The Midlife Curiosity Tour That Changed Everything | Allison Aubrey

Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR’s most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the results rattled her enough to send her on a curiosity tour, looking for answers that had nothing to do with biology. 

What she found became her new book, Your Turn, a reframing of the years between 50 and 75 as a third turn, the part of life where, against every expectation, a hidden surge of energy and purpose becomes possible. In this conversation, Jonathan and Allison get into the moment a lab technician’s offhand comment sent her into a spiral, the recurring dream that a professional dream analyst helped her decode, and the real reason she finally stepped away from the newsroom rhythm she’d built her 25-year identity around.

You’ll hear how she distinguishes passion from purpose from simply mattering, and why one of those three actually shows up in your bloodwork. You’ll hear the real stories behind her “curiosity tour,” including a retired police officer who found her purpose as the last person walking a community 5K, and a scientist who left a powerful research job to pull invasive vines off trees in her own neighborhood. And you’ll hear the simple, repeatable patterns Allison found across dozens of women from all walks of life who made real pivots, one that starts by going inward before it ever asks you to go outward.

If you’ve ever wondered whether the pull toward something different in your life is real or just restlessness, this conversation offers something rare: actual evidence, and actual permission.

You can find Allison at: It’s Your Turn Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sitting down with Bella DePaulo to talk about what it actually means to be single at heart, and why some of the deepest, most authentic lives being lived right now aren’t built around a partner at all.

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photo credit: Sherri Holdridge

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] Allison Aubrey spent 25 years as one of NPR’s most trusted health and science reporters. Then a routine test at a longevity lab that she had agreed to do only as part of a story she was reporting, told her something about her life that rattled her. It was a huge wake up call that sent her on a journey to figure out who she wanted to be in her next season of life, and what really matters. In this conversation, you’ll learn why the tests built to measure her aging body ended up diagnosing something entirely differently. The one word that a stranger used that made her stop hearing anything else in the room. You learn what a dream about missing a live broadcast actually turned out to mean. We’ll explore the real difference between passion and purpose and mattering, and why one of those actually shows up in your blood work. And the simple question that helped dozens of women find their way back to themselves, along with the specific repeating patterns that Allison saw in people living incredible later lives. As she traveled the country on what she called her curiosity tour. Allison is also the author of the new book Your Turn How to Create a Life You Love. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.. We’ll jump right in after this short break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:21] Your your new book started as reporting. Um, you find yourself, you end up at a longevity institute kind of bit of experiential journalism like James Nester, Michael Pollan style, like I’m just going to go in and become a part of this. You have a long career before that as a health and science journalist reporter. Like, so this is not new for you. You know, you’ve been exploring and trying to live a life that you feel is alive and connected and healthy. Things don’t go as planned. Take me there.

Allison Aubrey: [00:01:53] Sure. It was actually very new for me. I have been telling other people’s stories for 25 years, and I got this call from the woman who heads up media relations for Northwestern University Medical Center, and she explained in this very excited voice that they had this new longevity institute they were launching, and they were trying to think of a reporter who could do a great job, kind of introducing it and putting it in context. And she was sort of flattering me, while at the same time offering me an exclusive. And I fell for it. And I sort of unwittingly went in there with, um, you know, thinking, oh, this is going to be a great story. Like people need to understand this, you know, the science of longevity and, you know, lifespan is, is accumulating. And this is like a really important, you know, you know, institute. So once I found myself there that day and I had agreed to this battery of tests to try to measure basically and distinguish my chronological age. That’s the number on my, you know, birthday cake from my biological age or my epigenetic age was sort of how fast I’m aging. And I just didn’t give it enough thought. I assumed that I had the DNA of Methuselah, right? I was like, oh yeah, I’m in. I’m game. Um, and then almost from the word go, I started to get little surprises.

Allison Aubrey: [00:03:19] Should we say the first thing they did? They put me, they stripped me down and to like, you know, a little medical robe. And I went into a bod pod that measures body composition. And the, the cardiologist was sort of like, oh yeah, you know, you’re a healthy body weight, but you’re, you’re a bit under muscled. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, I’m under muscled. Um, and then I think the moment of fear came. Um, I was sitting in the dark in this chair with a, a monitor strapped to my wrist, and for a few minutes they cut off my circulation to measure something called endothelial function, which can, in theory, detect sort of like early stages of cardiovascular disease. And this young medical tech had this like look on his face. And he, he said, oh, you know, um, you’re on the low end. And I said, what do you mean the low end? And he said, below average, like on the low end. And he sort of fiddled with it thinking like, oh, you know, was he really getting the right measurement? And at that point, I kind of stopped hearing anything in the room. You know, I thought, what me? You know, like, I’m healthy, I exercise, I eat. Well, what is going on here?

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:40] So, I mean, you go into this thinking, okay, this is just kind of a cool journalistic project and I’m going to go like, I get to sort of like learn some things maybe about myself also, um, Um, when you get this and you sort of like see the look on the person’s face and you hear these words low end. Um, I mean, what’s going through your mind at that point? Because when you’re, when you said yes to this, it wasn’t about you. That’s right. Now it is.

Allison Aubrey: [00:05:10] Well, I, the thing that was the ticker tape racing through my mind was, am I failing a longevity test? And that’s what it felt like. And of course, it was irrational. I had not gotten any results at all. But, you know, the bod pod experience and then this little endothelial test, it just kind of was like, whoa, wait a second. I am aging now. After the fact, I learned that the arm that they did this test on, I’d had, you know, the very stereotypical middle age injury of frozen, frozen shoulder. I was nursing a frozen shoulder, so I had been taking it easy on that left side. And later I found out, oh, that could have thrown off the test. I was then assured, oh, Allison, this is just a research tool. Like, don’t read too much into it. Like my blood work was fine, you know, way after the fact as I pieced together sort of what was right and what was wrong. Most of what was right were the numbers that matter, right? You know, cholesterol and, you know, um, the things that really make a difference a one C the things that were that were wrong were kind of linked to my stressed out lifestyle, my sort of, you know, overcaffeinated, um, you know, living in this sort of state of, um, pathological productivity.

