Chip Conley came to San Francisco in late 2024 and the city’s alumni chapter hosted an event for local alums from all four Bay Area chapters.
Before Chip spoke in the sanctuary of the Unity Church, he offered the ice breaker familiar to many of us: Turn to someone you don’t know and tell each other “If you really knew me, you’d know…” I wasn’t in Baja but when my turn came, I had a sudden “Aha!” I looked this stranger in the eye and told her, “I didn’t know it but I was waiting my whole life to become a Modern Elder.”
For the first decades of adulthood, I was a Late Bloomer Boomer. While others were killing it in their careers or inventing the future, I was dancing the lambada at Carnaval in Bahia. A professional life on the communications side of healthcare offered meaningful impact while I moved from city to city searching for where I belonged.
Settling into married life, homeownership and parenthood around the age of 40, I had a sense of (more or less) joining the “adult world.” But by the time my daughter was a teenager, I felt rather lost and frustrated that society was telling me life was all downhill from there. MEA didn’t yet exist so I had to take the slow road to figure things out.
I did have a nebulous vision for working to change how we live when no longer young. In the 1970s, my mother got a PhD in gerontology and joined the faculty of medical college. But within a few years her department was disbanded. Medical students weren’t interested in becoming geriatricians: the pay was low and there was “no heroic cure for old age,” as my mother put it. She was ahead of her time and I wanted to somehow bring her legacy to the 21st Century. I’ve become a coach focused on healthspan, working to narrow the gap between how long we live and how long we flourish (currently in the US, that gap is widening to an average of nearly 13 years in poor health!).
After discovering Chip’s Wisdom Well, I gave myself the 65th birthday present of an MEA workshop in Baja. The next year I served as co-lead for my local MEA alumni chapter and took the course Navigating Transitions Online (TQ is such a critical skill to cultivate). This was the mindset I’d been looking for, the people I’d been wanting to connect with, the social movement I hoped existed somewhere.
As the ripples continue to spread, I’ve become a weekly presenter on one of the Rethinking Aging Club’s podcasts and meet up with my RAC collaborators at aging innovation conferences in the U.S. and Asia. Being one of the oldest participants in an AgeTech meetup in my area, I serve as both role model and product persona. “Nothing about us without us” is the message I share with all the younger entrepreneurs. Conventional thinking may say I’m too old (“Finished at 40” is the stereotype in tech) but I clearly see it’s not too late for me to help invent the future, too.
In the Spring, I was back at the Unity Church once more with the four local MEA alumni chapters to watch the documentary Join or Die. It was easy to feel “collective effervescence” as our group reflected on how MEA embodies the kind of engagement recommended in the film. I remembered my “aha” moment last year in that same sanctuary and smiled.
Outdated ideas around growing older surround us, mindsets that damage our health and longevity. So it is literally lifesaving for our generations to reimagine the second half of life for the 21st Century. Modern Elderhood isn’t a place, the kind of location I was seeking in my 20s where I might fit in. But it’s definitely a destination. I was “waiting my whole life” and now my life has become whole.
-Ellen
Ellen Khalifa is thrilled to be part of various social movements working on a new vision for the second half of life. She coaches and consults on behavior change for healthspan and wellspan.