25th anniversary.

Years ago, we thought it would be hilarious if for our 25th anniversary we put on a full scale amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof, starring us, and then forced all of our family and friends to watch it. I wrote about it here and here.

Neither Suz or I have any experience putting on a theatrical production, let alone acting in one. But luckily we happen to be surrounded by people who do. A few weeks ago we gathered eight of the most talented people we know to help us out. This truly is an extraordinary group, made up of writers, directors, choreographers, singers, composers, all incredibly accomplished and they all very generously agreed to spend a Saturday afternoon listening to where we are at.

Suz and I felt pretty good about our vision so far. We had rewatched the movie, and along with one of our kids, we pulled together a structure for what the show could look like. Realizing early on that a full scale production would never be possible, we envisioned our end product as a Fiddler On the Roof inspired variety show. We would keep all of our favourite songs, and in a very approximate fashion, we would tell a condensed version of the Fiddler story with highlights from the three hour production in just under an hour.

We had worked out our most meaningful and memorable scenes and we mapped out a few show stopping numbers that were guaranteed to get the room laughing. We also started the casting process which included ringing up friends and family in order to rope them into our plans.

When the day arrived and our league of extraordinary theatre professionals gathered in a circle in our living room, I was overcome with emotion. This slightly hair-brained idea had suddenly become very real and the emotional weight of it hit me. This was no longer just me and Suz’s weird little project, but something that this amazing community had now gathered together to bring to life.

I began to speak and my eyes welled up. I quickly abandoned my prepared opening remarks and instead spoke words of gratitude from my heart.

We collectively took a moment to ground ourselves in what we were about to do, and then Suz and I launched into describing our vision. Scene by scene, we shared the plan for a fairly complicated production that included a cast of many, loads of choreography, and a live band. We were quite tickled by what we presented, and half an hour later, after talking through our vision, we opened the floor to questions.

There was a polite silence. And then someone spoke up, “It’s great but It’s not quite what we thought it would be…”

“What did you think it would be?” we asked.

“Well, we thought that it would be more of your story. Not the actual story of Fiddler on the Roof.”

My stomach dropped. We had already created these vivid images of the event in our minds and receiving this feedback from our assembled team was disorienting.

Then someone else spoke up. “I’m glad you said that,” they started, “because I feel exactly the same way, but I was too afraid to say anything.”

The confusion around what we were pitching was unanimous. The consensus was that it needed to be our story. No one expected (or wanted) us to celebrate our anniversary with a mediocre amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof. It soon became clear that we needed to shift away from learning to sing our favourite songs and memorizing lines from the play, and instead use Fiddler as a framework to tell the story of our 25+ years relationship.

I didn’t know what to say. After being jolted by what felt like a sizeable rejection, it became obvious. They were right. I had been hiding behind the myth that we were essentially doing this as a lark, when instead this event could be personal, significant and incredibly meaningful.

As of this June I will have been married to my wife for 25 years. We met when we were both 22 years old. There have been moments over the years that have been ecstatic, with my heart bursting out of my chest with love for her and the life we have created. There have also been times that have been incredibly hard. Times that took serious work to come back to each other and times when I felt like throwing in the towel and splitting up our assets.

The reward I feel in my heart right now is a true love and admiration for the complex and wildly imperfect life that we have built together. I know myself so much better than I did when we were married in 2001. And I know Suz better too, including her many gifts and struggles. We’ve raised two wonderful kids, and we’ve matured in our careers and in the process of adulting, but we also still love to play. Our anniversary Fiddler event will be uniquely us, whimsical and fun. And it will be so much more than a punchline.

As our friends said goodbye, we felt so much clearer about the project. The show is not about pulling off a ridiculous stunt. It is about reflecting on our life together and giving it a celebratory and theatrical shape. It is a gift to ourselves after twenty five years and a chance to share our story with the people we hold dear.

Our next deadline, given to us by our incredible team of advisors, is to have a full script for the event prepared by January. Our current page count on that script: zero. But we’ve got some ideas. Stay tuned…

Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year.
Two Gen X friends.
Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
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Hello Midlifers!

Many of you might be relieved to know that this is the final instalment of the Beard Experiment, where I have been growing my first-ever beard at age 53. I am going to tell you whether I’ve decided to keep it or shave it, and why.