Allison Aubrey: [00:06:30] Most of what turned out to be wrong with me was linked to that. And it wasn’t so much biology as it was kind of this sense that I realized I was kind of running to stand still. In fact, the moment I felt that we were in this laboratory and after that endothelial test, I kind of zoned out and there was a wall of windows when he opened the door looking out to Lake Michigan. And for a moment I felt like I was in that water tumbling, like not drowning, but kind of just like almost floating and coming to a deep sense of standing still. And when I came back to the room and people were talking at me, telling me what the next test was, that was this moment. I said to myself, Allison, you are running to stand still. That’s how I was feeling at that moment in my life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:21] Mhm. So let’s zoom the lens out a little bit then. Um, tell me what life looked like for you at that time. You know, if you’re running to stand still, paint that picture for me.

Allison Aubrey: [00:07:33] Yeah. Well, I would say this was coming out of the pandemic. And during the pandemic, I worked unbelievable hours. I was on the air frequently, often at 5 a.m. in the morning. So finishing reporting at 10:00 at night, waking up to do sort of up first, the Morning Edition, you know, podcast in the morning and really just throwing my whole self in as I had have done in my reporting for years and years and years and years. And I think coming out of the pandemic, something deep within me knew that I was a little bit ready for something else. I just didn’t know what it was. And so instead of facing that head on, I just dug deeper. I gave myself more deadlines. I kind of pushed aside any sense coming from my intuition or heart of like, oh, you know, what else might there there be? But the more I dug in, the more I felt that my work was becoming this sort of practiced task. I wasn’t getting any kind of lift or reward of like hearing my story on the air or even reporting the stories I was doing, like deep dives into very complicated medical science and distilling it that that’s my job. And suddenly it didn’t feel like it was giving me the same lift it had. And I wondered, you know, who’s benefiting from this? I sort of wondered if I had been doing the same thing so long that it was time to parlay my my skills and my strengths to something new, but I think I was scared.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:05] Yeah, as are so many of us, when we sort of like hit a certain moment in our lives. Um, but like you also, I think so many of us were heads down, you know, like we’re in that season where we’re still working really hard. We’ve got a million people looking to us and, you know, we’re trying to do really good work. Um, and oftentimes we’ve been doing some version of that for years, if not decades without ever having the space to just step back and pause and say, like, how’s this working for me? Um, so it sounds like you, you come into this experience at the Longevity Institute, maybe primed, but not necessarily consciously aware of how primed you are.

Allison Aubrey: [00:09:43] I think that’s a really, really good way of saying it. Sort of like, you know, my head didn’t know what was happening, but somewhere deep within I. Yeah, I was starting to sense it. I should add also, I have three children and at that time the oldest was in college. The middle was headed off to college. And my baby, who was now 15 years old, would have been, you know, sort of starting middle school. And so I think that I was just really conditioned to what I call this moon bounce of controlled chaos. Right? Because I’d been parenting for so long, I was so accustomed to sort of, you know, running from the newsroom back home to parenting duty and sort of jumping between the obligations of parenting and the obligations of work. And when you get into that rhythm, it’s hard to get out of the moon. Bounce. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:29] Yeah. And I think that’s so relatable for so many people. You know, um, everyone has their own version of the moon bounce. I love that. I love that visual, by the way. So when we’re back at the Longevity Institute and you start to see a couple of numbers that make you raise your eyebrow. Um, how does that come together with what you stepped into that moment? Sort of like with your brain working on to make you start to ask a bigger question?

Allison Aubrey: [00:10:59] So I wouldn’t say that it was some kind of like immediate pivot. I think it was a slow recognition of what I just explained to you that, oh, Allison, yes, you’re competent at what you do. And that’s a very good feeling and you’re rewarded. You get a paycheck for what you do, and you’ve won awards for what you do. And, you know, you educate people, you know, who listen to NPR and all of that felt good, but it didn’t feel like enough anymore. And I’ll tell you why about sometime after that experience, I was deciding I wanted to do a story about dreams. And I contacted a guy named Ian Williams. And he has live interpreted thousands of dreams on the BBC. So he’s a therapist who analyses dreams. And we started out and he asked me to tell him about one of my recent dreams. And I had had a an incredibly vivid dream. It goes something like this. I was in my bed and, um, suddenly the on air light was flashing. And Steve Inskeep, who’s the host of Morning Edition, said, you know, and NPR’s Allison Aubrey joins us now. And I could see the on air light. And I could see, actually the studio in our old building at 635 Massachusetts Avenue. But I was stuck in my bed and I couldn’t get out. And then I woke up and of course, I ran to my phone. My God, my God, what time is it? What day is it? Did I just miss a, you know, a live hit on Morning Edition? And I calmed down enough to realize that, you know, I hadn’t.

Allison Aubrey: [00:12:29] And so Ian Williams said to me, what do you think that dream means? And I said, I don’t know, like, it’s like an anxiety dream. Like maybe I’m getting too old to wake up at 5:00 in the morning, or I’m scared I’m going to miss a deadline. And he said, how long have you done your job? 25 years. Oh. How many times have you missed a deadline? Uh, never. So you’ve done your job 25 years and you’ve never missed a deadline. You’re. Your dream is not an anxiety dream about missing a deadline. I said, oh, okay. Well, what is it? And he said, you have something to say that you can’t say on Morning Edition. And with that, I knew he was right. It was just like every cell in my body knew he was right. I had been working on a proposal to write a book, and it’s a lot of work. You know, you got to get an agent. You got to write the proposal. You know, I have three kids and a full time job. And so it was just this little side hustle project that was just sitting. And after that conversation with Ian Williams, I was like, that’s it, I’m finishing the proposal. I’m writing this book.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:44] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Yeah, I mean, which is no small thing. You’ve been doing a job for 25 years. You’re great at it. You know, um, you’re known for it and known widely by a lot of people for it. And there’s a certain amount of identity that gets wrapped up in it. Right? And for you to say, okay, there’s this thing that’s been sitting on the side and it’s actually time. Um, I mean, it’s interesting also though, because a lot of people will sort of like keep their mainstream gig and then write a book on the side. Um, some people will just say, I’m going to take a sabbatical and take a year off. When you thought about, oh, like this, what he’s saying this dream means actually, that feels real to me. Um, and it sounds like immediately that book that’s been sitting over here. It’s like. Mhm. Like, that’s the thing. Do you how do you navigate the question of, okay, um, what will it take me to write this? Do I need to just pull back from everything that I’m doing and devote myself to it? Because it’s so hard for any of us to step away in any meaningful way from something that we have been so vested in for so long.

