There is a German word: sehnsucht, which denotes a deep, often painful yearning for an alternate, unreachable state of being, which includes lives you didn’t live. Lewis talks about the “secret signature of each soul” containing sehnsucht. It has also been well researched at the Max Planck Institute, where it’s defined as encompassing “thoughts and feelings about all aspects of life that are unrealized” and specifically identified its connection to imagined alternative life trajectories.

But enough of the academic background; more to the lived experience: some holograms have recently stumbled into my apartment, too, Taylor. It got me wondering, how do you claim the versions of yourself you never lived? Are those versions of you as much you as the version you are today?

In my 20s, I thought the purpose of life was to leave a mark on the world. Perhaps I still think that, but in a different way. My mark on the world once revolved around my career. I thought by leading large teams and building interesting and useful businesses I was contributing my verse.

Today, at what I hope to be the midpoint of my life, I am less concerned with commercial endeavors and more preoccupied with the unbroken chain of life to which I find myself having contributed. Sometimes I think about the unbroken chain of women who had to give birth all the way back to the dawn of human existence to make my life, and my children’s lives, possible, and I feel a sort of religious dedication to humanity. The ghosts of my ancestors appear to be dancing with the holograms of my unlived lives. Would they be proud of my modern existence?

While the hologram of my once ambitious #girlboss era shakes her hips in my periphery, my disillusioned 42-year-old self blinks slowly in the wake of her faulty return on investment. Today, rather than worrying too much about being noteworthy, I ponder if perhaps simply being here, and making peace with my existence, is all there is to it. After all, at some point in history, perhaps in the Roman Empire, perhaps in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a Taylor Swift of that society. He or she was renowned as an entertainer, a spiritual leader, a thinker, or an inventor. Their name was remembered for generations beyond their biological life, and it may have felt unthinkable that this person’s name would someday be forgotten…until it was. Taylor Swift will also be forgotten someday. Whether that is because humans no longer roam the earth after their catastrophic end (the way of the dinosaurs) or because society has evolved and changed so drastically that it’s unrecognizable by today’s standards. And ultimately, was our unknown innovator’s life more or less worthwhile than Taylor Swift’s, or our own? How many people need to see or witness your existence to validate it? How long does your name or memory need to be preserved for you to make peace with your life? Which brings me back to the holograms of my own life.

There are many choice points I can now look back on and see the path of my life. Where I decided to attend university, choosing my husband as my long-term life partner, saying yes to various career opportunities, becoming a mother, and deciding to change my career trajectory, to name a few. Would my life have led me to this point, with these people, but on a different road, had any of those decisions been altered? My sense is no. But equally, as Bernhard Schlink says in The Granddaughter (a novel I cannot stop recommending this year), “my unlived lives are nine, as much as the lived one.” So perhaps I can find some peace in watching my collection of holograms play out their lives, without having to step into them.

I started imagining how I would have managed this injury and recovery if it had happened in my teens, 20s, 30s versus now. It got me thinking about the psychological and emotional journey my life has taken, for better and for worse (butmostly for the better). Let me begin by saying when the injury occurred I heard the infamous “pop” in my knee. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that the first series of thoughts that went through my head were “I couldn’t have done my ACL, because that’s something that happens to other people…not to me.”

Stop and think about the absurdity of that thought for a moment. To say to myself, in complete seriousness, I am somehow above, or live outside of, standard human biology, is a level of delusion I would likely mock in a friend. And it got me thinking a lot about delusion and arguing with reality. Later in the morning, after going back to the lodge, I had to quite literally say out loud to myself: “there is no arguing with reality. You are injured and it could require surgery.” I repeated it multiple times to remind myself of reality’s veracity.

But what role does delusion play in our lives? Is delusion all bad? I have sometimes described myself as possessing self-efficacy to a fault. That delusion has served me well in many ways. It was a voice in my head telling me I should, obviously, be leading a multi hundred person team in my 20s and a multi thousand person team in my 30s. If not me, who? It was a voice that told me I am a naturally born mother and, well of course I will figure out how to be a mom to my children. It is a voice that encourages me to push my physical boundaries well into my 40s. But when does that voice stop being a cheerleader, helping you fulfill your potential in this life, and where does it become a source of suffering?

I look back on myself in my 20s and I think I often generated much undue suffering in my own mind. My need to be right, a constant quest for why (maybe I’m still suffering with that one), my embracing of the social mask of business, my disappointment in a system I didn’t create but wanted desperately to change, my constant moving of the goal post and pushing off fears of enoughness, each of these could (and perhaps will be) a substack entry of their own. So many of these emotional patterns were emblematic of me polishing the bars I felt were caging me. But equally, my clinging to them was also an argument with reality that perhaps deluded me into challenging but fulfilling experiences.

