This week on It’s OK that You’re Not OK:
What’s it all for? Loss and meaning in midlife with Chip Conley
Midlife has a lot of messy stuff in it: divorce, the death of your parents, menopause, health scares, empty nests, career changes, feeling increasingly irrelevant – “midlife” has terrible branding, according to author, modern elder, and hospitality expert, Chip Conley.
What if midlife (and beyond) could include an ever deepening sense of self and more satisfying connections – right alongside all that cascading loss?
Chip and Megan start out talking about midlife, and wind their way to the power of telling the truth about your own life. In the middle, there’s grief: scary diagnoses, the deaths of friends, a near death experience, and some personal wake up calls to the meaning of life.
It’s Ok that You’re Not Ok in the mixed bag of midlife.
6 things you’ll learn in this episode:
- How “hospitality” manifests itself inside grief (and life)
- How suicide deaths in your friend group impact the rest of your life
- What it’s like facing a cancer recurrence *just* as you’re feeling yourself come back to life
- Why community is crucial to our survival
- Coming out as a gay man in the 1980’s, and what coming out to yourself might mean now
- Why you want multigenerational relationships, no matter how old you are now
Content note: this episode contains mention of suicide, along with brief mention of the method.
Related episodes:
Baratunde Thurston on the power of community
About our guest:
Chip Conley is a strategic advisor for hospitality and leadership at Airbnb, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which helps people in their ‘third age’ find a new path forward, and author of Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. He was a founder board member for Burning Man. Find him on social @ChipConley
Additional resources:
- Chip’s book – Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
- The Rumi Collection: An Anthology of Translations of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
- Check out Megan’s best-selling books – It’s OK That You’re Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
Books and resources may contain affiliate links.
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