Allison Aubrey: [00:14:57] Yeah. I call this my rope swing moment. You remember like jumping from a rope swing when you’re a kid and you’re kind of like, you’re holding on and you’re like looking down and you’re like, oh, you know, like you’re afraid to let go because you don’t know what’s underneath, but, you know, it’s time. You know, it’s time. If you don’t, you’re gonna go back and hit the rock so, you know, you’re hanging on. I felt like I was hanging on. I felt that rope swing moment like it was just, it wouldn’t go away. And so at a certain point after I got my book contract, I could have stayed on and written it on the side, but I just knew that that was running counter to everything that my heart was telling me. And so I just, you know, went to my editor and I was like, look, I have this book contract. I, I want to take a sabbatical. I’m calling it my curiosity tour. And it’s a lot of negotiation to get a huge, huge chunk of time away in a newsroom. Um, of course, I was giving up like job security. They filled behind me when I left. And, um, you know, I was intending to come back and I, I did come back, but I left not knowing, you know, it felt like a risk.

Allison Aubrey: [00:16:00] And to me, I just had to do that. I mean, there wasn’t another choice for me. I think that my fear was that all I kind of knew was a newsroom setting, right? I know how to be part of that hive, and I like to be part of the hive. I like to feel like I’m in the middle of like, exciting things happening. And that never disappoints in a newsroom. But I also didn’t know what there was outside of that. And I looked around and I was fearful that once I left the newsroom, there wouldn’t be anything as purposeful or as exciting or as adventuresome. And that’s really the question I asked when I set out on this curiosity tour. I was like, I’m going to look for people, you know, women in midlife like me, not not billionaires or movie stars or Olympians or super influencers like people like me who’ve been in the trenches for decades, sort of toggling between parenting and paycheck and find out who are the people who are thriving, what are they doing? What are their stories like? How do you make a midlife pivot?

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:03] Yeah, I want to dive into a whole bunch of what you discovered on that tour as well. Um, before we get there, though, let’s tease out a few other things. Um, the idea of a summons.

Allison Aubrey: [00:17:16] Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:16] Um, I think a lot of us hit a moment where we feel like, you know, and people call this different things, you know, is it a call? Is it there’s something inside of you that basically we’ve probably, it’s been like sort of like nipping at us for a long time. And we’re like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Um, but there’s this idea that you explore of, of like getting the summons and almost nobody answers it. Um, what is the thing that, um, like when you get that call, like in your mind, what’s really happening there?

Allison Aubrey: [00:17:46] Well, in my mind, so that language of the summoning comes from James Hollis, who’s a Jungian analyst analyst, who I interviewed, and I’ve read several of his books, as has my mother actually gave me the book when she sensed I was feeling sort of a midlife, you know, wall. And, um, that language really comes from James Hollis. And it’s the moment where you realize you’ve been living the societal script, right? Like we all have this sort of like learn, earn and then what? Retire, like learn, earn, retire script that we’re supposed to be following. And, you know, Gen Xers have been really good at following that script, right? We’ve done all the things. You know, my mother told me when I had two little children and I was in PR and I was like, oh, like, this is feeling a little overwhelming. Like maybe I should step off the career track. And she said, you’ll do no such thing because you will never get that job back. And you worked really hard to get there. Just keep going, you know? And so I think that’s the script that we got that we could do anything and be anything because we were Gen X women. It came at a cost, right? Like we’ve been just running and running and going and going parenting and the paycheck and parenting and like, you know, rinse and repeat of obligation for decades. And I have a lot to show for that societal script. I think my mother was right.

Allison Aubrey: [00:19:05] I think that staying at NPR was the best thing ever. And it’s been an incredible career. Absolutely, positively incredible. I am paid to be curious, and I am so incredibly lucky. But I think with the the calling is and the summoning the summons is, is that you reach a point in this midlife where the question you’re asking isn’t what does society expect from me? But what is my intuition telling me? If I’m sensing that I’m looking for a shift, how can I tap into that intuition? And what I recognized is that I was so committed to that societal script, you know, because I’ve done well by that societal script many millions of us have. Right. I had a lot to show for it. And, you know, it paid the bills and it gave me accolades and it gave me a sense of purpose. However, I was reaching a new phase and fear. You asked, what is it that stops people from being able to listen to the summons? It’s fear, right? Like nothing cuts off intuition like fear. And I had fear. Like, what if I’m not? Npr’s Allison Aubrey. Or you know what? If the best years are behind. Right. And so I had this sort of like slow cross-fade where I was toggling between like hanging on that rope swing moment to this belief that there had to be something else, that there was a life of adventure and joy and purpose outside of a newsroom.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:36] That lands is really true. I’m curious. Fear of what? Because it could be so many different things, you know, loss of identity, uncertainty. Like there’s so many different things. I would imagine, you know, the concoction is probably a little bit different for everybody.

Allison Aubrey: [00:20:52] Yeah. No, I think you hit the nail on the head, right? I mean, I think it’s all of those things. I think it’s, it’s um, you know, loss of identity. Um, you know, it’s ego to some extent. I mean, and some of it’s real, right? Like I still get my health insurance through NPR. Right? So that’s just the practical side. Like women retire with 30% less than men. And so there’s just the practical like money elements, right? Will I have enough money? Like how will I get health insurance? So there’s the practical side of these things. But once you face those and plan for those, The meta things are just what you’re saying, you know, sort of ego identity, um, legacy, all of that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:32] Yeah. And I would imagine fear of the unknown also. It’s just,

Allison Aubrey: [00:21:35] Oh yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:36] You’ve got a long history of showing up and kind of having a sense of like, I’ve been doing this long enough that even though things are different every day on a meta level, like I kind of know, yeah, I know the rhythm.