Today I watch my 87 year old father engage in this same dance. By all accounts he must be in the top 5% of health for humans born in 1939. He is mentally sharp, informed on current events, engaged with his grandchildren, interested in deep conversation, and still very active (even if slightly unbalanced from time to time). And when we discuss the deleterious effects of aging, he has the gall to be hard on himself. He is deeply annoyed and embarrassed that he’s hard of hearing. Would you expect a near-90-year-old to have great hearing? I know I wouldn’t. Then he’s irritated that he can only make it to the first mile of the family hike and turn back. Again, what does he expect? His fitness at 45? 60? We are truly our own worst critics. But I found myself - a 42-year-old with no business whatsoever giving this wise man advice - offering it anyway. Don’t be so damned hard on yourself. Enter into a relationship with your pain, your embarrassment, and your full experience as a human. Invite Mara in for tea, as the wise Buddha did. Pain, emotional or physical, is a guest that knocks loudly until invited in, then it often leaves on its own accord once met. Simultaneously, I found myself cheering on his delusion. Keep fighting, old man! Reach for the moon and expect to live to 100, because I don’t want to navigate this earth without you. How do we true up these opposing concepts?

I know for certain there is no denying reality as it relates to my knee. If I had kept skiing on it, there is no doubt I would have created pain and suffering of the physical variety. But I am delusional enough to think I’ll be going on my women’s CAT skiing trip again in 2027, and that dream is motivating me on my recovery journey. Like most everything in life, it’s probably a dance. And why are we all so concerned with who’s ahead and who’s behind, when all we’re doing is dancing with ourselves?

There is a ski lodge nestled in the interior of British Columbia called Baldface Lodge. Baldface is one of my happy places. Rumor has it there is a 30,000-person waitlist for a seat on a cat, a rumor I do not intend to fact-check, as it makes me feel even more special when I go there. Not that the experience at Baldface needs enhancement - a private lodge accessible only by helicopter nestled in over 30,000 acres in the Selkirk Mountains, it is an unrivaled adventure.

This year, my friend and I decided we would fill our 12-person cat with all women. No small feat, we recruited 10 moms who put on a tour de force of skiing, lodge apres, dancing, and general good times. Surrounded by a group of hard-charging, deep-thinking, nature-loving, joy-infused women, I was ignited in ways that are difficult to put into words. Unfortunately, on the first run of the first day out on the snow, I blew my ACL. Yes, the first run of the first day. Knee injuries are a hazard of our lifestyle. I heard that infamous “pop” throughout my body, and knew that I was the unlucky one that day.

I had the cat drop me back at the lodge, and I spent the day icing it and hoping I was mistaken. Alone in the lodge, while the epic women’s trip I had helped to organize was out getting some of the best turns and most exciting adventures of their season; I cried a few times. My tears were an alchemy of grief, acceptance, FOMO, and anxiety about the road ahead.

In my experience, midlife brings a multidimensional richness to life, but some of those dimensions can be sad.

I felt an acute awareness of my own fragility, even my own mortality, as I hobbled around the lodge for the next few days. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I did tolerate it.

On day two of the trip, I woke up having slept poorly because of the swelling and aching in my knee. As we brushed our teeth, one of the three women I was rooming with entered the bathroom area, looking shell-shocked. She informed us that her very best friend in the world had been buried and killed in the deadly avalanche in Tahoe the day before. The victim’s husband had just called to share the news - an intense blow as my roommate had introduced the two of them over a decade ago. That group had also been a women’s trip, on a similar adventure to ours, enjoying the beauty and adventure that skiing offers. Most of those women lived in Marin County, which is where we lived before relocating to Park City. Heady doesn’t even begin to describe it - the feeling that someone just one degree away, seeking the same adventures I seek, didn’t just snap her ACL, she lost her life. Between my own injury and this shocking news, day 2 alone in the lodge was shrouded in a forlorn cloud.

Each day, around 3 pm, the cat returns to the lodge, and the exhausted but exhilarated skiers gather to revel in the day’s experience. Pink noses, compression lines on their faces from goggles and helmets, broad smiles, and an aura of exuberance are the hallmarks of a post-shred happy hour. So each day, 11 beautiful women stepped off the cat, exuding exuberant energy. On day 2, I decided that while my trip was certainly not going to be what I expected, it was my choice: enjoy the experience I was having or wallow in self-pity and fear.

I recently embarked on Viktor Frankl’s seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning. While I certainly wouldn’t shed any white woman tears and compare my knee injury to his experience, his lessons rang in my ears.

Frankl is clear that suffering is inevitable, but how you respond to it is not. Suffering stripped of meaning becomes unbearable; suffering with meaning is endurable. Having spent (perhaps too much) time contemplating why on God’s green earth I have human life and self-awareness, I do know that connection to other people and to nature offer me tremendous meaning. Frankl also contends that modern life creates a widespread sense of emptiness. People have the freedom to do whatever they want (like go on a cat skiing trip), but often lack a clear sense of why. That vacuum is often filled by conformity (doing what others do) or by totalitarianism (doing what others tell you to do), neither of which offers genuine meaning. But what’s difficult is that meaning must be discovered through life’s experiences. It can’t be sold to you in a TikTok video, created for you by someone else, and it can’t be manufactured arbitrarily. Put another way, meaning must be discovered, not invented. I made a choice to enjoy the connection with brilliant women I was afforded, to engage in lively conversation with the staff at Baldface (including a riveting dissection of Mary, Fuck, Kill: Elmo, The Count, Oscar the Grouch), and to spend time taking in the untouched nature surrounding me while I sat in uncertainty about my knee, and grief for the loss of life in the Sierra Nevadas.

