Whether you call it a Third Act, third season, or second life, one thing’s clear: middle-age and beyond isn’t the end. It’s a redesign. In this episode, as part of the series on aging, retiring, and dying single, Peter McGraw explores how Solos can turn aging, retirement, and reinvention into their most liberated chapter yet. Joined by Theresa Williamson, a city planner and Solo in her own second life, they unpack how mobility, flexibility, and optionality give Solos an edge—and why a fulfilling Third Act doesn’t require a fat bank account or a partner, just a little creativity (and maybe a plane ticket to Brazil).
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Listen to Episode #247 here
Aging Single #11: Third Acts
The Power Of A Third Act Reinvention
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on this series on aging, retiring, and dying single. I’m back with a provocative take on what comes after your so-called prime. We’re talking about third acts, a phase that’s less about winding down and more about reinventing yourself, deciding what comes next on your own terms.
My guest and I have been discussing this topic via WhatsApp. She’s a City Planner, Community Organizer, Environmentalist, and a recent empty nester. She’s no stranger to the show as a frequent listener and having joined me before as a guest on the Single in Rio episode. Welcome back, Theresa Williamson.
Thank you, Peter. I’m very excited to do this episode. I think you know that probably the most critical resource in my own transition into my third act has been your show and all of the resources that you provide and connect to. I’m thrilled to be here to talk about this.
Defining The Third Act: Ditch The ‘Prepare, Perform, Collapse’ Model
That’s very kind. I think one of the great benefits is that you have a foot in the Global South, so we can get a greater cross-cultural perspective on this. I think we’re going to be talking about retirement, we’re going to be talking about aging, we’re going to be talking about shifts that may occur at middle age or beyond.
I think that one of the things if you’re single, this next stage in life doesn’t necessarily mean golf courses and grandkids. It could be traveling, starting a second or third or fourth career, or finally actually building the life that you’ve always wanted, perhaps. I think one of the things that we’ve been discussing a lot is this Western model of aging, which frankly, I don’t like very much.
It really is lacking in the third act. I say it’s prepare, perform, and collapse. The idea of just collapsing into that rocking chair, maybe playing bocce, maybe if you’re lucky take a cruise. There’s just too many Americans, I think, especially who rely on that model, and I want to talk about different models. Let’s define our terms. When we say third act, what are we talking about?
When you brought this up, I was like, I’ve been using second adulthood. This is a term that Gail Sheehy coined in the ’90s. Actually, how I came upon it was a big part of the story because my parents passed away both a few years ago. I had been expecting to, as a solo and only daughter and so on, my daughter’s already growing up, I had been expecting to go back to DC for large chunks of my third act.
This was when I was 47. I’d lost my dad at 46, my mom at 47. I expected to be going back a lot and predefined what my next phase was going to be like around aging parents. All of a sudden, that wasn’t the case, and of course, there’s all the grieving process as well. When I went through my parents’ house to take care of all the objects that were left from lives of a lot of travel and reflecting on our family and our family history and everything, I ran across a book by Gail Sheehy called New Passages.
It was written in the ’90s, where she interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people going through this period of life transition. She looked back at data from the ’50s to the ’90s showing that life expectancy had jumped. There’s this huge new period, but we had internalized that as the old age was around 50 and however old you get from there, it’s all downhill.
What she showed and also through all these interviews was that that very much depended on people’s outlooks and the lives that they had built. One of the statistics she had at the time was that a woman who reached 50 at that point and remained free of cancer and heart disease could expect to see her 92nd birthday. I was 47, I was going through the house, I was in this new phase of trying to figure, okay, all of a sudden what am I going to do now? I won’t have to go back to the US. I had chosen to move to Brazil when I was young, where my mother was originally from. What am I going to do now?
There’s this book, and it talks about how, in fact, many women have a better second adulthood, as she put it, than their first adulthood. She explains all the reasons for that because you have more resources possibly, you know yourself better, you’ve addressed your traumas. There’s the potential there. After that, I came across the book Younger Next Year, which was about physically how you can go all the way to 90 with the health of a 50-year-old if you do certain things, statistically on average.
That was really inspiring and funny how that happened. I was celebrating my 48th birthday, decided to do a solo thing. When you’re a solo parent, you can do this thing. I took my daughter up for a road trip in New England for different shows. We ended up, on my birthday, seeing Trevor Noah doing stand-up comedy in Schenectady, New York, of all places. He, by the way, is a solo. I was in a random thrift shop that had one book and the book was Younger Next Year. Of course, this was my birthday after both I’d lost both of my parents mostly because of health issues that they could have probably addressed if they had been more careful.
