Pauley - Your life calling : reimagining the rest of your life

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In memory of my mother and father, Richard and Mary Pauley

M y friend Meg was successfully treated for thyroid cancer in her thirties, but for the next ten years she faced every annual checkup braced for bad news. When she arrived for lunch after her latest visit to the doctor, she was wearing such a worried expression we were prepared for the worst. But heres what her doctor had said: Meg, I think youve dodged a bullet. I dont think that cancer is coming back. Good news! And yet the look on her face was not joy or even relief.

I think Meg had been living year to year. Now, suddenly facing the prospect that she might go on living a long time, she felt completely unprepared. This is what she said: What am I going to do for forty years?

Its the question of the ageand the question of our age. My generation is the first to get a heads-up that, as one expert puts it, our working lives could well be exceeded by the years we go on living. But what are we going to do ? The demographics of aging have been improving, adding decades to what we commonly know as midlife, but as Laura Carstensen, Ph.D., director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, The culture hasnt had time to catch up. The enormity of this hasnt hit people. Its starting to. At lunch that day with Meg I witnessed a moment of impact.

Everyone is talking about reinvention. The president used the word reinvention nine times in a State of the Union address. The Harvard Business Review devoted an entire issue to reinvention. Something profound is happening. But as a woman in my AARP online chat room aptly put it, Im ready to reinvent myself. Any ideas about what I should reinvent myself into? Nothing is lining up in front of me. Its a common sentiment. I often hear it described as a yearning for something more. Its a feeling I could personally relate tobeing ready for something, but a something you cant quite define. Our vocabulary hasnt caught up.

What does midlife mean? It used to be the beginning of a long glide path into retirement, which many of us still eagerly look forward to. As I write, the morning paper reports that 2 million of us will be retiring in the coming year. Maybe you will be one of those newly minted retirees. But since you are reading this book, youve probably decided your retirement will be different. Unlike previous generations, who retired from something, my generation hopes to retire to something else. Midlife keeps on going and going. Even before the economy went into recession, the majority of baby boomers surveyed by AARP reported they expected to keep on working in retirement, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but its not. Retirement is a word with new meaningno longer a door marked EXIT . Think instead of a door that swings on a hinge, moving us forward into something new.

Marc Freedman of Encore.org, which helps people pursue second acts for the greater good, says weve been blessed with a bonus decade or two or three. We still have options. I have met dozens of people whove already been there and done it in Your Life Calling (now Life Reimagined Today ), the series produced for the Today show with my partners at AARP. This is a booming demographic. And the Gen Xers are not far behindthey start turning fifty in 2014.

Ive been thinking and talking about reinvention for many years. Born in 1950, Im on the leading edge of the baby boom, and Ive had a peek over the horizon. The future looks pretty good.

Not long ago, two sixty-something women filled a sold-out auditorium at my alma mater, Indiana University (class of 72). The evening was billed as A Conversation with Meryl Streep. I would be asking the questions. The highlight was when Meryl asked and answered her own question, eliciting a gasp from the audience of 3,500 people:

When Bette Davis starred in All About Eve , a movie about a way-over-the-hill actress, how old do you think she was?

She paused a moment before she said, Forty! Then she let that sink in, and brushing her hair back like she does, said in her offhanded way, So... its really a different world. It really is.

Midlife is different than it used to be. For many it will be much longer, but demographers dont merely talk about longer life expectancy, they also talk about longer health expectancy. People living longer and staying healthy longer is a powerful combination.

And theres more. A few years ago researchers made an unexpected discovery that, around the age of forty, people begin to experience feelings of dissatisfaction and a diminished sense of well-being. They were surprised to find this in men and women, rich and poor and all over the world. But the bigger surprise was the rebound effect. At around the age of fifty, feelings of well-being begin to rise againand keep on rising, well into the seventies. In the twenty-first century, fifty is the beginning of a new and aspirational time of life.

Richard Luker is a social psychologist sometimes called the father of sports research. He created the influential ESPN Sports Poll twenty years ago. Hes probably the foremost expert on how Americans spend their leisure time and money. People who are now in their fifties are far more vital in their outlook than people in their fifties were even ten years ago, he says. Just now since 2007 these adults are saying, not only do I see a more vigorous life, Im up for it, Im game, I want to do more. Our research is bearing that out in spades.

We have all known inspiring individuals who have defied the stereotypes of aging to lead long, creative, and productive lives, but until now that was perceived as the exception. As I read in The Washington Post , Not long ago, workers in their forties were closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. Today men and women in their forties can reasonably be thinking about beginning a new career, or something new thats not a career. We are the first generation to get a heads-up that not only is there more to come, but maybe even the best of all.

You may be surprised to know that people over fifty-five represent the largest age group of owners of new business start-ups. At an age when our own parents and grandparents expected to wind things down, people are getting a second wind.

The Stanford longevity expert, Laura Carstensen, notes that with our new vitality come some pretty big questions. She says, Those of us living today have been handed a remarkable gift with no strings attachedan extra thirty years of life for the average person. Now that gift is forcing us to answer a uniquely twenty-first-century questionwhat are we going to do with our supersized lives?

I dont fashion myself an authority, though as a journalist and storyteller I have long recognized the power of other peoples stories to help us to see our own lives in new ways. Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life is neither a must do nor a how to. But I do hope to challenge some misconceptions you may have about reinvention:

That you have to get it right the first time

That there is some most authentic you waiting to be revealed