From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

by Arthur C. Brooks

Unless you follow the James Dean formula—“Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse”—you know that your professional, physical, and mental decline is inevitable. You probably just think it’s a long, long way off.

Here is the reality: in practically every high-skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one’s late thirties and early fifties.

If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can’t study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends. Actually, it’s you who can’t do that. In fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.[16]

We might call this the “principle of psychoprofessional gravitation”: the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.[20]

You can accept that what got you to this point won’t work to get you into the future—that you need to build some new strengths and skills.

Fluid intelligence] is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning.”[6] Translation: When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.

Cicero believed three things about older age. First, that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige.

So why do people try, over and over again? Two reasons: First, they are not aware that their first curve naturally bends down—they think something is wrong with them. And second, they don’t know that another curve exists that will take them to a new kind of success.

Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.

Pride is sneaky: it hides inside good things. Saint Augustine astutely observed that “every other kind of sin has to do with the commission of evil deeds, whereas pride lurks even in good works in order to destroy them.”[23]

In fact, perfectionism and the fear of failure go hand in hand: they lead you to believe that success isn’t about doing something good but about not doing something bad.

The drive to achieve worldly success for positional reasons can easily become an obsessive passion. The problem is that this kind of success—like all addictive things—is ultimately Sisyphean and unsatisfying. No one is ever famous enough, rich enough, or powerful enough.

From putting my career before the people in my life, deliver me. From distracting myself from life with work, deliver me. From my drive to be superior to others, deliver me. From the allure of the world’s empty promises, deliver me. From my feelings of professional superiority, deliver me. From allowing my pride to supplant my love, deliver me. From the pains of withdrawing from my addiction, deliver me. From the dread of falling into decline and being forgotten, deliver me.

In the West, success and happiness come—or so we believe—by avoiding losses and accumulating more stuff: more money, more accomplishments, more relationships, more experiences, more prestige, more followers, more possessions.

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to more Eastern thinking, this is backward. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find our second curve.

Successful people often keep working to increase their wealth, accumulating far beyond anything they could possibly spend and more than they want to bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. His answer was that many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in material terms, so they stay on the hedonic treadmill of earning and acquiring, year after year. They hope that at some point, they will finally feel truly successful, happy, and thus ready to die. But it never works.

Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want Success = Continually having more than others Failure = Having less

Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want

I [no longer] feel the need to surround myself with stuff . . . especially after my father died in his house, and the paramedics almost couldn’t reach him because his house was so full of stuff. That was a great lesson to learn.

The aspen tree, it turns out, is not a solitary majesty, as I learned by sheer coincidence later that day from a friend who knows a lot more about trees than I do. He explained to me that each “individual” tree forms part of an enormous root system. In fact, the aspen is the largest living organism in the world; one stand of aspens in Utah called “Pando” spans 106 acres and weighs 6 million kilograms.

The redwood, which can grow to 275 feet tall, has remarkably shallow roots—often only 5 or 6 feet deep. It seems to violate the laws of physics that they can stay upright for hundreds—even thousands—of years. That is, until you know one more fact: the redwoods grow in thick groves because their shallow roots are intertwined and, over time, fuse together. They start out as individuals and become one with others as they mature and grow.

No matter your religious views, the point is helpful and instructive: humans are naturally interconnected—biologically, emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. Creating an isolated self is dangerous and damaging because it is unnatural.

Just because it is common, however, doesn’t mean loneliness is harmless. Research has established that the stress it creates leads to lowered immunity to disease, insomnia, cognitive sluggishness, and higher blood pressure.[11] Lonely people tend toward high-calorie, high-fat diets and lead more sedentary lives than non-lonely people.

Not everyone suffers equally from loneliness, of course. Some have a natural proclivity for it. Others have life circumstances that would make them more isolated than others. While gender and age aren’t good predictors, marital status matters: married people are less lonely than those who are divorced, widowed, and never married. However, loneliest of all are those who are married but with an “absent spouse.”

The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34]

In 2007, researchers at the University of Michigan looked at married people aged twenty-two to seventy-nine who said they had close friends.[39] Having at least two—meaning at least one not being the spouse—was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, self-esteem, and lower levels of depression. For those who can’t name two, the spousal relationship was much more important for meeting emotional needs, and this can lead to problems. It is a lot of pressure on a marriage to fill almost every emotional role and makes rough patches in a marriage all the more catastrophic and isolating.

Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottom—where emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carlos’s coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success.

Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental.

At the highest level is Aristotle’s “perfect friendship,” which is based on willing each other’s well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isn’t is utilitaria...

Friendship is a skill that requires practice, time, and commitment. • Work friendships are not a substitute for real friendships, although they can also be satisfying, if designed purposively.

There is a new phenomenon emerging in several countries including the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, called “Men’s Sheds.” It is basically parallel play for older men who are relearning friendship skills.[49] Men who are lonely—many retired, but not all—are left by their loved ones in, well, sheds full of woodworking tools where they can work on crafts projects in parallel with other men. Remember, men tend to develop friendships in the course of shared activities, and these crafts allow this while not requiring direct collaboration—parallel play.

After that, I decided to write down the three things I want for each of the people I love the most and then ask: Am I investing in those things in their lives? Am I putting my time, energy, affection, expertise, and money toward the development of these assets and qualities?

Over the next two hours, Acharya explained the ancient Indian teaching that a proper life must be lived in four stages—these are the ashramas. Ideally, ashramas last twenty-five years each.

Many people find that, in a midlife transitional state, their interest in religion and spirituality unexpectedly increases. Faith, religion, spirituality, or perhaps just interest in the transcendent commonly grows in our hearts as we move into middle adulthood.

But even if “none” is an accurate portrayal of you at the moment, it does not have to hamstring your openness to religion and spirituality. The key is to subtly shift your self-concept from “none” to “none right now” or, perhaps, “none, but open to suggestion.”

No matter what your religious beliefs, there are two obvious lessons here. First, as I’ve been emphasizing over and over, it doesn’t matter who you are—if you live long enough, you will see the decline of your fluid intelligence. Second, you never really know what kind of impact your work will have had. There’s no telling.

But there’s a more important lesson than these: it was Paul’s very sadness about worldly events—while maintaining his faith—that has attracted people for thousands of years.

So ask yourself: Which type of person do you want to be? One who declines with seeming indifference while suffering privately? Or one who—like Paul—acknowledges loss openly and yet maintains faith, believes in the power of love, and continues to serve others?

In an influential 2009 article in the journal Psychological Review, the evolutionary psychologists Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson argue that sadness has persisted in the face of evolution because it brings cognitive benefits.[15] There is evidence that it makes us better at assessing reality in social situations, because we are less likely to flatter ourselves or gloss over negative truths.

Research shows that stress inoculation training—in which people learn to cope with anger, fear, and anxiety by being exposed to stimuli that cause these feelings—is effective in creating emotional resilience.[19]

Liminality is uncomfortable, as all transitions are difficult. But here’s the good news: even unwelcome transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than they are in real time. Indeed, Feiler finds that 90 percent of the time, people ultimately report that their transition was a success, insofar as they made it through in one piece and with no permanent setbacks.

In your next phase of life . . . What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn?

What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?