Anyway, all because of all of that, I got down this track of thinking about this subject and of course, your podcast was also already an important part of my life at that point. Yeah, and then of course all the Blue Zones stuff, this idea that you can actually thrive and live your best life after middle age. As I moved towards turning 50, I started a whole set of transitions and changes in my own life. I was deliberately making decisions about slowing down with work and relationships with friends and community that I had always, partly as a solo, emphasized and given value to, but not as much as I would have wanted.
Aging Vs. Decay: How To Live Strong In Your Second Life
I want to get into some of those transitions. Two things I think about this is, yeah, third act might not be the exact right term. You’re 50, you’re probably going to live to 100, so a second life might be the better way to think about it. You can think about life in seasons, so it’s a third season, for example. Whatever term you decide to use, I think the spirit is the same, which is how are you going to spend your older years in this new era.
One of the things I like to say as a man is the world’s never seen 55-year-old men like this. When my dad didn’t make it to 55, but if he had, he would be an old man. I work out, I eat right, I sleep well, I’m on a growth path, I feel young. Yes, I look in the mirror and I see gray, I see wrinkles and there are the issues of aging, but one of the things I liked from Younger Next Year, which I actually read in my 40s, I think, which was very young to read it, was the difference between aging, your hair gets gray, and decay, which is you lose muscle mass, you don’t feel as energetic, etc. It’s hard to avoid aging, but you can avoid decay through your lifestyle.
A lot of what we’re talking about, I think, is predicated on taking care of yourself. I don’t drink, for example. I move a lot and again, I eat whole foods, etc. I think a lot of this stuff is like, if you do want to thrive in your third act, third season, second life, let’s just accept that you need to be rigorous about your health. There’s no escaping that. This is not about luck.
Solo Advantage: Autonomy & Freedom To Choose Your Path
Before I get into some of the things you’re doing, I want to talk about how the path is different for a solo than for someone riding the relationship escalator. I think that there are some very real challenges at times. You don’t have, for example, the hedge of a spouse. You can’t always share resources. You can’t share hotel rooms and split the cost, etc. There are, I think, some really good things. What comes to mind when I say, what are the advantages of being solo in terms of approaching this stage in life?
I think it’s the advantage all along, but it feels more of a disadvantage, maybe or not more, but it’s harder to claim when you’re young, which is the agency, the autonomy. When you’re young, you don’t necessarily see that as your goal, especially if you’ve been conditioned to think you’re supposed to ride the escalator. As you get older and you understand that there are choices and that maybe this isn’t for you, then you I think become aware of your own agency.
By this point, again, if you’ve been able to be help if you’re healthy and economically capable, then that allows you to do so many things. You don’t have anyone else theoretically to check in with. My daughter started college and I was really torn. I was like, “I don’t know how this is going to affect me,” because we are very close. We joke Gilmore Girls kind of thing, but very different. There was this whole, “What’s going to happen like in my life?”
I have such a full life and I’m very committed to my work, 25 years building a nonprofit organization that supports favela communities here in Brazil, and I’m really deep into this work. It’s my life’s purpose, which being solo has allowed me to do. What happened when my daughter left home was very different from what I expected, especially because she was so well. That’s obviously a big factor.
She’s doing really well at college and very happy and she’s in a very safe environment and exploring a lot of things. It gave me the freedom to go back, and I realized how much of a solo I really am by how well I’ve adjusted and how I feel free. I feel really free. I don’t know how long it’ll last, because things can come along. I’m trying to savor that at this point.
I think that that creates urgency. Both of us lost our parents relatively young, and it’s a reminder that there’s no guarantees. As I have said, you’ve probably heard me say on the show many times, what are you waiting for? We have this narrative about waiting in life, waiting for the good things to happen, delaying gratification, whether it be that part of preparing, you delay gratification preparing for a career and then performing and sometimes delaying that gratification. You have to go into the office or the classroom or whatnot.
That said, I do want to say this, this is not telling anyone what to do. This is not prescriptive. There are people who are living their best lives. They don’t want their third act to be any different than their second act. Warren Buffett retired in his 90s, and he did the same thing his whole life. He did it very well and by all accounts, he enjoyed doing it. There is no demand or requirement for any change that happens.
