It’s as old as time. Spend a lifetime swimming the turbulent waters of modern society — work, conquer, live, build, sometimes lose — then pause to reflect as you get older. Am I where I want to be? What is this gnawing feeling that won’t let go? I thought I had looked at it. Obviously, not deeply and long enough.
I look around and realize I’m happier walking our two chocolate labs through the local forest than I am predicting the future of nascent industries on a computer screen. I slow down long enough to marvel at the raindrops trickling down the rain chains on a stormy day in Savannah. Am I getting wiser?
Oh yes. I’m turning 61.
The Turning Point
60 is a random number. These things can happen before or after that number. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the gnawing feeling that won’t subside. Eventually you face it. That was a year ago, at 60. I’m turning 61 now, and it took me this long to write about it.
Fearful of what you might find deep within, and relieved to discover it was you — the real you, your very own best friend, waiting there all along — you dive in. Except you don’t quite know where. And that’s the sweet spot. You just don’t know. That mind frame opens up exponential quantum potentials.
This time you’re older. Wiser. You have more experience. You’re no longer in that prince-or-princess stage of life, happily charging at every windmill like Don Quixote — or Dame Quixote. This time there’s a finality to it. This is the last third, the afternoon of life, as Carl Jung so aptly put it. This is supposed to be the delivery on those early promises: work hard, have a good life.
Work hard? Check. A good life? Absolutely. Enough resources to retire? It depends where.
It’s The Freakiest Show
As I watch the games these people play — the billions and trillions worth of predicted profits that somehow never trickle down — the strategies, the manufactured urgency to make a new system seem indispensable — I find myself not envying any of it anymore. It’s magnificent, really. It’s the freakiest show, truly, to borrow David Bowie’s line. And as the French say, c’est le miroir aux alouettes — a lure so shiny it convinces you to walk straight into the trap. After a while, we’re left hungering for more.
The Same Imbalance, a Different Noun
I’ve spent the last 20 years in electric mobility and the last 12 watching Advanced Air Mobility go from concept to right around the corner. I watched that industry pour roughly 85% of its investment into vehicles, leaving almost nothing for the ground infrastructure those vehicles will rely on to land, charge, and operate. That recurring imbalance is exactly why so many industries have stalled: the next shiny potential comes along, capital follows it, and the people doing the serious, unglamorous work get left behind to keep going without the limelight or pressure.
Now I watch the same interest chasing AI’s trillion-dollar promises with the same imbalance, just a different shape, same narrative. I’ve seen this movie before — the dot-com burst I lived through running an IT company in New York, the EV revolution, the AAM evolution. The pattern doesn’t change. Only the technology does.
Toying With an Old Idea
So I’ve been toying with an old idea — an itch I’ve had since birth, confirmed at 14 when I read the Tao Te Ching for the first time and realized others had already thought about this and found answers. Decades worth of research is how I came up with The Wholistic Center: an ancient wisdom repository for modern life. It’s spelled with a W, as in whole — not simply holy, and not the modern wellness-industry way of using that word. Neuroscience and quantum physics keep circling back to what these old traditions already said. The vessel changes. The essence doesn’t.
A Question for You
I’d love to hear from you. Are you watching this same pattern — capital chasing the next shiny thing while the serious, unglamorous work gets left behind — play out in your own industry? Have you found nuggets of ancient wisdom that actually hold up at work? Do you find yourself asking questions our fast-paced societies don’t leave room to answer? Is there an ancient practice that quietly fills you with delight? Share it here. The world only gets better for hearing it.
Watching AAM stall and AI chase the same imbalance, I’ll admit it: I’m having more fun writing about ancient wisdom than I ever expected to. That probably tells you something.
Somewhere on a cork farm!
