6 Reasons It’s Awesome to Be Middle-Aged  

Chip Conley is 63 and loving it. Aging. Seriously. And he wants you to love it too. Conley, an author and entrepreneur, details why in his new book, Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age (Jan. 16). Though midlife is usually associated with the word “crisis,” he argues, it has the potential to be an overwhelmingly positive, transformational stage; it should be “reframed as a chrysalis, where we shed our skin, spread our wings and pollinate our wisdom to the world,” he likes to say.  

Conley wasn’t always so poetically positive about his middle years. The founder of a boutique hotel company and former head of global hospitality and strategy at Airbnb, he faced loads of challenges in his 40s. Among them: nearly dying after he experienced an allergic reaction to antibiotics, becoming single after the end of a longtime relationship, and losing five friends to suicide.

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“I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to change my life,’ because everything was going wrong. And so I did,” he told us in a recent interview. The decision to focus his efforts on rebranding midlife came to him while he was writing his 2018 book Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. “One day I went for a run on the beach and I had an epiphany,” he explains. “The epiphany was: Why don’t we help people in midlife understand how to reimagine and repurpose themselves — to cultivate their wisdom of life experience in a way that serves them and the world.”

Now he’s an enthusiastic brand ambassador for positive aging, catering to middle-aged seekers of happiness and purpose at the Modern Elder Academy (MEA), a learning institute he cofounded in 2018. It holds workshops at two retreat centers, one based in Baja California, Mexico, and the other in Santa Fe, New Mexico (he divides his time between the two), because “who teaches you about midlife?” Conley asks. “No one.” Prices start at $420 a night.

MEA includes “the world’s first online wisdom school,” with courses such as “Reframing Retirement” and “Cultivating Purpose.” A third campus is set to open in March, MEA’s second location in Santa Fe, with a slate of planned speakers that includes poet and spiritual leader Mark Nepo and British writer Pico Iyer.   

This week, MEA announced a partnership with Blue Zones, a longevity research organization based on the work of Dan Buettner, author of the 2008 mega-bestseller The Blue Zones, among other books on how to live longer and better. In 2024, MEA will offer two Blue Zones-themed retreats.  

We asked Conley, the impresario of this expanding midlife happiness empire, to offer six of his favorite reasons we should all love being middle-aged.