All that from a torn ACL on a girls’ ski trip, huh? Welcome to my brain.

I am now scheduled for surgery and have a long road to recovery ahead (if you’ve recovered from an ACL or other knee injuries, please comment and give me tips, or reach out directly.) I will also have a mental recovery, as I rebuild confidence in my abilities on the mountain. But I intend to follow the wisdom of Frankl by “say[ing] yes to life in spite of all the tragic aspects of human existence.” This feels like more salient advice than ever as headlines of war wash over us daily. I have discovered that experiencing my body in nature, feeling intertwined with the mountains, and an authentic connection with my loved ones and community are certainly elements that comprise my purpose. To that end, perhaps this injury has served its purpose - it has shown me what I value, and solidified parts of what comprises meaning in my own life. And if the dance floor at Baldface is any testament, an ACL injury cannot stop a grown woman from throwing down a few martinis and some one-legged boogie.

About a year ago, I caught up with an old colleague who had recently transitioned into parenthood. She and her husband were debating whether or not to have a second child. We were having something of a heart-to-heart; she prepared with many questions for me about life as a mom to three. I probed a little deeper to understand what seemed to be at the center of the consternation. “I worry that we risk not properly optimizing our, and our child’s, lives.”

I found myself experiencing a strange mix of empathy and genuine pity. Let me be clear that this friend neither wants nor needs my pity, and I certainly did not feel it from a place of superiority. I think that sense of pity was actually for a version of myself who could easily have remained trapped in a cycle of optimizing my life.

Entirely unrelatedly, two weeks ago, we took a family ski vacation to Colorado. The house we stayed in had a Jura coffee machine, which brought me no excitement. This lack of excitement was, indeed, from a place of superiority. We used to own a Jura coffee machine, and there is only one word I can use to describe the espresso it produces: loveless. Jura machines will put you out a few grand, so it’s not that they’re cheaply made. Quite the contrary, they are large, appear substantial, and function well. What they are is reductive. They’re designed for a coffee drinker who wants something a little more special than a Mister Coffee, but isn’t interested in learning to operate a real espresso machine. (And I cannot fault someone for that, it’s quite the undertaking.) If I sound like an out-of-touch coffee snob, I might respond by saying...if the shoe fits…

But back to the Jura coffee. It’s not that it was bad, and someone with a well-optimized life may indeed adore their Jura coffee. But it lacks art. It lacks input. It is, by design, not a dance between the machine and its operator; it requires no feel for temperature and produces the same product regardless of the bean’s vintage. But Kayti, aren’t these good things? Reasons to buy a Jura? And how on earth is your asinine rant about coffee related to your friend having another child? Aren’t you usually talking about marriage, parenting, or grief on here? To which I answer: yes.

I have a hypothesis that the popularized concept of optimizing your time, born after the industrial revolution and further refined by technology and tech culture in the 21st century, is simply an avoidance tactic. I recall living in Manhattan and power-walking to my gym at lunch, counting the minutes to make sure I could run an extra mile on the treadmill. I remember wearing the first-generation Fitbit, entering my steps and sleep data into a Google Sheet to track my progress (towards what God only knows). I look back on these consuming endeavors, and I pity myself. I pity the ways in which that version of me felt safer time-stamping my step count than she did inhabiting her own body. I pity that she felt a need to fill her active mind with small tasks and avoid big feelings of grief. I pity that she saw life as so black and white, and struggled mightily to exist in the comfortable grey, in which wrongdoing and right doing simply don’t hold quite so much water.

Now, I am not saying cerebral experiences have disappeared from my existence - they have not. Nor am I saying they don’t have their time and place. But I am saying there is an art to living, and part of that art is letting go of the idea that anyone can fulfill a false promise that if they could simply organize their calendars a little better, then (and only then) could they finally take a breath. As Oliver Burkman puts it in his book Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and at home; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.”

I often wonder what type of world I am preparing my children for. And the truth of the matter is that none of us know (or, if you do, please reach out and set up a call with me.) Humans are, in general, very bad at predicting the future. I do my best to consider what skills, emotional habits, and thought processes are likely to serve them.

I pick up the transcripts of my life, blow off the dust, and ask what feels important to pass on. One lesson, something I read nearly twenty years ago, comes from Dan Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. He describes the difference between instrumental and fundamental decision-making.

Instrumental decisions treat actions as means to an end, driven by external rewards like money, status, or advancement. Fundamental decisions are driven by intrinsic value, by meaning, curiosity, and values, by things worth doing for their own sake. Instrumental decisions prioritize efficiency; fundamental decisions provide purpose.

My guess is this will remain true forty years from now: when life becomes a hamster wheel of instrumentality, serving something external like money, status, dopamine hits, etc., it stops feeling like a life worth inhabiting.

I can’t tell my old colleague how many children she should have, but I do know I’m thrilled to be a mother to three humans. I can’t tell you not to invest in a Jura coffee maker, but I deeply enjoy my few minutes of bliss dancing with my Niche grinder, scale, portafilter, and steam wand.