Allison Aubrey: [00:21:45] Of oh, nothing’s. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:48] Right. I can navigate this, whatever it is. And then when you’re stepping completely out, you’re like, I don’t know the majority of what my day is going to look like. And for most of us, that’s terrifying.

Allison Aubrey: [00:21:58] I agree, I think nothing stokes anxiety like uncertainty. And so we cling to the familiar. So I agree. Have you experienced that in your life?

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:08] Oh, so many times. I’m like multiple career changes into into my life. So I’ve been in the trenches of uncertainty and, but there’s a certain exposure therapy when you keep revisiting that and realizing like, oh, it was really hard, but I keep finding a way through. So I think I’m gonna like whatever it is eventually. I think it really, it, it forges you rather than destroys you. Um, I have another curiosity though, when you’re sort of like exploring this, which is, um, I think a lot of folks will be listening saying, okay, so I’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. And there is this thing that I feel like it’s calling me, but as you described, you know, when you’re in the kind of like the work, work, work, work, work, balancing the moon balance thing where there’s almost no time to pause. It’s so hard to figure out like, what is am I just delusional and fabricating that call? I mean, when I left being a lawyer, I knew that I was working insane hours. I was so psychologically and physically incapable of making a rational decision that I actually, I took a leave of absence before I made any decision because I was like, I’m not capable of understanding of hearing the whispers in any sort of rational way. I need to actually just pause long enough to hear it. Um, did you see as a pattern or have you experienced like in this shift for you, you know, the struggle between is this something the real that I should follow? Um, and how do I, how do I know that I’m sort of like, I have the cognitive wherewithal in the space, in the sense of groundedness to make a really well informed decision right now, especially when you’re running so hard for so long.

Allison Aubrey: [00:23:57] I think that’s where my curiosity tour came in. I framed my sabbatical as a curiosity tour. And what is the curiosity tour? It was just that, like me following my curiosity. I mean, I was of the mind that when, you know, when news happens, you fly, you get on a plane and you fly to where the news is happening, right? And I had to sort of reframe how I thought about curiosity and to start seeing things that were right around me. So I did travel to some cool places for my curiosity tour, but what I also did was I slowed down enough to notice people in my own backyard. For instance, I met this woman, Katherine. She is an NIH scientist, a bench scientist at NIH, a plant scientist. And her third turn, I sort of came to call the midlife passage your third turn, this time between 50 and 75. It’s sort of the beginning of, you know, your, um, you know, your midlife pivot. And Katherine caught my eye because right down here at the corner of my street, there’s this stream and there’s a lot of invasive species that are like vines that are wrapping around the trees and ruining them. And I would see this crew of people working out on these trees and like, doing the hard work of taking these like, thorny vines and like pulling them and cutting them from the trees and, And the person leading this effort was this woman, Katherine. And she’s this brilliant PhD scientist who had this big job at NIH when it became too much for her. And she started this band of what they’re called weed warriors. And so they’re getting rid of these invasive vines, and they’re saving the trees one by one, which then saves the water quality of our stream.

Allison Aubrey: [00:25:35] And she calls this her andor act of resistance from that Star Wars show, Andor. And the idea is that people can, you know, pull together in groups to tackle a little problem and then see the result right before their eyes. And are they fixing climate change? No, they’re not, because none of us has the power to do that. But did they can they walk by the tree that they saved every day and take pride in that and know that that was a community effort? And so this is the work she does now. She left behind this like super big, powerful job, a National Institutes of Health. And she took on this very soulful, very purpose oriented passion project, right? And she’s making a difference in a way that she didn’t see in bench science. And so meeting Katherine in my own backyard was my first clue of like, oh my God, there are like fabulous, wonderful pivot stories all around me. And so I just one by one by one started interviewing women who had made very interesting pivots. And one of the through lines was most of them had had big, big jobs or impressive jobs by societal standards. But what they were doing now was all about legacy, all about purpose. And it was all coming from the heart, all of it. I mean, these were women who let go of the rope, right? They had their rope swing moment. Oh my God, can I jump? They jumped. Right. And look how wonderful their lives were.

Allison Aubrey: [00:27:00] I mean, I met a shy editor who became an improv performer. You know, I met people who were doing the boldest thing of their life, like a 65 year old CEO who I call her my badass Pollyanna, because she actually took a hold of this $60 million company and turned it into a $6 billion company and convinced private equity bankers to give every employee an equity stake in the company because her true north is fairness. And so she could have retired to Paradise 15 years ago. But she stays on because she wants to see the system where every one of her workers, you know, gets a piece of the pie. If the company succeeds, everyone should succeed. So, you know, she’s living her true north. Her purpose project is to sort of remake how, how business works if it’s only for her company. So some people are doing the boldest thing of their life, and some people are doing the simplest things of their lives. I hung out with groups of women who play mahjong, which is this amazing game. And, you know, it’s very trendy right now. And people think that it’s this fancy society thing. But honestly, mahjong is incredible. It creates this sort of like, Magic Circle, right? Where people come around the table. It’s a brain game, right? Very good for memory. It fosters connection and play. And so the way that people pivot and find their third turns is as different as we are different as human beings. But the through line is, is that you’re listening to what your heart is telling you and that there’s some sort of passion and purpose.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:36] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I mean, two words that are depending on who you ask. Um, amazing or loaded. Passion and purpose. I feel like we’ve we’ve heard a lot of talk about them. We’ve heard there’s been a tremendous amount of pushback on the word passion these days.