A while ago, I was told that someone commented (behind my back), “How much can someone possibly talk about a beard???” It turns out, the answer is that I can talk about a beard a lot because it has been a shockingly impactful experiment. And as it turns out, the Beard Experiment is not really about the beard itself at all.

In part one, Confessions of a Beardless Man, I explored the midlife identity issues that led me to finally ‘let it grow.’ In part two, The Summer I Turned Hairy, I detailed the highly entertaining reactions to various stages of facial hair growth, including my own family roasting my beard at length.

The Data

• The beard is officially 200 days old TODAY. 200 days!

• I’ve purchased one beard brush and one beard trimmer.

• The beard has been trimmed three times by Mike and Marvin at Main Barbers and approximately 12 times by my new beard trimmer.

• I’ve gone through one small bottle of beard oil.

• I have been called Santa seven times. Papa Smurf twice. Dumbledore once.

• I’ve been told I look like famous tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou once. Mandy Patinkin twice.

• I have been told it makes me look old more times than I can count or remember.

More Data: The Tribe Has Spoken

I included a poll at the end of Part Two asking for your input on the future of my face.

As of this writing, the results are clear: the beard wins in a landslide. (Also, I’m pretty sure that the 15% of people voting for a return to a clean shave included multiple votes from both my parents…)

Observations: It’s Not About The Beard. It’s About Identity.

I’m still figuring out who Midlife Steve is. However, I do know this. Midlife Steve is going to be a departure from my previous incarnation as Striving Type A Steve. I really was a clean-cut, LEGO Business Man clone. Proof? This has been my profile photo for over a decade:

I showed up, tried to offend no one, had a short haircut and friendly demeanour, and busted my butt to try and prove my worth and achieve security of one sort or another. I have been a people pleaser my whole life. I have been a rule-follower my whole life. Nothing filled me with more hot shame than failing at something or getting in trouble.

And now? It’s not like I’m suddenly a goth anarchist, that I have lost empathy for others, or have decided to live in the woods.

I will admit, though, that I find myself questioning a lot of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

I recently wrote about the Three Midlife Questions I’ve been asking myself, and it’s been an incredibly powerful exercise. It’s made me realize that there are parts of myself that I have buried or hidden for fear of judgment or not being ‘normal.’ It may be obvious to a lot of you who only know me from this newsletter, but I really enjoy expressing my creativity.

My childhood memories are filled with drawing, writing, storytelling, and making stupid home movies. I have a degree in Literature. I spent most of my career in the media.

A funny thing happened, though. I traded creative work for managing creative teams. Then I co-founded a podcasting company that helped other organizations and brands learn to make shows filled with Creative Bravery. I became the business development and strategy guy, selling and teaching creativity instead of practising it.

As I left the ‘doing’ of creativity and pursued ‘leading’ creative teams, my media consumption changed enormously. I stopped reading fiction for years and instead went on deep dives into productivity, entrepreneurship, leadership, culture, change management, and all sorts of other non-fiction. I basically created my own version of an MBA so I could get better at leading teams and, eventually, a company.

A while ago, I wrote about a moment of career revelation:

At lunch, a friend complimented me on my entrepreneurial instincts and without thinking about it, I said, “I’m not really an entrepreneur. I am honestly an accidental entrepreneur. I’m really a Creative who needed to find a new business model to be able to do the work I really love doing and that I’m good at.”

Wow.

As soon as it left my mouth, something shifted. “Accidental entrepreneur” instantly resonated. It doesn’t mean that I’m not an entrepreneur or that I’m not good at it, but it did hit home that being an entrepreneur is not the thing that drives me intrinsically. I didn’t dream of “being an entrepreneur” when I was kid. I dreamed of being on SCTV or Saturday Night Live. Or writing books like Kurt Vonnegut or John Irving.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about that lunch conversation.

And since hitting a bunch of midlife transitions, I’ve thought a lot about how to reconnect with that creative person at a deeper level.

This Midlife Field Guide project is a massive attempt to do just that. The writing, the multimedia storytelling formats I’m playing around with on Instagram, the videos I’m starting to make, the talks I’ve been starting to give about midlife… it all feels like I have re-entered a major groove of creativity that is deeply aligned with how I’m wired.