I won’t pretend to know what decision makes sense for you or why. I only know that I’m building a life that doesn’t make sense to some, but makes a whole lot of sense to me. And that’s what I wish for my children, for the people I love, and for you, dear reader (there are tens of you). Perhaps this week, you can release a version of “optimizing your life” that’s causing you stress or avoidance. And with that time, I hope you do very little, and enjoy it.

But first, let’s have a little chat about time.

Time seems to have stopped behaving.

The passage of time once felt linear to me - slow, blunt, predictable. In my adult years, it has become far more fickle. The more time I accrue on planet Earth, the less concrete it feels. Perhaps no stretch of years illustrates this better than 2020–2025 in my own personal journey through the space-time continuum.

I promise I’ll return to New Year reflections, but lets linger a bit longer in the looking glass.

I gave birth to my third child in the summer of 2020, completing three childbirths in thirty-three months. My oldest was just entering toddlerhood; my middle was only sixteen months old. Six weeks after my youngest arrived, I began a C-level role at a public company.

At the time, I was entirely unaware of the emotional tsunami gathering force just offshore in my life. Desperate to return to routines, social validation, and the patterns that once brought me motivation and sanity in my pre-parent, pre-pandemic life, I was energized by the shape I imagined my life taking.

(Spoiler alert: that shape bore little resemblance to reality. I am proud to say that I neither drowned nor tread water, but that’s a story for another day.)

Between a toxic work environment, the relentless demands of three children under three, the full emergence of myself as a mother, and the collective rupture of the pandemic, 2020 represented a strange break in the line graph that once defined time for me. It was as if the trend line of life, which I had monitored so closely, suddenly burst open, leapt off the PowerPoint and swallowed me whole.

Five extraordinarily intense and beautiful years later, still inside that warped, four-dimensional version of time, I understand something I didn’t before: time is a kind of living grief. A constant reckoning with what is passing, paired with the knowledge that we can never go backward.

What am I supposed to do with that light note?

This is the emotional terrain from which I now approach things like New Year reflection.

From time to time, an external prompt allows us to step outside ourselves. The turning of the calendar year is one of those moments. I enjoy carving out time to look back, even when the year seems to have vanished in a blink. What did I read? Which relationships did I nourish? How did I grow (or not grow)? What is the state of my community? My country? What context am I living in now?

2025: A weird year (personally and collectively)

There are many adjectives one could use to summarize 2025. Between what feels like an eroding democracy, the rapid spread of AI into nearly every arena of daily life, and an internet culture evolving faster than most of us can metabolize, it’s easy to feel unsettled.

And yet, when I reflect on my own passage through this strange, nonlinear year, a more complicated picture emerges. I nourished deep friendships. I cried, some days many times, about my parents’ inevitable aging, despite their good health. I cried over my children, from both joy and fear. I felt confident as their mother. I felt deeply unsure as their mother. I watched live music. I wrote poetry. I began my academic path in social work. I fell more deeply in love with my husband. I traveled. Perhaps most memorably, I paid a sophomore visit to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. (Can we all agree the word needs more magic?)

If I had to summarize 2025 in a single word, it would be: weird.

Our family leaned into our inner weirdos. I tried on projects and identities that felt strange and unfinished. My career entered a transitional phase that resists clean narratives. It feels weird scrolling Reddit and trying to determine what content is human and what is AI. And while I don’t subscribe to the “we’re cooked” flavor of online liberalism, watching what’s happening in the White House right now is, even if you wanted it, just weird.

With the hard-earned understanding that time is not linear, and that we control far less than we’d like to admit, my word exiting a weird 2025 and entering 2026 is capacity.

Capacity as a grown skill

I won’t speak for everyone in their twenties, but at twenty-two, I did not yet have the capacity to meaningfully hold dialectical thinking. If I understood it at all, it was abstract and fragile. Twenty years later, it is the cornerstone of my emotional life.

My children can drive me to the brink of my sanity, and I can love them so deeply it aches my bones. I can step away from a high-status, high-paying role and still understand myself as a worthy member of society (this one took time to internalize). A destructive public figure can be causing irreparable harm and still be intellectually brilliant.

As I age, I find myself increasingly wary of anyone who speaks with too much certainty. Even modern science holds humility at its core, acknowledging that today’s settled knowledge may be tomorrow’s joke. This stands in stark contrast to the endless parade of online grifters selling the next pair of jeans, supplement, wellness habit, or therapeutic modality, each promising that your perfect life (or sanity) is just a few clicks and a few dollars away.

Anyone can build skepticism and end the cycle of fad diets, fad emotional hacks to happiness, and fad lives. But it takes practice, and it takes capacity.

Capacity in the wild

Recently, while standing in the school pickup line, a friend shared that her husband has been navigating a midlife crisis as he helps his parents through their final years. She said she hopes he’s over the hump, that things might return to normal.

I hope that feels true for them. But a quieter truth settled in me after our chat: in emotional terrain like that, things don’t really “get better.” Instead, we expand. We build lives capable of holding more. We grow our capacity.

Capacity is what allows us to carry the grief alongside the beauty, the pain alongside the meaning, the fear alongside the love. It’s what carries us through this nonlinear experience of being human.

In short, capacity gives us the ability to feel this catastrophic human existence.