Allison Aubrey: [00:28:54] Yeah. And I’ll i’ll go with you on passion and I’m willing to let passion go. Um, in fact, let me just agree with you. Passion is probably over you. So let’s push passion to the side, but let’s focus on purpose. Okay. Okay. The reason why I love purpose is because I love the science around purpose. As part of my reporting on this, I interviewed Steve Cole at UCLA, and he did this study about five years ago where they took women who had been kind of shut ins. Like they stayed at home, they watched TV, they said they were lonely. They didn’t have a sense of purpose like on surveys. It was very clear that they, you know, were feeling isolated. And this this group of women agreed to volunteer in a school for the year. Now, they took these women’s blood. They took a blood draw at the beginning of the year. And then again at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year. What the blood draw showed is that when you look at the white blood cells and the immune system, you can actually see when someone’s sort of lonely or chronically stressed because of loneliness or lack of sense of purpose, what you’ll see is that the genes that regulate for that encode for inflammation, they get turned up, right? So inflammatory genes are upregulated. And antiviral genes, the ones you need to protect you are turned down. So it’s this sort of molecular molecular signature of chronic stress, of loneliness, of disconnection, of lack of a sense of purpose.

Allison Aubrey: [00:30:23] Now, at the end of this school year, 9 or 10 months later, they did the same blood draw. And they could show that these women who agreed that they felt much better, they felt part of a community. They felt like they were mentoring people. They had a sense of purpose. They had a sense of connection. They felt like their life had meaning, that there was a reason to get up in the morning. That’s all purposes is a reason to get up in the morning. They felt that a reason to get up. And guess what? The molecular signature in their blood, in their white blood cells and their immune system changed, right? The genes that are regulating inflammation, inflammation were turned down. And the genes that regulate the antiviral response were turned up. And I love, love, love that study. Because if people are like purpose, purpose, whatever that is, okay. No no no no no. You can measure it. You can measure a sense of purpose in the immune system, in the white blood cells. It is linked to longevity. It’s linked to better health. Like, do we need more science to say that when you have a reason to get up in the morning, you feel better and your life is better and you feel more joy. You know, I think that we shouldn’t throw away the word purpose.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:36] Yeah. And I completely on board with that. I’ve done a bunch of a deep dive myself on purpose. And the parts of life that it touches, it’s pretty much everything, you know, from relationships to cognitive function to immunity to life ending or altering disease risk. It’s it’s kind of wild how much that can play a role. So when you, you’re on your curiosity tour, you’re talking to all these different women. And from what I remember, sort of like age early 40s to 100 early hundreds. Um, was the span there? It sounds like purpose is one of the big patterns that you see, but I want to tease out something specific to that because I think you you brought it up when a lot of us think about this word purpose, we’re kind of thinking we need this one big thing, like a big universal thing. Like it’s got to be a big thing. But what you’re inviting is, well, for some people, maybe it is like there’s one big unifying, universal thing where you put everything behind it and it’s going to impact the world. But maybe it’s also like clearing the vines off of like, it’s like tiny little local things. And I think, I wonder if, if oftentimes we discount that.

Allison Aubrey: [00:32:45] Oh, 100%. I mean, people are scared to talk about purpose because I’ve had women say to me like, oh, there’s, I don’t know how to do anything that would change the world. Like I don’t, I like, I don’t like climate change, but I don’t know what to do. Right? Like little me, I can’t do anything. And I think that is something that all of us have sensed, like, how are, you know, in the in the poly crisis of the world? Like, how are we supposed to make a difference? Well, if you don’t think that you’re going to be part of some tiny, tiny little solution, if you can’t right size, you know, some little thing that you can be a part of, well, then where’s the hope? Right? And once we don’t have hope, like what do we have? So I think picking some small, you know, start with an interest, you know, and then work your way backwards. Here’s an example. I met a woman named Ruthie Smith and she’s a retired police officer in Prince George’s County. And every Saturday my husband runs a five K park run, which is a community run. They’re held all over the country. It’s an organization based in the UK. And, um, so I went one Saturday and there was this woman, Ruthie Smith, and she was at the very, very back of the line. She was walking and she had on a little penny and it said Tail Walker. And I was like, oh, hi. And, um, and we started chatting because my husband had run up further ahead and I was sort of walking with Ruthie and she told me that, like when she retired from the police force, she was excited at first, but then kind of fell into this like, oh, what is what is, you know, what am I supposed to be doing with my day? I need a sense of purpose.

Allison Aubrey: [00:34:21] So she found the park run. At the time, she said she was pretty out of shape. And so, you know, doing a five K walk every Saturday is was really just the beginning of her taking on physical activity for the first time in a while, she was starting to feel more fit. And then she volunteered for this position called Tail Walker. And her job is just to be the ear, the eyes and ears of the trail. The last person finishing the race to make sure that you know nobody’s hurt or nobody needs attention. And you know, nobody is ever gonna like, say, wow, one day I want to be the tail walker and a community five K, right? No one ever. But it gives her this incredible sense of like helping out others, being connected to a community like. And she has fun doing it because she’s also walking the five K. So I think about Ruthie a lot. It is not something that she would have been able to predict. This role found her once she found the five K, but tapping into that community then gave her this purposeful role that makes her feel good about like, gives her something to do when she wakes up, gives her that sense when she wakes up in the morning of like, oh, I’m needed, right? Like I have something I need to do today. Um, I think it can be a big thing or a little thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:38] Yeah, I love that because it really invites everything into the purpose tent. You know, it’s sort of like saying you don’t have to make a big grand gesture or commit to a big thing or put yourself at risk in some big, meaningful way. It’s like, just open your eyes and look around your neighborhood or your family or your group of friends. Guaranteed. There’s something there that will matter in a way that, like, maybe nobody’s even paying attention to before.

Allison Aubrey: [00:36:01] Maybe mattering is a better word than purpose because purpose has become a little overused.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:06] Yeah. A couple years back, I interviewed, um, sadly he passed recently, but somebody who was one of the leading researchers on mattering. Um, and he said the academic academic definition. Um, I’ll try and remember this was um, offering value and being and having that value acknowledged by others. He’s like, there were two pieces of it.

Allison Aubrey: [00:36:28] Oh, wait, say that again. Say that again.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:30] It was offering value, like knowing that you’re offering something that’s genuinely valuable, but also having that value acknowledged by someone other than you. And he’s like, when you have those two pieces of the puzzle, that feeling of mattering, that’s where that really lands the most powerfully. And that’s stayed with me for a long time because it’s an in-between thing. You know.