That said, if you are feeling the friction, if you do want to live many lives within one life, there is an advantage to being solo, which is, as you said, autonomy. You don’t need to negotiate this with a partner. Imagine being married to Warren Buffett and wanting to travel the world with your partner and he is fixed in Lincoln, Nebraska, going to the office every day. You could get trapped, and you don’t have to be trapped.
I think also the other one is that you if you recognize it that with a world built for two, it’s very easy to default into couples-like living, even though you’re not a couple. For example, at one point of time, I bought a house in Boulder, Colorado, and that is a very much of a relationship-escalator-like act. You can feel very committed to that house and being there and maintaining it and having to do work to pay for the mortgage and so on. Solos can decrease their footprint. They can live in other places they can stretch their dollar, perhaps, by living in a lower cost place. That takes a bit of a risk, it’s a challenge, it’s going to be an adjustment, but it also can be very growth inducing.
After your episode with Bella DePaulo, I went ahead and read her new book, Single at Heart. She points out that solos, especially lifelong solos and I really am, even though I was married young, because all the indicators were there, I just didn’t know you could do something different. She talks about how solos do tend to pursue things that are meaningful to them, psychologically rich experiences, etc., and actually pursue careers that make less money on average.
It’s interesting. Of course, you can go the one direction of trying to take care of yourself economically and focus on making money when that’s your choice. You have the agency to pursue something for economic reasons. You could also just as easily take that agency and that freedom that you get from living a life that’s self-directed without a strong influence from a partner, to do something that you really care about.
One of the things I’ve been doing in the beginning of this third act, and what I hope is the beginning of a third act, as my daughter leaves and everything, is just I wouldn’t call them memoirs, but writing my memories down for her, and maybe other people might be interested eventually. There’s a little piece here that I wanted to read to you that I wrote.
“After college, it didn’t occur to me to ask anyone or to take anyone’s opinions into account when I followed my inner compass back to Brazil. I certainly wouldn’t have changed that decision for a man, but I also didn’t consider my parents, friends, most of what I’d known in life, or anyone or anything else either.”
“Mom had similarly followed her inner compass to the US, leaving a fiancé behind. My grandmother had left David, her husband, because he was abusive, as goes one version of the family legend. Despite that being so rare at the time, in the 1940s and in that place, Teófilo Otoni, which is in the northeast of Minas Gerais state in Brazil. She had moved to a big city hours away.”
“As a preteen, I had announced to my parents that I wanted to go back to Brazil when I grew up. Mom had said, ‘There’s no opportunity there. That’s why we left.’ As an activist, I couldn’t think where else I had a direct claim to with more opportunity. My calculation wasn’t financial. It was about meaning-making, change-making, making a difference with my life.”
That’s the quote that I wrote down, and I was thinking about the freedom that I felt to make that decision to go. Despite financial, despite family, I turned out to be financially fine, mostly because of family, but I didn’t make my decision because of that, and that was because I knew I only needed to worry about myself at that point and into the future. That was more important to me. I think the third act is also about tapping back into ourselves when we’re younger. I think there’s a lot of reflection that happens, or can happen. I’ve been doing a lot of that, trying to work through childhood stuff and figure out things about myself.
Mindset Shift: How To Embrace Abundance In Midlife
That’s so wonderful. It actually made me think of my own little story, which I’ll share now. Before I say that, one of the things I do think is like, this is not about being fabulously wealthy and going to Antarctica. I think that some of our happiest moments in life are ones where our basic needs are met. You don’t have to move to Tuscany, but maybe you want to move next door to your best friend in the same city.
I just want to say that this is not predicated on fabulous wealth. The story I have about it was my mushroom trips are well documented on the show, including a lot of Solo Thoughts episodes. One of the things that I’ve been working on is how do I feel good about my remarkable life. If I look at my life on paper, it’s incredible. I achieved more than I ever imagined I would. Actually, I rewrote my bio on my website and it’s a story of me revisiting my eighteen-year-old self and telling him how it turns out. I literally cried writing that bio because it’s beyond whatever that eighteen-year-old boy could ever have imagined, like, ten times as good in that way.