A hope for 2026

My hope, for myself and for anyone reading, is that 2026 offers you more capacity. That capacity may require holding things you would rather avoid. But when we make room for them, something else follows: steadiness, humanity, and a quiet freedom that doesn’t depend on fixing anything at all.

As a matter of fact, I was not the last mom at pickup. (Although I was among the final few.) As a matter of opinion, however, I was the worst mother on the planet. Not just for being “the very last mom at pickup” at her cheerleading clinic, but for living in a semi-permanent state of locked horns with her amygdala.

In yoga you often hear the instructor say something along the lines of “the light in me sees the light in you.” The last six months between my daughter and I have been more like “the reactive amygdala in me sees the reactive amygdala in you” and is not followed with a namaste.

But before I go on, let me set the stage a little…

I am fairly certain people who parent closely with me would describe me as a certain mixture of extremely hands on and terrifyingly free range. I am highly attuned to my children’s emotional states. I notice the changing tides of their temperaments; I observe the various progressions and backslides they’re making over time. I know their friends names and their mom’s email addresses, and I spend enough time in their school to know the names of classmates with whom they do not socialize. I enjoy being embedded in my children’s emotional and relational lives.

Equally, I offer each of my kids a degree of physical freedom that often makes other parents uncomfortable. Two weeks ago I sent my five and six year old out trick or treating without adult supervision. Two years ago, when they were the tender ages of three, four and five, I left them to play independently at a nearby park so I could run home to pick up the American Girl doll my middle accidentally left at home. During my 15 minute interlude I received a call from a local area code, which turned out to be a dad at the park calling at the behest of my five-year-old because my three-year-old had fallen from the swing and was crying. Unperturbed (and proud that he remembered my phone number and our protocol “find a parent and ask them to call me” for this very situation) I returned to the park to find everyone happily playing. My inner parenting voice named Jonathan Haight would have been proud.

I share these details about my personal parent philosophies not because I believe them to be right (on the contrary I wonder frequently just how badly I’m messing it up), but because it offers insight into the games and strategies with which I engage.

Last week I realized I’d been playing the wrong game at the wrong time.

The recent flavor of ire I’ve been receiving, rather potently, from my daughter is less of a story of independence, and more of a story of codependence. Without realizing it, I have found myself in a constant negotiation with her about her state of being. An precocious and tempestuous six-year-old she often shows up to our interactions like a teapot with it’s lid flapping from the heat. One wrong move increases the temperature a single degree and her lid flips off as she whistles. I find myself enmeshed in her dysregulation, trying my darnedest to co-regulate, offer tools, and guide her on a path to connection. This usually fails.

I find my own prefrontal cortex yields to my lizard brain, and the emotional contagion begins. If you have parented a toddler or young child this cycle may feel familiar. And if you’re anything like me, you occasionally wonder to yourself “when did I turn into this person” when you blurt out something sanctimoniously parental like “you can be mad but you can’t be mean.”

Last week, though, a rare moment of parental revelation washed over me as I put on my most vanilla ice cream, unbothered face while she mustered up all the anger in her tiny frame and spewed it in my general direction.

I miss my husband.

Our family’s foundation was built on our relationship: one I cherish and value deeply. We have each found surer and surer footing in our own parenting approaches as the years have progressed and our children have grown. I am, no doubt, the emotional leader of the family in our home, a role many women feel comfortable but burdened in. Over the last few weeks I’ve sunk deeper and deeper into the turbulence of my developing six-year-old, awake in the small hours of the night worrying about the minutia of her emotional life.

But then I realized: she’s six.

My relationship is 17. I talk often to my kids about the “Good Will Piggy Bank” between us. I tell them that when I do something loving, kind or generous for them, I’m putting a coin in the bank. When they do the same in return, they are also making deposits. But other times, we have to make withdraws from the bank. Every relationship is constantly adding to, and taking away from, the piggy bank. I’ve cashed in on much of the “coins of good will” between my husband and I the last six months as I tuned into my children’s needs, schedules and desires. I can feel our balance is low.

So I decided that for a few days I would very much like to be “a bad, bad mom”. I stayed out of the fray of the irk and ire; I pulled the yoke downward and found smoother air in the grown up world. I acknowledged that I don’t always need to coach her out of her current emotional state. I can observe and not absorb. And in fact, from her perspective, being constantly told how to talk, think or feel is indeed exceptionally annoying.

My husband and I got tickets to a matinee movie and took ourselves out for dinner, something we’ve loved doing together since the aughts. I spent a few days making generous and enjoyable deposits into my marriage Piggy Bank of Good Will, and take a break from being mired in counting the coins of my children. To my surprise, the kids seemed better off after my vacation from hands on parenting.

The research supports this instinct. John Gottman’s work on the “emotional bank account” shows that stable couples maintain a roughly 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions, a buffer that protects relationships even during conflict. And in my observations marriages erode less from big betrayals but rather from the slow siphoning of attention as child-rearing, careers and modern demands swallows the oxygen. I don’t know what the research says about mother-child relationships, but maybe stepping back from the constant coaching gave more air for play, joy and fun.