It feels really, really good.

Congrats, Creative Guy! (WTF Does This Have To Do With Your Stupid Beard?)

I promise this is still all about the beard… and about more than the beard. In reconnecting with my creative identity, I quickly realized something else that is very important.

I’m kinda done with fitting in for the sake of fitting in. My clean-shaven, short-haired look is such a powerful visual symbol of that identity.

And I’m done with it.

Which brings us back to the beard.

The beard is not a beard.

It’s a symbol that I’m not the same guy I was before the beard. It’s a symbol (and constant reminder) that I’m embracing a new version of myself. I’m giving myself permission to be uncomfortable. I’m giving myself permission to be different than who I’ve been in the past. I’m giving myself permission to be okay with negative feedback or people who prefer the previous version of myself.

The beard is my way of telling everyone that this is Creative Midlife Steve, and I’m no longer good ol’ Type A LEGO Business Man Steve.

I still don’t recognize the guy in the mirror with a beard. And I like that! I’m enjoying getting to know him. Every time I see myself, it’s a visual reminder that I’m inhabiting a new version of myself, and it’s kinda exciting.

I’m not the only one not recognizing the new guy. My step-daughter, Charlotte, has been bang-on in her roasting of the beard and her observations about how my internal wiring manifested itself in my consistently tight personal grooming.

She told me it was highly confusing for her to see me with a beard because I never have a hair out of place. I have always gotten my hair cut very regularly. I’ve always had the exact same short haircut. And… I’ve always been clean-shaven.

And suddenly, she is discombobulated because all that has changed. She said it’s like I’m suddenly a different person and she doesn’t know what to make of it.

YES, Charlotte! This is exactly why I’m doing it!

Embracing Aging Instead of Avoiding It

Charlotte also castigated me for making myself look older. She said that I have smooth, unwrinkled skin and that it makes no logical sense to cover it up with white beard hair that makes me look ancient.

Over the last 200 days, there has been so much feedback about how much older the beard makes me look. I waffled back and forth about whether I should shave it so that I wouldn’t feel old, but I recently had an epiphany.

So what if being clean-shaven makes me look young? I’m fifty-three! As someone who has looked a bit like an overgrown schoolboy for most of my adult life, maybe it’s time to embrace looking older instead of attempting to stave it off as long as possible.

These days, it doesn’t even feel bad to hear that I look older. It almost feels like… I’ve grown up. (Which is ridiculous at 53.)

The Beard Is A Metaphor For Midlife

This whole experiment, which sounded initially like a stupid stunt, has turned out to be quite meaningful and transformational.

I’m now going to reach even farther into the layers of deep beard meaning…

The beard has become a symbol of this whole Midlife Field Guide project for me.

As you will soon find out, most of the material I developed in a stand-up comedy course was about the beard. The beard featured prominently in my talk at ’s Shift Sessions event. It’s because the beard is, in many ways, a metaphor for the midlife journey.

Midlife is a transition, full of change. To use ’s metaphor, I feel like I am emerging from my Midlife Chrysalis, changed. Instead of transforming from a worm into a beautiful butterfly, though, I am emerging from my chrysalis looking older and, according to my father, “less attractive!” 😜

It takes courage to change how you appear to others and how you appear to yourself. It’s not an instant change either. It takes time, and there are different stages of growth.

When you first start growing a beard, the transition begins. It’s subtle stubble at first, but quickly people begin to notice that you’re different than who you were before.

This attention paid to your changing appearance is uncomfortable. The beard growth itself is uncomfortable and itchy. Skin gets irritated and red.

Soon, though, the beard starts to come in and take shape, much like the new midlife “you” starts to get increasingly comfortable the more you explore it and live in it day-to-day.

Some people get it and like the new beard. Some people don’t get it and want the old version of you back. So it is with midlife.

The beard is a journey. It’s trying on a new identity. It’s dressing up as a new version of yourself. And while the beard journey shifts your exterior appearance, the midlife journey transforms you internally.

At the end of the day, you get to decide what you think. You get to decide which version of you lives on to see another day.