Yet, I still don’t always feel like I won. I don’t always feel like life is remarkable. I think some of it is because I’ve had such a scarcity focus in my life, from my childhood to being a professor. Being a professor is a zero-sum world in a lot of ways. It’s a very tenuous approach to tenure, and it’s hard to undo those perspectives. I was up in the mountains solo and I did a mushroom trip, and my intention with that mushroom trip was, how do I feel good about my life?
I have a feeling this resonates with a lot of people. I had this moment of insight, as often happens, where there was a period in my life where I did not have scarcity mindset. I did not have scarcity focus. It lasted exactly one year. It was my freshman year in college. I went off to college so excited and feeling so free to have escaped this chaotic, highly controlled world of a mother who was mentally ill, yet well-intentioned, wanted to keep us safe and keep us controlled, trying to just deal with the challenges of her own life.
I hit the ground running. Rutgers University only an hour, hour and a half away from home, but it might as well have been a different planet. I was living with my best friend at the time, and I sucked the marrow out of that experience. It was a world of possibility and freedom. I didn’t care about grades, I switched out of Engineering into Psychology, I picked up a new sport, I started to have adventures and travel. I was a bit of a trickster. I would lead these pranks that we would do on each other and other people. It was so wonderful, so stimulating intellectually, socially, etc., like the future was just bright and filled with possibilities.
That was really good for me to recognize that I had this abundant mindset. What ended that abundant mindset and pushed me back into the world of scarcity was that summer before my sophomore year, I got a term bill I couldn’t pay. This amazing opportunity was going to be ripped away from me. My parents couldn’t help, I got an emergency loan. I needed $1,500, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but in 1989 was a lot of money to a kid on his own.
I got $500 loan, $500 from one of my grandparents, and my friend Todd lent me $500. That woke me up. I turned into an adult that summer. Suddenly, grades became important, and while everybody went out partying on Friday night, I was doing my statistics homework because I realized like, it was all on me. Nonetheless, it was nice to know that I can do abundance, and now I just need to channel that eighteen-year-old who does not give a shit about anything except sucking the marrow out of life.
I think it’s really important to expose ourselves. The fact that you had that experience for a period means you can draw on it. Whatever experiences we have, good and bad, they all bring all sorts of different elements with them and some may feel really good and there’s always something on both sides. They’re part of our toolbox., I’ve always been into reading, I’m into popular neuroscience and psychology and lots of things, but I’ve gotten really into it in this period of working through stuff and transitions and the grieving, which then became this work.
One of the books that I ran landed on was Life is in the Transitions, which is really funny because William James has a quote, “Life is in the transitions.” The idea is that the most significant formative moments in our life aren’t static. They’re not the static periods. These in-between times are really important and that they can be positive or negative. It could be your wedding, and it changes everything. It could be starting college, like you said. These are positive to many people and marriage depending. You’ve got the other side, losing a parent and illness and so on.
They can be voluntary, involuntary, they can be personal, like within our own life, they can be a social thing like the pandemic. He talks about the average person having 36 of these. I went and did this list and I came up with 50 to 60 in my life. I’m like, “They’re not the life quakes he talks about,” which are huge, like multi-year. My parents’ passing away would be a life quake.
In a way, I feel like this third act, if you’ve gotten good at the muscle of transition, you’re building a muscle. To me it’s like, if I need to have a transition, I can handle it. I’d prefer to be able to choose which ones I’m going to have. There are some things you can do to increase the chances that you’re choosing them, like talking about the agency at the beginning. I feel like this period is also about reducing.
Reducing the disruptive ones has to do with our ability to embrace things, how much we can embrace and ride it out and work with it and not try to fight it, because most of these aren’t things you can go back on or should go back on. I feel like life so far was about getting used to these and learning how to work with them and now I feel more capable. There’s plenty of things that could happen that I’m sure would blindside me and I would not be able to handle well, but I feel like generally, on average, I’m much more capable.
The issues that I had from early trauma I’ve worked on. It would be new things that would appear. I haven’t repressed things and I’ve worked through things, so it means that it would have to be new things that would have to come along for me to not have any idea how to handle. I don’t know, I feel like this is also an important part of this phase. For me, anyway.
Growth And Discomfort: Why You Can’t Have One Without The Other
I think that what ends up happening is with aging, you’re highlighting the great benefit. You have life experience, you understand who you are, you get a sense of what your limits are. What does not kill me makes me stronger. If I handled this, I can handle the next thing. The contrast is something I’ve been working on, we have this desire for comfort. Life can get easier in some ways. You get to have your air conditioning and your nice comfortable space and your routine and I needed that, in a lot of ways.
