You’ve heard these data points before: we’ve added more than 30 years to life expectancy in little over a century. The prevailing narrative alongside this demographic gift is that you are going to be old for longer. But that is not how we are experiencing these additional years.
As a gerontologist and coach, I’ve spent decades watching the same pattern unfold in the people I work with: adults in midlife and better arriving at a profound crossroads, full of wisdom and potential, yet navigating from an outdated map of life that is limiting and ageist.
Recent research and a plethora of new tools enable us to modulate the impacts of age, making us more vital and empowered than any previous generation. In so doing, something extraordinary has evolved: two new life stages.
We discovered two new life stages and suddenly, everything makes sense.
A decade ago, I recognized that we live long enough to go through a kind of adolescence twice, so I set out to popularize the term Middlescence: a new-normal stage of adult development. It shares similarities with adolescence, only this time we have the benefit of wisdom from decades of life experience. The reckonings are real, the choices are consequential, and the potential is extraordinary. I published the Middlescence Manifesto in 2016, and I regularly hear from people and podcasters saying how naming midlife has helped tame its unhelpful, inaccurate narrative: the midlife crisis.
So what of the second stage? Where did the other 10–15 additional years of life go in the midst of our life course? A few years ago, I started studying where these additional years landed in our lived experience and recognized that we’ve added a stretch of life towards the end, which calls for planning and investment. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean physically, psychologically, relationally, spiritually. These years can be some of the most meaningful of our lives or the most diminished. We have the agency to choose which of those two paths we take.
I call these the Trophy Years™. Not because they’re easy, but because they’re earned. They’re the years you’ve been building toward your entire life, and they deserve to be lived fully, not surrendered to decline.
That’s not to say that the Trophy Years will be without loss, physical limitations, and other challenges. Loss and grief will arrive. That is not pessimism; it is honesty. But what we consistently fail to account for is what increases: the depth of our wisdom, the quality of our connections, a capacity for purpose and even a sense of joy that compounds with time. Just as we shouldn’t enter retirement without a financial plan, our Trophy Years deserve the same deliberate design.
Once you see these stages clearly, the question changes.
It’s no longer “How do I avoid aging?”
It becomes “How do I design my life so I age well and thrive?”
That shift changes everything and invites you to look honestly at how you are living, what gives you purpose, and what no longer serves. It invites you to start building toward the future you want to inhabit and deserve.
Anti-aging points you backward.
Life design points you forward.
Earlier this year, groundbreaking research by Becca Levy and Martin Slade confirmed that beliefs about aging are not a soft variable; they are a biological one. Nearly half of the older adults studied improved in cognitive and physical function. The single strongest predictor? Their beliefs about aging.
The shift from avoidance to agency is not just philosophical; it is physiological. Naming these stages, Middlescence and the Trophy Years, is not just language. It is a map. And it is the map I spend my days helping people navigate: from reacting to aging to designing a life of meaning, vitality, and purpose.
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If you’re ready to stop reacting to time and start designing with it, I’d love for you to join me and MEA CEO Derek Gehl this June 7–11 or August 2–6 at MEA’s Santa Fe campus for Designing Longevity.
This is what it looks like when your Trophy Years stop being something to defend against and start becoming the life you deliberately design.