Allison Aubrey: [00:36:50] I’m writing it down, I love that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:51] And we’re talking about this in the context of all right, we hit this season of life and we’re kind of like, what got us here maybe isn’t going to give us the feeling that’s going to get us there. So like, how do we get that feeling purpose sounds like is one of the things that you discovered as a common pattern. This kept showing up in big ways and small ways. There’s another nuance I want to tease out and ask you about, which is that you mentioned that one woman who is in this company where she grew it to 6 billion and then like, had everybody sort of like, it sounds like she didn’t leave, because I think a lot of people also look at this season and say, to get what I need to get the feeling that I need, I’m gonna have to blow everything up and go do something very different. But I’m wondering if you saw patterns also in this curiosity tour where people actually they, they stayed where they were, where they were, but, but they kind of, they did things in a different or a more intentional way to give them what they needed.

Allison Aubrey: [00:37:41] Absolutely. So, Cathy Bolhouse, this is the woman who turned a $60 million company into a 5 or $6 billion company. She’s still the CEO. Um, and she’s still running the company. So she got to the point where she finally had the power as CEO to run the show and make decisions. And once she had that, she finally. Her backstory was she’d sort of grown up in poverty. She’d watched her mother work in a in a factory and work, you know, come home with stained hands because she stained grandfather clocks in a factory and still not be able to afford Christmas presents. Right. She said, what kind of world is this? If somebody has to work all day, every day and they still can’t, you know, buy gifts, you know. Um, so she, she really committed very early on in her life, if she ever made it to the top, she would change how the system works. So she’s finally there. She’s not leaving because she’s literally changing how the system works. She has thousands of employees, by the way. So her story is super inspiring. Another quieter version of that, of sticking in the job that you’ve been doing is my I profile a friend, Molly Andolina. She’s a tenured professor at DePaul University, um, a political science professor. And, you know, we were in graduate school together, and she told me that she went on to get her PhD. I didn’t get a PhD. Stopped after a master’s degree, but when she finished her PhD in political science and she was hired on, you know, into this tenure track job, she said this would have been like around 2000. She said the idea was that you had to be the sage on the stage.

Allison Aubrey: [00:39:12] You know, you had to stand up in front of everybody and impress, right? You had to lecture and wow people, and you want it to be big and bold in the center of the room and the universe. And it wasn’t her personality. She’s an incredible scientist and researcher and writer and teacher and connector and all the things that teachers do that really matter. But standing on stage and like just talking at people wasn’t her superpower. And so anyway, she has made a career of studying, listening as a democratic skill. This is her superpower. And it took years to lean into that. And there’s a sort of a long backstory of how she came to see that we learn more by listening than we do by talking. And it’s a very noisy world where it’s sometimes her students feel they’re never listened to. So she sort of upended her classroom. And she’s the moderator of an ongoing conversation. Right. And of course, as a political science professor, she has to teach her students like how a bill becomes law. But you can learn that in a textbook, right? Which she can do in, in the classroom is create this space for, you know, free and free flowing conversations and questions and allowing students to be heard and listening to each other and learning from each other. So she actually has published studies on sort of listening as a democratic tool. And she, when she made that pivot within the same job, she went from being kind of, you know, miserable in her job, wondering, is this what I should be doing to thinking, wow, this is exactly where I should be.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:53] As you’re going through the tour. So so purpose is centered. It seems like this is a common theme across all the people that you’re talking to. Like it is shifting to bring more of this into my life. If maybe it’s the job that I’m doing, maybe it’s the thing that I’m doing on the side. Maybe it’s just a couple of hours a week as a contract, but whatever it is that matters. What other patterns did you see? What were the other big things, commonalities that really stood out to you?

Allison Aubrey: [00:41:15] Yeah. So I feel like there’s a bit of a formula and I say that loosely because of course, everyone’s path is different, but I did notice some commonalities. And, um, I’m going to give some credit here to Mark Friedman because he developed a midlife learning program at Yale. And before I ever went on my curiosity tour, I had interviewed him for a story about gen space in LA. And, um, he gave me this idea in this early conversation that we had that when he leads these mid-life learning programs, that part of the through line is to have people, you know, explore n word, kind of like do a reality check on what is my self-identity. You know, how am I different? How am I the same as I was 25, 30 years ago? Right. Because as you and I have been talking about, when you’ve been in the moon bounce of controlled chaos, you know, going between parenting and the paycheck, you haven’t been thinking to yourself, oh, like, Alison, what are your what are your, what are your strong suits? Like? What are your values? You know? Um, and so this idea of, you know, of, of self exploration or self excavation is what I call it in the book. And I put a lot of tools in there that are evidence based for self excavation. And I redid all these tools myself. And so this idea of going in. Right. To really listen, that seems to be stage one of a midlife pivot. Because when we go inward, we often discover like the joyful parts of us that we left behind, right? Like when I went inward and sort of like, excavated the eight year old Allison, who was freckly and redhead and running through the woods, muddy and, you know, carefree and blithe and unguarded.

Allison Aubrey: [00:42:57] I was like, wow. The eight year old version of me. She was she was something, right? Like she, she was happy and joyful. And she laughed a lot. And she was goofy and she was mercurial and, you know, and I, I sort of was like excavating, like my 1.0, if you think of it that way or how I came to think of it that way. And I realized I’d left a lot of her behind. And once I kind of excavated freckles, I started to remember what little freckles up, right? Like I played piano my whole life. And the piano was the thing I would do when I was happy, when I was sad. Like, I mean, it was the instant way for me to get a reset. And my piano’s still up there, but I hadn’t been playing it. It just it was out of tune and I didn’t have a good excuse. I just hadn’t been playing it right. So I started to be pulled back into the more creative parts of me that I’d kind of left behind. And I felt like that was a through line for all of the women. When I asked them to sort of take me back to how did you make this pivot? Everybody had this moment of sort of looking within to rediscover almost like the kid within.