When working on a book, I want a comfortable life. I want it to be efficient and I want things to go smoothly. The problem is that it is very hard to grow when you’re comfortable. There is no such thing as an exercise routine that builds muscle that’s comfortable. It doesn’t happen. To recognize that discomfort is a necessary ingredient for growth can help you snap out of that. I’ve talked about these guys when I lived up in Boulder and down the street from my house. I just was in it. I was up early, I was working a lot, and I was just building, it was an exciting, stressful time, and there was a coffee shop that was open at 5:45 AM.
I’d go in there and I’d be 30 years junior to anyone else in that in that coffee shop. It was a bunch of old men. They were grumpy old men. They just did the same thing every single day. They didn’t complain about it, but there was not a lot of growth happening there. If that coffee shop didn’t open up that day, it would be a really bad day for that crew.
I always think about that in some ways, that it’s very easy to turn into the person who just needs their routines and is not embracing the discomfort because it’s hard. It can get harder. Those are the two sides, you have this choice, which is like, “I can handle this because I have in the past,” versus “I need it to be this way. It has to go exactly this way because that’s how it was yesterday and that’s how I envision it for tomorrow.” You’re smiling.
You remind me of a couple of things. One thing is my parents were polar opposites. It’s amazing that they stayed married. Until death do them part. My mother was Brazilian and very Latin and very vivacious and extroverted, and my dad was an English intellectual. His thoughts and ideas were very hard to follow and he was an economist. My mom was an economist, too, but she was a development economist, so it was quite different.
Anyway, my mom was a homebody. Once she retired and she retired early, she wanted to stay home. She wanted to take care of her house, she wanted to take care of her grandchildren, she wanted that comfort. Everything needed to be comfortable. I saw the effects this had physically because if her knee hurt, she wouldn’t exercise and then she’d gain weight and then her knee would hurt more and then she couldn’t exercise and this these sorts of vicious cycles.
I love my house. I have a house that I’m very committed to, but it’s that solo nesting thing as well also happens. At the same time, my dad was a nomad. My dad would have moved his whole life multiple times if he could have. He traveled to over 100 countries with his work, but also birdwatching, which was his personal passion. He didn’t need to be comfortable. He could be birdwatching involved, being out in the middle of nowhere for a while and getting bitten by a lot of bugs, and so on.
I have both of those very much in me. It’s really interesting. What I basically do is I have a routine that I love with my house and my pets and my work and my friends, neighborhood, etc. Every couple of months, every few months, or at least twice a year, I need to travel and do something more uncomfortable. It’s often uncomfortable. I have no issues with uncomfortable travel as long as I’m aware in advance.
In fact, if it’s too comfortable, then I don’t see it as legitimate because part of the experience is to see things that are different and experience things. That part becomes part of our toolbox, for us to have these experiences that you can go back and say, “I lived this experience.” it can happen. I could feel that. I have felt it. It was a therapist years ago that told me that. I was sad that that I had lost somebody in my life that connected me to a feeling. She said, “The feeling is in you. This person exposed you to that, but you’ve experienced it. Now, you can connect. You can find that.”
She was right. After I had that awareness, I was able to intentionally reconnect myself with those feelings. It was around the natural world. It was somebody I knew who was part indigenous. I felt like I could only experience the natural world that way around this person. I think that we learn. As we get older, we can accumulate and we can also decide, “Now I’m going to seek out these new experiences.” I’ve tried comfort for a long time because it felt right or it felt like what we’re supposed to pursue, but now, I want to explore new things. We can make that decision at any point, and I think it’s a great time in midlife, as we enter our third act, if we, again, are healthy and financially capable.
There are these limitations that may come from for certain things. I don’t want to ignore people who can’t get out of a job that won’t allow for the flexibility to explore certain things, even if they’re low cost. There are people that are tied to all sorts of conditions, sadly, that keep them from having these opportunities.
I want to say again, you don’t have to go to Tibet to make this happen. My most recent example, I’ve been boxing. I went and looked at boxing gyms. I turned down the yuppie boxing gym that was a seven-minute drive and climate-controlled and clean, to go to a gritty gym that’s a pain in the ass to drive to, that’s hot, so hot in the summer and so cold in the winter, in order to challenge myself even more.
