Get Busy LivingInspired by Junk
Mail (and Rage)

By Michael Shimbo

“You’re doing what?”

That’s been the very first response from nearly everyone I’ve shared the idea of Seconds with.

It started seven years ago. One of my two older sisters was turning 50. I was home in West Virginia, and we had plans to ski that morning. The snow had piled deep the night before, and the skies turned blue and wide, a rare show for central Appalachia in January.

I remember sitting in the car at the end of her driveway. She had stopped to check the mail. Unlike me, who would have tossed it on the floor and kept moving, she paused and flipped through it, calm and focused, while I scrolled God knows what. Then came the line that stuck.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

She held up a birthday card. More like a welcome kit. From the world’s largest platform for people aged 50 and older. Her name was on it, but the image? A woman who looked ready to surrender, not start something new. Cheerful, bland, and lifeless. A celebration of the end.

What she had received was, as Anderson Cooper once joked live on CNN, “a death certificate.” I’m sure that’s media folklore, but it’s not hard to believe.

So, I did what a good little brother does: I made fun of her. I mocked the card, offered no sympathy, and moved on to flirting with ideas about why there was no alternative. Why was that the only option? What could be built that is different? At the time, I was 44 and clueless about what was coming for me. Until it did.

What she had received was, as Anderson Cooper once joked live on CNN, “a death certificate.”

A little over a year ago, I was back at my sister’s house. I was 49, about to turn 50, and this time, I was the one feeling off. Disoriented. Edgy. Like the ground was shifting under my feet. Life was fine on paper, but I felt like I was running out of ink.

As I packed for a drive to Washington, DC to catch a flight back to London, I spotted a book on her ottoman. She said it was a birthday gift but hadn’t touched it. The title gripped me, so I downloaded the audiobook, not expecting much.

Fifteen minutes into the book and my drive, I nearly had to pull over.

The book was The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 by Jonathan Rauch. It laid out what decades of global research now shows: happiness dips in midlife. Not because life is bad, but because we become restless. There’s a U shape to emotional wellbeing. We’re born upbeat, grow frustrated in our forties, and then, without changing much, start to feel better in our fifties and sixties. It’s not a crisis. It’s a reset. Even chimpanzees follow the same curve.

That moment changed me. It gave me language. Relief. Perspective.

What started as a joke about building a punk rock alternative to legacy 50 and older platforms, has become a mission to rewire how we see midlife and what comes after. Seconds is a new kind of membership for a new kind of life. A place for intelligence, tools, and community. A way to help people optimize their second half. Designed for and by GenX, and the future, versus refining a playbook built by the Silent Generation.

My sister doesn’t remember the mail moment the way I do. Maybe I’ve taken creative license. Maybe she has PTSD. That’s what memories do: they become echoes of echoes. But what we both believe is the same. Getting older shouldn’t feel like defeat. It shouldn’t suck.

Welcome to Seconds. Get Busy Living.

Michael Shimbo is the founder of Seconds, a pub loyalist, and a builder of ideas. Currently in London, UK and often found at 35,000 feet.