Allison Aubrey: [00:44:03] Right? Um, you know, who was the playful you? What were the, the hobbies and the, the things you did for fun? And are they calling your name again? Or is there something that you didn’t get a chance to do that you were excited about as a kid, and now you might have the chance to do it? So I would say step one is look within. And once you do that, these new interests bubble up and then you find people who are interested in the same things, right? When I think about the eight year old me running through the woods like it’s not an accident that three of the women in my book, one is a certified forest bather, one is Katherine, the weed warrior. That nature is a huge, huge theme in my book. Right. How do we reconnect with our wild home? How do we spend more time in nature? Right. And so it just reminds you of who you were before the world had expectations of you. And before you got too busy. And the world was nothing but obligation. And you can make time in this very crossfade kind of way to to bring that person to the fore again. You know, so and that connects you to other people and to these interests. So I think inward and then outward to connect with people with the same interests, right. And I think that’s the recipe for going forward. And I really did borrow that from Mark, sort of inward, outward forward. And I think it really does hold true.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:23] Yeah. And I mean, it makes a lot of sense also. It’s really hard. You know, I, I tend to believe that a life well lived is an intentional life. But you can’t be intentional. You know, you have to make decisions that are intentional. You can’t make good decisions until you have a basis for making good decisions. And if that decision is about like, what am I going to say yes or no to? You’ve got to have a sense of who you are and who you aren’t like, what lights you out and what what drains you before you can make a decision, which is actually going to be well aligned. And but so many of us, I mean, it’s interesting, you’re sort of like inviting us to step back into our like when we were kids to remember, like, who were we? Like, what were the things back then? And what are the adult, you know, like, how is that presenting in an adult life now? I wonder if some people struggle with that, though, because we become so disconnected from it over a period of decades that we can’t even remember anymore. Like we’re just like, I don’t even know, like, I don’t remember the last time I felt something resembling aliveness. How do I, um, which is a little bit tragic, but I think I would imagine there are questions that you can ask yourself that.

Allison Aubrey: [00:46:32] Yes, yes. So one of my intellectual inspirations before I started writing the book, um, I was reading Mary Catherine Bateson, and she’s the daughter of Margaret Mead, and she’s deceased now, but she wrote a lot in her books about kind of a second adulthood, right? She kind of likened it to Erik Erikson’s stages of development. When we’re asking ourselves these really important questions of like, who am I? What’s my self-identity? Um, what’s happening to my body and what is my generativity or my purpose? Basically, what’s my reason for getting out of bed in the morning? And I let that sit with me for a long time, this idea of a second adulthood. And what I realized is that for me, it did not feel like a second adulthood. It felt like a second adolescence, right? I was going through this transition, like physically, emotionally. At the same time, my daughter, who’s 15 now, started puberty. And when, you know, we when our teenagers are angsty, when they are irrational when they have when there’s rebellion, we say, oh yeah, they’re teens. Like, that’s teenage rebellion. Like we have a cultural acceptance of that. And, um, you know, we give them a pass, we give them space.

Allison Aubrey: [00:47:50] We love them even when their behavior is bad. Where is that cultural acceptance for people our age? Right? If I go around saying like, oh my God, who am I and what is happening to my body? And what is my my purpose? People be like, lady, get it together. You know, we do not give enough space to have this second adolescence, but that’s exactly what it is. We are asking the same questions who am I now? What is happening to my body and what is my purpose? These are not easy questions to answer because they require what you and I just talked about. They require like facing that passage and going, what am I willing to let go of? Am I willing to let go of ego and accolades? Right? How am I going to make this transition, this, this bridge between like what we have been and what we’re going to become. There’s a lot of rocky water underneath. And asking these questions, you know, is, is hard to do. So it takes courage and it sometimes brings like a kind of form of rebellion, I’d say, and struggle.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:55] I love that you used the word become there. I think about this often. Um, and I wonder whether, you know, once we hit the middle season of life, um, we feel like who do we want to become next? But what we’re really, really more deeply looking for is how do we return to who we once were?

Allison Aubrey: [00:49:14] Oh, 100%. It’s exactly, it’s coming full circle. I mean, I used a lot of circle analogies in my book. You know, I, I came up with the term third turn. I was inspired, I grew up in Kentucky when I was 12 years old, I went to Churchill Downs, which is the home of the Kentucky Derby. And oftentimes in a horse race, you know, it’s this predictable front of the pack horses. And then right around the third turn, some horse pulls from behind. And and, you know, finds this surge of energy that no one’s expecting. There’s and it’s always a surprise, as my grandfather told me, something unexpected is going to happen at the third turn. And you find this surge of energy to, to race ahead and win. And, uh, I had this conversation with my grandfather about, you know, why, why at this point, why do you think the third turn and of course, as a teenager, you know, you have no concept of midlife. And I never forget what he said to me is like, well, when you can see the finish line, a sense of urgency arises, you know? And I thought, wow, okay, so I know you had a guest on who was sort of like talking about time anxiety. That’s time anxiety right there. Right? Like if there’s something you’re gonna do, if not now, when? And so I feel like at a time when the 100 year lifespan is possible, you know, 50 to 75 is kind of the third turn or the third turn, the third quarter. Like there is time to surge ahead.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:41] Yeah, I love that. One of the things that you referenced also, which I want to dip back into because I think it’s really important. I don’t want us to miss it is. So you shared a kiss. So you find something that really just like you connect with it for whatever reason, its purpose, it matters. It gives you the feeling that you want to have. And right after that, you planted this seed that says, okay, now go find people who are doing that too. Um, and it sounds like that was a common pattern also. You know that. Okay, so it’s cool to do this yourself, but when you can build community, family, chosen family, friendships and you’re all sharing, you have this, this affinity, whether you’re kind of like parallel playing and doing it in your own way or all collaborating on one thing together, that, that, that connectedness, that sort of like shared participation in the thing is, is a, it sounds like that was a common pattern. Also probably really important.