Empty Nesting: Practical Plans For Your Next Chapter
It’s a little choice. I get exposed to different people and different perspectives at that gym than I would have otherwise. There are these little micro-decisions that you can make, I think, to try to induce growth through discomfort. Let’s talk about some of the things you’re doing. What are some of your plans? What are some of the changes you’re going to make, especially now as an empty nester?
To your last point, travel doesn’t have to be far. Sometimes it’s about community. You know Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is not actually a hierarchy, apparently. Scott Barry Kaufman argues that it wasn’t a hierarchy, he just listed needs and was analyzing them and at some point, somebody put it in a hierarchy.
He offers a sailboat model and transcendence at the top, which apparently Maslow talked about as well as a human need. If you think about it as a hierarchy, at the base, you’ve got the physiological needs. Of all of the other needs, I personally think belonging is the most underemphasized and possibly most important. In fact, that’s the one that allowed for the others. If in a hunter-gatherer society, belonging is what allowed you to get access to food and water, shelter, safety, community, connection and meaning.
I’ve become more and more aware of that and also how I’m an urban planner, as we mentioned, and how we don’t build our cities for belonging. We encourage mobility, which is great when it’s a choice, but also sometimes, it’s a choice because you’re not feeling a sense of belonging. Belonging doesn’t have to be family. It can be family of choice, but it can also be within ourselves. The work that needs to happen is often inside us. You literally don’t have to go outside your house to improve your quality of life. In fact, probably the most important thing you can do is the inner work.
I’m just thinking out loud here. I think thinking about this idea of belonging, inner work, and also a sense of responsibility that I feel because as an activist, I’ve been developing methodologies and working, creating things for decades with our partners, our community partners here in Rio and others around the world. All of a sudden, I’m like, “We haven’t documented 90% of this in a way that someone else could really replicate, learn from, be inspired by fully in any way.”
We have bits and pieces. We’re not bad at documenting, but we haven’t systematized what we’ve done. I think for me, a lot of the work that I’m going doing going forward is around building more sense of belonging in my own neighborhood in Rio, which I love. It’s a very special neighborhood like in many ways in terms of the people, but also in terms of the architecture and the history and the design.
It’s a neighborhood that’s built in a way that encourages community and a lot of interaction between people on the street. Learning from that, writing about that, the methodologies of our organization, documenting that, intergenerational transfer. I learned a lot from older activists, and I’m interviewing some of them now that are still alive, and then also transferring that knowledge and what I’ve accumulated to younger activists.
I think for me those are some of the projects that I’m working on. The exercise we’ve talked about, the trying not to decay, so trying to keep moving and increasingly exercising and doing new activities and caring for my house. I really do love my house. I have a beautiful house that I’ve been very lucky. I did a lot of work on it and now it’s more or less done so I can enjoy it and welcome people and welcome visitors. Have my solitude and my alone time, but then also share my time. A lot of the stuff that you talk about, I’m trying to practice all of the things.
The Foundation-Flourish Model: Health, Wealth, Connection, And Meaning
I think that’s very exciting. I was really influenced by Scott Barry Kaufman’s model. In Solo the book, I present my own model, I call it the Foundation Flourish model. One of those the foundation is health, wealth, and connection. Those are the three things most people spend their whole lives trying to accomplish those three things. They have very little opportunity to flourish, which is to pursue meaning or achievement or engagement or even just positive emotion, just to enjoy themselves a bit more.
I love the sailboat model. The foundation keeps you afloat and the flourishing is the sail where you can catch wind. I think it’s a really apt metaphor. Especially because it suggests that there’s no one way to live a flourishing life. Some boats are going North, others are going South, others are going West. Some are going slow, some are going fast, some have the sail down and are just languishing there. It’s a very fun one.
I have a sabbatical coming and I’m very excited about it. I’m going to be continuing in some ways a lot of the things that I’ve done in the past. I’m going to be working on this idea. By the time this hits, I’ll have already done a Solo Thoughts episode about the solo economy, about how the world is going to change with this rapid rise of singles. How institutions are going to have to adjust whether it be businesses, government, religion, healthcare, etc. The world is going to shift.
However, we, as individuals, are shifting faster than the institutions will. I’m going to be writing about that. I’m going to be doing a little bit of work on some critiques of peer review, so some stuff that’s related to my job. I’m going to be considering what is the next big thing. Do I have another big idea in me after doing the humor stuff, perhaps after doing the solo stuff that’s there? I’m going to be doing this stuff largely outside the United States for me to grow and to expand my perspectives I’m going to need to hang out with people different than myself.