Revisiting The Hypothesis

Here’s what I predicted back when I started this experiment in May, along with the actual results:

• I think I will have a meaty goatee, complemented by hideously patchy hair bits on the side of my face. ❌ Shockingly, I can grow a full beard.

• I think it will be embarrassing and uncomfortable, especially when it’s growing in ✅ 100% accurate.

• I think I will not feel professional ✅ Very accurate. I felt so weird popping on Zoom calls or running into clients or colleagues for the first few months.

• There is no possible way that I will look like the cool, Robert Redford-like Chill Mountain Man in A.I. Option 4, but that’s what I want my first beard to look like. ❌ I look way more like Chill Mountain Man than I ever expected. Nice work, Chat GPT!

• I predict that most of my family, but especially my mother, will HATE the beard with a passion ✅ 100% accurate. My mother, father, and step-daughter, Charlotte, all disapprove of the beard (especially my mother, as predicted!)

• I predict I will not like it and won’t keep it. ❌ After reading this far, you will likely not be shocked to learn that I have enjoyed the beard more than I ever thought.

  ---

Conclusion

I’m choosing Beard Steve.

I’m choosing the creative guy who was buried under layers of productivity, management, and entrepreneurship thinking. I’m choosing the guy that you’re reading right now, because this feels like the real me without filters.

Does Beard Steve look older? According to Charlotte, and many, many others… absolutely. Do I look like I just wandered out of the woods? Maybe. But for the first time in my life, I’m not trying to look like the person I think I should be. I’m just looking like who I am right now.

And if that guy gets mistaken for a mall Santa a lot in the next month? I can live with that.

Beard Badge unlocked!

I’m off to get a new profile photo.

See you in the comments,

Beard Steve

What Is Your ‘Beard’?

What is the change you’ve been secretly wanting to make, but you’re afraid it’s too ‘weird,’ too ‘old,’ or too different from who you’ve always been? Whatever it is—dyeing your hair, changing up your wardrobe, or digging into a dream you’ve been putting off—what would happen if you let it grow?

It might itch at first. You might get some weird looks from people who know you best. But after a while, you just might like who you see in the mirror.

Final Pitch for Movember!

If you’ve enjoyed #beardmania this month, please consider donating to the Midlife Field Guide’s Movember page. It’s a terrific cause, and we’d love to reach our fundraising goal with your help.

As if writing and making videos about facial hair for a month isn’t enough, I also got my prostate checked for Movember, which is very important for those of us over fifty. (For a future experiment, I’m doing a bunch of preventative medical testing with the amazing team at Georgia Healthcare in Vancouver, and they graciously included the prostate exam.)

Please donate here. Thanks for your support!

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Welcome to the Midlife Field Guide.
One year. Two Gen X friends. Countless personal life experiments.
Can they figure out the meaning of midlife?
Subscribe for free!

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Hello, Midlifers!

I have been waiting patiently for Movember to roll around so that I could talk more about The Summer I Turned Hairy. I have grown my first beard at age 53 and it’s transformed me outside… and inside.

Trust me. I know that growing a beard does not sound like a life-changing experience. However! Consider this:

• How often do you get a chance to radically change your physical appearance, to the point where many people don’t even recognize you anymore?

• What is it like to have tons of people providing feedback about your face… directly to your face?

• How often do you get a chance to bring to life some un-lived version of yourself to see how it feels?

• How does it feel to do something that you’ve always wondered about, but have never had the courage to actually commit to doing?

The beard has been all that, and more. Here’s how it went…

Diary of a Wispy Chin

Stage 1: Stubble

Thursday, May 15, 2025 is the day I decide to stop shaving and start the Beard Project. I don’t tell anyone, not even my wife. Very quickly, I start getting comments about the scruff on my face. This is because, my entire life, I have shaved regularly and had a short, neat haircut. My children call my look “LEGO Business Man” and it’s not a compliment.

My wife, Debbie, and my son, Dawson, both like the idea of the beard. My daughter, Cedar, and step-daughter, Charlotte… not so much. Charlotte is emphatic.

“Get rid of it! It’s all WHITE! It makes you look SO OLD!”

Quickly, the stubble becomes itchy and my skin is irritated and red. I buy beard oil to see if it will help. It does not.