Managing the bank accounts of my family’s emotional lives is more like a yoga practice than a financial controller. I find myself called to the idea of sthira-sukha, a yogi term capturing the state of putting in effort, but not trying too hard. I found the six-year-old in me was trying a little too hard, so I embraced the 41-year-old me - someone who’s mind and body I quite enjoy inhabiting these days.

Wendy Mogul taught me that it’s important that kids see that being a grown up is fun. I would also like to model for my children that being married can be fun. But great relationships, with our kids or otherwise, don’t materialize out of structures. They require a special cocktail of time, experience, intention, communication and letting go. And sometimes the right next step is an actual cocktail with the man I commingled DNA to hatch up these existential challenges in the first place.

And now, a poem, from the indomitable, Heather Peteroy:

I am a bank owner.

Teller. Manager. Thief.

I sit on my hoard like a dragon.

A kiss good morning

An open car door

Nose strips for my snoring

Movie night pillows on the floor

Each one like gold

Stored in the annuls of my heart

Deposit Deposit Deposit!

Always, a new start

But when debt is the tab

That creeps up slowly

When I overdraft my accounts

With annoyances, daily

kids lost shoes, running late

A missed appointment

No time for a date

A six year old’s resentment

A turbulent thought

That keeps me from sleeping

While I know that I ought

Instead of just waiting

For the market to dive

Introduce austerity measures

Or ignore it all to hide

I’ll return to the moment

Before our “I do”

And make time for the tidings

That helped me find you

The question was asked in earnest, in the kindest husbandly tone imaginable. It bowled me over.

It was April 2021, and we were embolden by the Pfizer mRNA coursing through our veins. We booked a family trip to Santa Barbara, a short four-hour drive south from our idyllic Marin County home. At the time I led a large team, and we hit the road the morning of the company’s earnings call. I tuned in, attentively, while Wall Street reacted to the state of our business - which had been ravaged by COVID over the prior 4 quarters.

I found myself in familiar emotional terrain: carrying what felt like the weight of the world on my shoulders, prepping talking points for my team to ingest the temporary tumbling of our stock price, and calculating what needs to happen next to satisfy the boys club bellwether. Seeking refuge from the onslaught of stress, I sank deeper into the 5.78 inches of my iPhone 13, posting the usual cocktail of humor, exhaustion, and the cherubic faces of my children.

I had grown attached to the small exchanges these posts invited. While I never would have claimed to care about metrics like followers or views, it would be a lie to say I wasn’t playing the game. What hadn’t dawned on me yet was how subtly Instagram had tipped the scales from a socially acceptable distraction to a psychological crutch.

Like the strident of a record scratch, my husband’s polite request broke the spell and I could see Lady Justice’s scales with a large Zuckerberg shaped thumb pressing down on my own psychological wellbeing. I deleted Instagram that day. I committed to abstaining for the week of our vacation. Each day I snapped photos of the kids and longed to post the images. I imagined all the hearts and emojis I would have received in my inbox, bursting like little dopamine bombs in my brain. Alas, I held to my abstinence, and simply texted a few photos to close friends.

We returned from our trip, and rather than rushing to the app store I decided to wait another week. Slowly, the weeks rolled on until I had been six months clean.

I experienced all the tropes that get written about and discussed as it relates to social media teetotalism. I observed the moments I found myself reaching for my phone. At a red light. During the 5 minutes between meetings. When I sit down on the loo. Like a lock without a key, I’d open my phone, scroll through the pages of apps, and feel vaguely irritated. “There’s nothing here for you,” I began telling myself.

A useless pallet with diminished inherent value, this 5.78 inch screen began to represent something different: a reflection of my own need or emotional validation. I had already commoditized my hours, charging a hefty fee to a company for my time, convincing myself I was progressing feminism or my children’s views on the world by subjecting myself to a toxic work environment and constant stress. (That’s not to say many women who do the same aren’t getting what they need, but it is to say that I was not.) And in this reflection and realization of the ways in which I’d commoditized my time, I had also commoditized my attention, and my inner life.

I needed a long, contemplative break. So I spent 2 years with no social media apps on my phone.

As a chronically online person, much of this did not come easily. However, over time, I grew accustomed to my lack of relevance, even embracing it. Today, nearly five years after my husband’s earnest request, I do engage in social media on my own terms. I enjoy internet culture. I also crave a silly, mindless scroll from time to time. What I have decidedly not done is continue to commoditize the lives of my children and emotional health.

The experience of becoming a parent cannot be reduced to an internet persona, and the fullness of their childhoods will not be the data by which a media company’s earnings are judged. Our tender moments are not any more, or less, real because a loose tie on the internet double tapped them. Sometimes I have to tell a friend we did a two-week trip to Iceland last summer, an experience I now revel in: breaking unimportant personal news to friends in person. Being human indeed requires witness. As LR Knost says, “To need to be seen, to be heard, to be understood, is simply to be human.” But at what point does that quest transition into escapism and avoidance?

I cannot speak for others, but I feel strongly it is my responsibility as a parent to author my own journey in this chaotic life. Roberg Kegan says that only about a third of the adult population enters into self-authorship, wherein adults build “the internal capacity to define one’s beliefs, identity and social relations…[which] requires people to collect, interpret, analyze, and reflect to form their own perspectives.” Releasing the highly socialized framework of my social media habits offered me a chance to reclaim myself.