There’s this term WEIRD, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed nations, people. There a lot of behavioral science is conducted on WEIRD populations. I want to spend some time with non-WEIRD populations, while at the same time exercising some new muscles, learning perhaps new languages, and so on. I think it’s a very exciting time, and I think it’s a time that we’re both describing we get to experiment. You get to experiment and see what fits, what doesn’t fit there. You don’t have to commit everything, sell all your things and go on a walkabout if that’s not part of your personality, part of your constitution.
Ancient Wisdom: The Indian Ashrama 4-Stage Life Model
I want to highlight a model. You’ve talked about several books now. I picked up this model from my friend David, who’s Indian. I was unaware of it, and at the outset of this conversation, I talked about this very Western of prepare, perform, collapse. I’m going to butcher some of the terms here, so forgive me, but this is an Ashrama model and it’s a four-stage model. It’s an Indian model that dates back to Indian philosophical thoughts circa 800 to 300 BCE. This is an old model. Warning, it’s a male model. It was built and created by men for men. I don’t think it’s limited to men now, but just note that.
The idea essentially is to accumulate, release, build an identity, shed an identity. It’s actually a pretty radical change in life. The first stage is, and I’m not going to say these words, I don’t want to disrespect the language, but the first stage is a learning stage. It’s actually very similar to that preparation stage. We are familiar with this, which is disciplined study, apprenticeship, restraint. Delaying gratification.
A lot of this is like learning. Learning a craft, learning to be an adult. You can think about young Lincoln reading by candlelight, Marie Curie’s early monastic scientific focus. That’s the first stage. That’s very familiar, I think, for most people. The second stage is work, which most of our audience are living in. Produce, contribute, be engaged. Oprah building her media empire, LeBron James going to South Beach to win championships. Those are very familiar models, and in the American model, at some point, that ends. You die, or you retire, and you move into another stage.
This third stage is the stage of withdrawal. It’s a step back from these central roles where you hand off your responsibilities to the next generation, a shift from doing to mentoring, embracing a reinvention, relocation. George Washington leaving office, becoming an elder statesman, refusing a third term. Bill Gates moving away from Microsoft to focus on global health. Jane Goodall moving from fieldwork to advocacy. Maya Angelou moves to teaching and mentoring in her later years.
The fourth stage, I think, is really very interesting. It’s a stage of renunciation, which is to let go of your identity, to release your roles. Tolstoy renouncing wealth, fame, and privilege for more clarity. Thomas Merton withdrawing from public life into a monastic simplicity. This is, in some ways, a very ascetic thing that’s there.
I’m not prescribing this in any way, but I think it is an interesting alternative to the existing model that we see our parents do or grandparents do, that gets talked about around the water cooler, “When are you going to retire? What are you going to do?” that kind of thing, which allows for, I think, more options for someone.
As someone who’s playing with asceticism in his daily life, I think that there’s something very interesting about going full ascetic, I don’t know as that’s probably the right word, perhaps later in life where you give away your worldly possessions. You don’t need things to make you happy. Your happiness comes from inside, your happiness comes from, as you mentioned earlier, your connections and the good that you’ve done.
I find it really helpful, these different frameworks and just ultimately, I think, that every life is unique, and so sometimes the order of things isn’t the same, but there’s something about the arc being similar in terms of speeding up and then slowing down at some at some level. That’s just a physical thing as well, and so on. Despite not being married, which theoretically, is one of the things, although in our culture in Brazil, like in Rio especially, that’s not nearly as much of a pressure point socially and culturally as it is in the US.
I was like I had a child that was doing well, my parents were still alive, I had a very active career, etc., and I was like, “Okay, that’s a sign that things are going well, the fact that I’m pushed to an extreme.” anyway, I’ve been doing this transition and what you’re making me think about is the order sometimes that seems like a natural speed things up, slow things down, and one of the differences would be that in this Eastern model, there’s actually new things and there’s an inner evolution that happens that’s part of aging, and that becomes the central value. People shifting into other ways that they can make contribution.
At the same time, I was thinking as you were speaking about body, mind, and spirit, broadly speaking, these three. I was thinking about how in my twenties, I was very much focused on my mind, my work, intellect, my academics, and then my starting the nonprofit, very much in the mind space. In my 30s, I started practicing Tibetan Buddhism, and so I was incorporating all of the spiritual pieces.