Soon, it becomes obvious that some areas are growing faster than others. The goatee is coming in hard and fast, while the sides of my face are thin and patchy, like a sickly lawn desperately in need of water and fertilizer.

Even though it’s unkempt and patchy, I definitely look less child-like and significantly older.

This is the stage when I start getting unsolicited beard advice from other men. The number one piece of advice? Get a beard trimmer. On May 25th, my beard trimmer arrives. However, I am afraid to use it. I have no idea what I am doing or what settings to use, and I don’t want to do something dumb and look a complete idiot in public. So I just leave it in the box.

This decision leads to Stage 2 of the Beard.

Stage 2: Chaos

The consequence of not using the beard trimmer is that my facial hair is getting unruly. The bottom of my neck looks like a Rorschach test—random patterns of hair and skin that you could probably use to analyze your personality.

I become much more self-conscious about the beard. I have a business meeting and I am worried that my scruffy appearance will imply all sorts of negative things about me. “This guy can’t even manage a beard… how’s he ever going to do anything professional?”

This is also when I reveal my beard to the person who I know will hate it the most of all: my mother. She loathes beards. This has probably subconsciously deterred me from growing a beard so it is particularly exciting to reveal the beard to her with no advance warning.

My mother will be even more disappointed in me for posting this video of her reaction:

I don’t know if there will ever be a better quote than this one from my mother:

“You don’t look like my son.”

My father was not impressed either:

“It doesn’t enhance your looks. It detracts from your looks. I’m not being rude. I’m just being honest. We’re just being helpful. Do you want us to lie?”

I am increasingly self-conscious. Other people are definitely noticing. It’s a distinct change from what people expect of me, which seems to be “clean-cut man-child nerd.” Maybe now it’s “unkempt man-child nerd?”

Also… the bottom of the moustache is now getting in my mouth. I am getting yoghurt and sauces in my moustache and goatee. At mealtime, I feel like a farm animal at the trough.

Stage 3: The Trim

I need help. Desperately. I go to my trusted barber, Mike Shamoon, at Main Street Barbershop here in Vancouver. I tell Mike this is my first ever beard and I have no idea what to do. We have a fantastic conversation about beards while he cuts everything back and gives me a proper beard line, below which everything is shaved clean.

The beard line is a huge strategic decision. It’s like giving your beard a personality. Some beard guys are hard-core stubble-and-ballcap types with sleeve tattoos and pickup trucks. Some beard guys are hipsters and musicians with big, beefy, wild beards that complement their retro consignment wear. Some beard guys are immaculate stubble guys in designer suits. And some beard guys have a pretentious air, like they are professors or wizards or can’t wait to have a long puff on an old-fashioned pipe.

What kind of beard guy am I? I don’t even know!

Mike helps me choose something that is slightly shorter on the sides, slightly longer in the chin, and a pretty clean neck. After he’s done, I’m confident that this is a great beard line for me.

Soon it’s all done and I leave my first beard trim with strict instructions from Mike. I have to start shaving semi-regularly again, shaving down only (not up and down!), and sticking with the new beard line he’s created for me. I feel like I’ve just had a lesson in adulting and I don’t want to let Mike down.

You can watch all the nail-biting excitement of my first beard trim with Mike here:

And just like that, I’m suddenly now a comfortable beardo with an actual beard that I’m maintaining.

Stage 4: The Full Beard

I’ve survived Beard Puberty!

Despite the odds, it turns out that I can grow a pretty meaty beard. I am gobsmacked. People around me have been shocked, too.

“That’s a full-on beard!” a friend shouts at me over Zoom this week.

I look in the mirror and I can barely recognize myself anymore. The beard has changed the shape of my jaw line. I feel like the horse in the old joke, “A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, why the long face?”

Apparently, I’m not the only one finding my new appearance jarring. I got this text from my good friend, Chris:

”Dear God! You look like a different person. I feel like the kid who sees their dad with a beard for the first time and is freaked out.”

This summer, on vacation, I pop by to say hi to a friend I haven’t seen in nine months. She literally does not recognize me and thinks I am an intruder.