I certainly would not argue that deleting Instagram leads to self-actualization, or at the very least a dilution of the value you place on other people’s opinions. On the contrary, it has forced me to reorient my values and seek more direct in-person connections with fewer people. In declining to broadcast my life, I have not changed humanity, nor have I developed any new enlightened theories about human needs. But I have discovered a strength that more closely resembles rubber than steel, and in the process, recuperated emotional energy, which allowed me to become familiar with my own demons. I have, in the Buddhist tradition, exchanged my social media validation for tea with Mara.

Please, now, enjoy a poem written by my dear friend, Heather Peteroy:

On My Relationship with the Internet

By Heather Peteroy

I feel as though my brain has been a bin with an open lid

A hungry hungry hippo for a social hit

of edutainment wrapped in outrage

When will I understand the misunderstood stranger?

Seeking truth among the slivers of sermons

Scattered about my feed

What have I missed in the dissection of a million lived experiences?

How should I sift through the world, in its entirety

through a palm sized pan?

Swiping for gold

Small flakes wink among the dredge

A few more shakes and I’ll glean a whole nugget

from this flow of stolen hours.

Sometimes gems, sometimes thorns that slice my memory

Surgically grafting an experience I did not have into my mind.

Trauma roulette

Zen master supercut

Sandwiched between feast and famine

No borders between my mind and my eyes and this screen

Laminated with forever chemicals and thin price tags

I will get out my razor

Scrape the ‘for sale’ sticker off my consciousness

I will reclaim the natural chaos of THIS life

Unbrick the fireproof cavity of my heart

Let a gentle rain fall from the eve of my skull

Down past my sternum

Rinse my marrow

Down to the arches of my feet

Wash away the leeches I‘ve invited in

I’ll wander through the wilding without expectation

Open to the delight and sorrow of my own life

Full of memories that are only mine

Core Insights

• Mortality clarifies: Encounters with death, a parent’s illness, a health scare, or a near miss, reorder priorities faster than any self-help book

• Success is being redefined: Achievement metrics are shifting from status and scale to alignment, impact, and sustainability

• Complexity is the new constant: Relationships, politics, and caregiving create emotional terrain for which no one feels equipped

• Isolation hides in plain sight: Even with networks and communities, many feel uniquely alone in their mix of pressures and doubts

Mortality as Life’s Greatest Teacher

Far from a morbid fixation, mortality emerged as a compass throughout my conversations. As Greg put it, “time is the only resource that can’t be increased, not by wealth, success, or health.” Several described grief as an unexpected teacher: “Inviting grief in instead of pushing it away helps with prioritization and decision making. You can grieve many things: the failure of a startup, aging parents who haven’t yet passed, entire life phases.” This reframe, grief as a guide, not an obstacle, transforms loss into perspective. You can, or perhaps should, grieve what you haven’t yet lost. Many people avoid feelings associated with grief, sometimes motivated by avoidance and fear, once the floodgate opens. But like Plato’s allegory of the cave, it burns to open one’s eyes, but the feeling of seeing in honesty offers a beautiful lens through which life can reorganize.

Career Transitions: The Quiet Reckoning

Career shifts and purpose crises are near universal, yet often private, even shame-filled. Ten of eleven participants are actively navigating transition: questioning legacy, fulfillment, or the meaning of work itself. John calls this “the second third of life”, roughly 35 to 70, a stage for deciding what to change, keep, or let go. Natalie is moving between sectors, building a bridge to work that feels more value-aligned. Lindsay faces a generational dilemma: inherit the firm she helped build or step away to preserve her joy. Jenna left a lucrative consultancy for social work, an act of realignment, not rebellion.

COVID seems to have accelerated this existential audit, a collective brush with mortality without the emotional scaffolding to hold it. The experience shattered modern American society’s denial of death and illusion of control. The stress responses and burden of care fell disproportionately on the shoulders of women, and anecdotally, the women who I spoke with shared deeper emotional turmoil as they considered the shape of their lives traveling through middle age. The common thread: many people are navigating how to live the “back half” of their careers with intentionality, not just climbing higher, but living a truer, more authentic life.

The Fulfillment Shift

Many participants described a profound recalibration of their values. External validation, salary, status, and speed all lose their charge as they give way to authenticity, connection, and community.

Jessica, the breadwinner in her family, shared: “My job isn’t my main source of self-worth anymore. I find more meaning in volunteering and being part of my child’s education.” This isn’t mere burnout. It’s a structural shift from achievement to alignment. “Work-life balance” feels banal and outdated as a framework. The participants’ lives are too interwoven for compartmentalization. Career choices influence marriages, marriages affect parenting, parenting dictates health habits, and so on. Integration, on the other hand, seemed to offer a framework with more fungibility, one that can be reworked as seasons of life evolve. It is difficult to pinpoint the effect of remote work on this topic, but certainly working hours flexibility and cultural tolerance to time away from one’s “desk” appear to dramatically affect personal health habits and cornerstone child-rearing activities.

