The
InterviewLori
Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb, therapist behind the best selling book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, on why the second half might be the freest chapter of all.

By David Hochman

Photograph
Courtesy: Lori Gottlieb

When Lori Gottlieb’s nest emptied a couple years ago, she thought she would walk into a silent house and feel the floor give way. She had spent the whole year bracing for her son, Zach’s, departure, grieving in advance the version of motherhood that was ending. Instead, she stepped through her front door in Los Angeles, set down her bags and “the weirdest thing happened,” she says. “I had this enormous sense of liberation and freedom and excitement and energy, and I was, like, what is happening?”

Gottlieb has built a career sitting with people whose pivot moments surprise them like that. She is a psychotherapist and the author of the runaway bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. She’s also the “Ask The Therapist” columnist at The New York Times. And she has an unnerving gift for naming the thing you are feeling before you can name it yourself. Which makes her rare company for a conversation about getting older, a subject most people would rather approach sideways, if at all. She’s refreshingly direct about it: the possibilities, the changes and the thousand small rebellions that come with the fuck-it years.

Journalist David Hochman has known Lori for decades, as both a friend and collaborator. They sat down recently to talk about whether the midlife crisis is even real, the tantalizing allure of trying to optimize your way to immortality and why some people feel the fade in midlife while others finally come alive.

David Hochman: Let’s start with the big one. The midlife crisis. Is it really a thing, or is it something else driving that cliché, like loneliness, fear or frustration?
Lori Gottlieb: It’s such an interesting question, because before we hit that midlife moment, most of us are too busy to have it. We’re distracted by work, by kids, by all the things that fill up young adulthood, so we never sit still long enough to ask the existential questions. Then one day there’s more time, and we notice that maybe there’s more life behind us than in front of us. What we’re really bumping into is an awareness of mortality. And here’s the part people miss. That awareness can be energizing. The way we’ve framed the midlife crisis is scary and depressing and anxiety-provoking, but I actually think it’s one of the most exciting stretches of life, because you finally get to be intentional about what matters and how you want to spend the time you have left.

What we’re really bumping into is an awareness of mortality. And that awareness can be energizing.

DH: But sometimes it really is too late for certain things, is it not? We can’t all free-solo El Capitan or even backpack around South America without a care. What do you tell someone who’s grieving a version of their life that simply isn’t going to happen?
LG: I tell them to look underneath the desire. Say you always wanted to be a doctor. You’re sixty, you’re probably not going back to med school, and that door may really be closed. Fine. But what was it about that dream that pulled at you? Maybe you love helping people. Maybe you love the science or the feeling of being at the edge of something new. Those things you can still have. The specific shape may be gone, but the thing underneath almost never is. And people are usually shocked by how much is still available to them at that age.

DH: There’s this whole quasi-religion now, especially in Silicon Valley, around optimizing the human lifespan. Live forever! Reverse aging! Ninety is the new fifty! Is that healthy or are we running from something?
LG: A lot of it is social comparison. If nobody around you looks your age, it’s jarring, and you start to feel like something’s wrong with you when you’re just doing the most natural thing in the world, which is getting older. What worries me is that people pour so much time and money and energy into staving off the future that they forget to live in the present. They’re so busy preventing something from happening later that they stop paying attention to how they actually want to live now. There are surveys on this. When you ask people whether they’d rather live longer but anxious and optimizing, or live somewhat fewer years but relaxed and doing what they love, lots of people pick the second one. They just don’t realize they’re on the treadmill. They think they’re being proactive. They don’t see what it’s taking from them.

DH: My wife and I were at a party recently and I noticed two kinds of people in this age group we’re talking about. One group feels like their best years are behind them. The other started a new thing or pared down in some happy way and is suddenly thriving. What separates them?
LG: The ones who feel like they’re fading are usually grieving something about their life, and often it’s grief tangled up with regret. We all made life choices, whether it’s about marriage, work, investments, where we live, whatever it is. Some of us wish we’d made different ones. But the question isn’t really the regret itself, it’s what you do with it. Regret can shackle you to a prison in your own mind or it can be an engine for change. The people who thrive are the ones who say, I made those choices, I can’t unmake them, but I can make better ones from here. The ones who see themselves fading are stuck in regret. And if you’re stuck in regret, that isn’t grieving. Grieving moves. You have to actually let yourself be sad, and then you have to let it carry you somewhere.

Regret can shackle you to a prison in your own mind or it can be an engine for change.

DH: What about the big external fixes I see people reaching for. Ayahuasca in the jungle. Hundred-mile races. Blowing up a marriage. Does any of it actually work?
LG: When people are anxious about aging, they sometimes think they need to do some enormous thing to get back that young feeling of endless possibility. And sure, go run the marathon if you want to. That’s great. But most people eventually discover that it was never about the trip or the relocation or the race. What matters most is relationships. How is your life peopled? How are you woven into your family, your friends, your community? That’s the part people neglect while they’re off chasing the big external cure. They’re looking for something outside to solve a problem that lives inside.

DH: Or they make jokes, right? That AARP card or the colonoscopy reminder turns up uninvited and everyone I know greets it with a hearty “fuck you!” But inside your office, what surprises you most about what people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies tell you?
LG: It runs in two directions. Some people come in carrying fear. Fear about relevance, about desirability, about health. Their bodies are changing, and when they can’t do what they used to, when the stamina isn’t there, they have a real reaction to it. Aging involves a lot of loss, and for some people that’s the whole conversation. It’s anxiety about what’s slipping away.

But just as many describe this as the calmest, most centered time of their lives. They’ve stopped prioritizing the things that felt so urgent when they were young. They’re not climbing the ladder of prestige anymore. They’ve quit chasing some ideal of beauty and started to see that they’re beautiful exactly as they are. People talk about losing their parents and finally making peace with their childhood. Some talk about regret, others about forgiveness, of themselves and of other people. They feel settled, in the good way. They’re done reaching for the next thing, appreciating what’s already in front of them. Age definitely hands you a wider lens. Some even find it generative in ways they never expected. Most of them are far less swayed by what everyone else thinks. They’re finally listening to what they think. I don’t know that any of it is surprising. But that’s what I hear.

DH: So what do you love about being exactly where you are now?
LG: I’d say it’s that feeling of expansiveness. If you have kids, all that mental load you carry when your kids are under your roof—where are they? Did they make curfew? What’s for dinner?—that stuff just lifts. But it’s larger than that.

I find at this stage that my life has more space in every direction. Emotional space, social space, room in my work. I’ve deepened friendships. I travel when something feels meaningful instead of first asking whether I can pull it off. The question used to be, can I make this happen, what hoops do I have to jump through. Now it’s just, do I want to. And I’m still young enough to act on the answer.

Our parents’ generation worked and then retired, full stop. Most people don’t retire that way anymore. They realize there’s a whole third chapter, and they get to decide what goes in it. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. I’m not sailing around the world. I didn’t reinvent my career. But I know who I am now, I know what matters, and I’m no longer scattered across the thousand distractions of those middle years. My daily life is just much more expansive.

David Hochman is a writer in Los Angeles whose bylines appear in GQ, The New York Times, Esquire and elsewhere.