Allison Aubrey: [00:51:33] Yeah. I think as you bring this up, I’m thinking about this woman I met. Her name’s Leslie, and she was a classical violin player. And I met her on a flight from Oakland to, to Dulles Airport in DC. So 5.5 hour flight or so. And at one point, the Wi-Fi went down. And I’m a talker. So I struck up a conversation with her. I had watched her boarding the plane, put her instrument case up above, and I said, do you play the violin? And she looked at me and she said, no, I don’t. And I thought, oh, this is she’s not a talker. And, uh, she there was this pregnant pause. And I kind of looked back to my, you know, notes or my book or whatever. And then she goes, I play the fiddle. And she said it with this like playful, like I play the fiddle. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, um, I’m not sure I know the difference. You know, like, I think maybe I thought they were the same thing, but I’m not, you know, I don’t know. Blah blah, blah. And she was like, oh yeah, it’s the same instrument, but a completely different attitude. She said, when you play violin, you’re playing someone else’s music. When you’re trained to play the classical violin, you’re sitting in front of somebody else’s music. And the stress of hitting every note the way somebody else intended you, intended for you to hit that note.

Allison Aubrey: [00:52:55] It’s a skill and you can get good at it, but it also takes a lot out of you. So she said, I left behind classical music, and when I found fiddle, I got to improvise. I got to make my own music. So she made this like really simple switch from performance to play. And I think that’s an amazing. Her story encapsulates so much of the midlife pivot, right? If we can all go from performance doing the thing to please the fans, right? To please the crowd, to a return, to play, to playing music. Because music makes your soul feel good and it’s improvisational music. Well, there you go. That’s the recipe right there. And so I asked her, well, how has playing fiddle changed your life? And she said, well, I didn’t have any community around violin. But once I started playing fiddle, I started going to fiddle competitions and weekend, you know, and once you find your fiddle people, you got your peeps, you know, you know. So it’s a great example of like, find the thing you love and then or parlay that thing you know how to do playing violin to something more playful and then find other people who are doing that. And, uh, she was very, very happy person.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:14] So if someone’s joining us, right, and they’re sort of like nodding along, they’re in this season of life and they’re like, okay, so finding something that really that, that gives me that sense of purpose or aliveness, finding, you know, taking some time to really pause and look inward, you know, whatever that means to you. Whatever the process or the questions are, and finding people that you can share, whatever emerges from that really important. And maybe they’re joining us and thinking, this sounds really cool. I’m in the moonbounce phase right now. I’m going hard, but I would love to figure out a first step in. What would you invite them to explore?

Allison Aubrey: [00:54:47] Mhm. So a couple of things. And also, um, a little preamble. Oftentimes when we people say, oh, I would love to have that feeling again, but you know, I’m too busy or I’m taking care of my mom with Alzheimer’s or I have this responsibility and I understand we are the sandwich generation, you know, generation. And it goes without saying that we just because our kids are launching or getting older and maybe we’re, you know, done climbing the career ladder, most of us are still working and still have obligation on both ends. Parents, kids. And those things never end. Never will. That will be until the day we die. But we do have if you have an extra hour a week, an extra hour a week, you have time to start doing a slow cross fade to a pivot to a third term, right? So two things, um, that I would say two little starting places. One is I’m a big fan of this survey called the Values and action Character Strengths survey. It was developed by Marty Seligman and a bunch of other people. Peterson. Right. And I interviewed Doctor Seligman about it when it was brand new. And I was a young mom and struggling to know if it was like I was doing the right thing, like running from here down to the train every morning at 820 while like the au pair was trying to clean the kitchen here and get the kids ready, and my life felt like chaos. And I often wondered, like, am I doing the right thing? And the, the, uh, the tool is great because it helps you really figure out how your values and your strengths come together, right? And I remember taking it as a young mom and realizing that, you know, Marty Seligman telling me, assuring me like, it seems like you’re doing the right thing.

Allison Aubrey: [00:56:31] Like you do a job, you know, you’re you, some of your, your, your strongest strengths and, and values are curiosity and lifelong learning. You know, like, of course you’re doing the right thing. Like, you know, even my mother told me, if you stay home all day, every day, all you’re going to be doing is cleaning the house and changing, changing diapers. And everybody was right. I just needed to, to see it. And taking that survey really gave me, reminded me of who I was at a time when I was too busy to see it. And so I think go online and take it. You can find a free version online. You can take one of the classes, which are amazing and just, it’s a way to check in with yourself to remember what are my strengths, what are my values, and that will start speaking to you. And then I think the first idea that you have bubbling up when you hear about a volunteer opportunity, even if it’s just an hour a week, whether it’s with, you know, animals or the environment or something political, it doesn’t matter. The first thing where you feel your heart make that little leap when somebody describes what they’re doing. Follow along. Right. You don’t have to commit. You just have to try something. And then that might be an on ramp to something else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:42] Mhm. Love that feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Allison Aubrey: [00:57:53] To live by heart and intuition. We talked about the three chapters of life as learn, earn, retire. I think a much better script is learn, earn, return. Return to living a life by heart and intuition.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:13] Mhm. Thank you.

Allison Aubrey: [00:58:14] Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure to be here.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:18] So one of the things I’m still thinking about from this conversation, it’s it’s how much Alison’s body told her something that her mind kind of wasn’t ready to hear. Two other ideas I keep circling for me, the summoning or the summons that that quiet nudge that most of us have gotten really good at not hearing. I’m really thinking about whether I’ve missed some in my own journey, and especially in the season of life and the moon bounce, that visual, that specific exhaustion of bouncing between obligations with no space to ever ask if any of it is actually still working for you. And maybe a little bit of a bonus. The importance of mattering and finding people to share a deep, a deep curiosity or pursuit with. If there’s one thing to really carry into the week, maybe it’s this. Find one small thing that makes your heart just do that little leap that Alison talked about and give it a minute. Give it a couple minutes, give it an hour. See what it tells you. Hey, before you leave next week, we’re sitting down with Bella Depaulo to talk about what it actually means to be what she calls single at heart, and why some of the deepest, most authentic lives being lived right now are actually built around a partner at all. So be sure to follow Good Life Project. wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss that or any other upcoming episodes. And do me a quick personal favor. Share this conversation with just one person or leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us get discovered and reach more people. This episode of Good Life Project. was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By. Troy Young Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven’t already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time. I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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