On average, I’m healthier now because I’ve become more active physically. All of these things can come in different order sometimes. Maybe you’re very constrained. I think people who are traumatized have traumatic childhoods it can take a while. I had some trauma. It can take a while for us to get perspective on that and be able to pursue certain things. Also, some people now have children later, have careers earlier.
Just like with the relationship escalator is this linear thing and we’ve been questioning why is that linear and why is it these components, I think it’s similar with generally with as our lives evolve. Maybe being a little bit more open to when things may come and go. It was funny just to finish this thought. You’re bringing Eastern philosophy in and when I was in college, I took an Eastern religions class. That was my first exposure to Eastern religion and to realizing that there was some religion I was interested in because the ones I had been exposed to growing up weren’t of interest to me. I wasn’t raised with a religion in my family.
I remember thinking, “Buddhism sounds really cool, but I need to make some mistakes first.” at several points, I’ve done different types of vows and I’m very into experimenting with these sorts of things. For a month or a year, I’m going to go without X or Y. I want to see how I react, I want to see how I evolve through that process. That all becomes part of your toolbox later. It’s like, “I’m going through this emotional thing when I spent this period where I renounced X.” It doesn’t need to be linear. I don’t need to necessarily renounce more and more as I get older. Also, knowing how to renounce things, cutting things out. The discomfort of dropping things can be hard.
Leaning In: Tantra Vs. The Ascetic Path
I think there is an appeal of Buddhism because life is hard. Buddhism can help you deal with a difficult life. I don’t want to be fully ascetic. I’ve been reading more about Tantra and about how you lean into life. You may lean into very pleasurable, enjoyable, exciting things, or you may lean into more simple, analog, quiet things. I think that there’s something very appealing about that, that you don’t have to give up half your life.
I do want to have moments of asceticism, usually that’s at the end of the day with my books and my vinyl rather than my phone and my computer. I think one of the things that is valuable to do is to read and to listen and to learn about these different models and find the one that works for you, because to our point earlier, there’s not a one-size-fits-all.
I actually posted that we were going to be talking about this in the Solo community, which people can sign up for free at PeterMcGraw.org/solo. People wrote about their own third acts, and so I want to share a few of these. Trent wrote, “Separated after twenty-plus years of marriage and moved from suburbia into the center of a metropolis. Bought an e-scooter, started to explore, and building the confidence to travel solo. The freedom has been liberating in ways I didn’t anticipate.”
Christina writes, “I have a low-paying easy job that lets me focus on what I love. I’m making clothes, making art, and diving into hobbies I never have time for if I followed the typical script.” Camille writes, “At 53, I sold my house, gave away almost everything, and took an adult gap year. After two marriages and following the script, I knew I needed to remove the distractions and finally listen to myself.” Finally, Shane writes, “At 52, I’m in a liminal space. Resettling my career, launching my daughter, and finally embracing the solo mindset. I don’t know exactly what’s next, but for the first time, I’m writing my own script.” Talk about four people living remarkably.
Congratulations, everybody. Amazing.
Yeah, mazel tov. I love it. If you are moved by this episode, please visit the Solo community. We have an episodes discussion thread where you can share your third act, third season, second life, whatever you choose to call it. Theresa, I really value your friendship. I value how much you contribute to the solo community, and as well as our private conversations which really has got me thinking more deeply about this really important topic, and then obviously spending the time to join me.
Thank you so much, Peter. It’s an honor. Congratulations and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the work that you’ve put into this project and this movement.
That’s kind of you. Cheers.
Important Links
- Single In Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
- Theresa Williamson
- New Passages
- Younger Next Year
- Single at Heart, Singles Bill of Rights, and Singles’ Day
- Single at Heart
- Life is in the Transitions
About Theresa Williamson
Theresa Williamson, 49, is a city planner, community organizer and environmentalist. In 2000 she returned to her native Rio de Janeiro where she founded a nonprofit, providing strategic support to Rio de Janeiro’s favela community organizers.
She identifies the solo path as central to allowing her to commit so deeply to this transformative, growing body of award-winning activism.
A lover of sticking to a constant, steep learning curve, of evolving, and a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Theresa sees the solo path as a way to embrace all of life’s possibilities and connections, while respecting one’s own identity and limitations.