The Sandwich Generation: Carrying it All

Every participant is holding three generations: aging parents and growing kids, while trying not to lose themselves in the middle. Margaret pays $3,400 a month for her mother’s assisted living while shepherding her kindergartener through the school years. John calculates he’ll see his parents only forty more times if he continues twice-yearly visits, a math problem that suddenly feels existential. Greg watches his 78-year-old father care for a wife with Alzheimer’s while managing his own family and a partner with cancer.

These collisions of obligation, emotional, financial, and relational, push marriages and identities to their limits. “My marriage is in the messy middle,” John said simply. There’s no single playbook. Each family’s path is unique, but the pressure points are eerily similar. Much has been written about the sandwich generation (perhaps nothing more poignant than Catherine Newman’s Sandwhich…but I digress), and in this case, I might contend we doth not protest too much. Over $100 trillion is set to be transferred, mostly to millennials and Gen X, over the next 15 years, and that’s to say nothing of the experience of losing a parent. I am of the opinion that at age 40 Atul Guwande’s Being Mortal ought to be required reading for those whose parents remain earthside. Each family is a puzzle unto its own, and what is needed, logistically, emotionally, or otherwise, will vary widely.

The Preparation Paradox

Even among highly educated, financially literate professionals, few felt as though they had embarked upon the appropriate emotional and logistical preparation for death (their own or their parents’). “Most people think about scenarios,” Frank shared, “but don’t actually prepare. Even well-prepared families miss the emotional parts.” Mortality isn’t a paperwork problem. It’s a collision of control, legacy, and love, areas where intellect alone won’t save us. Some have put energy into the concept after being confronted by it through loss or illness, while others feel as though they are only just beginning that process. Either way, all expressed a desire for support in some form to navigate what’s next for their unique situation.

Aside from seeking aid in literature like Guwande’s aforementioned work, it is difficult to say how someone might best prepare for death without intimately knowing their circumstances and inner world. I can undoubtedly say that our society tends to sanitize death, and more conversations exploring its realities and its implications would probably serve most.

Modern Love and Emotional Labor

Many marriages described weren’t broken, but perhaps stuck in neutral. “My marriage is neither happy nor unhappy,” one participant said. Others admitted to partners with unmet needs, postponed affection, or emotional habits hardened by years of survival mode. These are not failures; they’re symptoms of a generation trying to build dual careers, raise kids, care for parents, and still stay married. This is, perhaps, unsurprising as “marriage is rapidly becoming a high-quality luxury good,” according to Derek Thompson. That is to say, it is rarer, older, and more stable over time. Demands on modern marriages are unlike what we’ve seen in prior generations, in part due to evolving social dynamics, economic conditions, and yes: modern feminism. I couldn’t possibly pretend to possess a magic salve to ease the difficulties underpinning all, or even most, marital challenges, but I am certain new tools and motivation from both partners to tackle life’s biggest challenges will be a requirement.

The Craving for Context

Participants were united by one request: see me in context. Most of my conversations revealed that people are tired of advice that treats symptoms, burnout, fatigue, and anxiety, without grasping the ecosystem in which they exist. Carla ended her relationship with a corporate coach because “it was leading to my resignation, not my reinvention.” Another said, “I want validation that this transition (back to work after maternity leave) is a big deal.” High achievers often minimize their suffering because, on paper, they “should” be fine. But the real story is quieter; the daily negotiation between responsibility and meaning can be fraught with new, and sometimes scary, feelings.

In Sandwich, Catherine Newman writes “And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid,” and to everyone who responded to my post and offered their thoughts to me I want so say: I see you. I see how hard it is to be a parent, an adult child, an ambitious professional, and a decent human in 2025. And I hope our time spent together helped you see yourself. “Life is messy. I certainly don’t expect tidiness from yours, or anybody else’s.”

Closing Reflection

Across every conversation, mortality stood out as the great clarifier, a teacher that never softens its lesson. It dissolves the illusions that success can buy more time, that productivity equals purpose, or that control can stave off loss. What remains, when all that scaffolding falls away, are three currencies: time, attention, and love. Everything else is commentary.

Midlife, then, is not a crisis so much as a curriculum. It asks us to reorient from ambition as expansion to ambition as distillation, to ask not “what more can I do?” but “what still deserves me?” The high achievers I spoke with are not chasing reinvention so much as reclamation: reclaiming rest, presence, and depth. They are trading optimization for orientation, metrics for meaning, and busyness for belonging.

This second third of life demands a new literacy, one fluent in paradox. To hold ambition and surrender at once. To care for parents while raising children. To love someone while grieving what you both have lost. To confront death not as a failure of planning, but as an invitation to live awake. The question is no longer “what’s next?” but “what’s essential?”

The real work of adulthood may be this: learning to let life be unsorted, to keep showing up tenderly in its complexity. The people I spoke with aren’t seeking tidy resolutions. They are learning to inhabit their contradictions with a little more grace, to measure success less by accumulation and more by aliveness.

That’s the quiet revolution of midlife. Not burnout. Not reinvention. But reclamation, of agency, intimacy, and presence, in a world that would prefer we stay numbed by achievement. A dear friend of mine introduced me to the concept of being strong like steel, versus being strong like rubber. The latter requires a process of reclamation, and perhaps a little support along the way.

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