It’s still so odd for me to have this thing on my face. My hands touch it, stroke it, and pat it unconsciously, like it’s a small pet or Tamagotchi that I’m in charge of keeping happy and healthy.

Now the question is what to do with it. Am I a beard guy now? Or is this just an experiment? How long do I want this thing to get? Or do I just want to go back to smooth-baby-faced Steve?

It feels like I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into the beard so far and I’m reticent to just shave it all off too soon.

However, it’s very hard to decide whether to keep it. Why?

The Feedback

I’ve never in my life had more feedback about my physical appearance than I have with this beard experiment. It turns out, beards are polarizing!

Some people love it.

”You’re one of the rare people who really suit having a beard.”

Other people (read: my mother) hate it. At a party this summer, my mother is caught secretly trying to rally other attendees to join Team Anti-Beard.

LOTS of people think it makes me look really, really old. From my step-daughter, Charlotte:

“It has aged you ten years. You don’t even have wrinkles! You shouldn’t have this beard while you can still look young.”

OUCH!

Several people think I look like I woke up in a dumpster.

”Have you gambled away all your possessions? What happened?” (actual quote)

Charlotte chimes in with another classic line after seeing this photo of my brother and me playing in a golf tournament together:

“You like your brother’s dad—it looks like a Father/Son golf tournament.”

OUCH again!

Who Am I?

It’s funny, because most of the feedback starts with “You look…” That makes sense. The beard changes the way people see me. It’s like a Halloween costume. Regrettably, I feel like for Halloween, I dressed up as the dad from Family Ties.

The bigger question, though, is not what I look like. It’s about who I actually am. And I’m still struggling with the mixed messages the beard is sending me.

Yes, the beard makes me look much older. Is that such a problem? I’ve always looked young. Maybe it’s time to embrace my actual age . For some reason, it doesn’t even feel particularly bad to hear that I look older. It almost feels like… I’m grown up.

The beard has also served as a Membership Card in the Club for Manly Men. People genuinely look at me and treat me differently because of the beard. I’m getting beard nods from other beardos. More fist bumps. I’ve been invited to more dude-stuff, including something cleverly called He-Man Live Ball, which is an hour of tennis where guys pelt balls at each other as hard as they can. (By the power of Greyskull, I am having loads of fun doing this!)

So despite all the negative feedback about looking like I’m ready to crawl into the grave, there are surprisingly positive aspects to my chin sweater. I really do feel like I’m play-acting a different, unlived version of myself to see what it feels like… and it mostly feels pretty good!

The Final Straw?

I have a surreal experience with a completely objective observer of the beard. She is a friend of my wife, Debbie, visiting from out of town. We’ve never met before, but we quickly find out that we share a common friend and I wonder out loud if have other connections. She shares that it’s unlikely because I’m too old to know people her age.

She is a few years older than me. That means she thinks I am at least six to ten years older than I actually am.

Before the beard—thanks to my clean-shaven, boyish face—people generally thought I was three to five years younger than I actually am.

So the beard had potentially aged me by up to FIFTEEN YEARS. What!?!?!

That evening, I am convinced that I need to get rid of this thing.

The Hairy Hunger Games: Have Your Say!

I still have the beard. I have still not decided what to do with the beard.

Do I keep this new, hairy, elderly version of Steve? Or do I revert back to the clean-shaven “LEGO Business Man” look that my kids have mocked me about for years?

I get to choose which version of Steve lives or dies in this next phase of my life. And it’s not an easy decision.

Against my better judgment, I am opening the first ever poll of the Midlife Field Guide community to get your input. I invite you to vote on the future of my hairy face, and, if you are so inclined, to roast or celebrate the beard as you see fit in the comments.

Cast your vote in the Hairy Hunger Games below!

Even more fascinating, here is what A.I. thought I’d look like versus reality—eerie!

Next edition, I will let you know the fate of my face and the winner of the Hairy Hunger Games!

In the meantime, as it is Movember and I’m writing about facial hair growth, I am also fundraising for men’s health. It would be so awesome and appreciated if you would consider donating to a great cause and help the Midlife Field Guide reach our goal.

You can donate to our Movember team here. Thanks for your support of Movember, even if you don’t support my personal beard 🤪

I’m looking forward to your beard roasts in the comments!

Steve

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