Chip Conley

As many of you know, our MEA faculty member Dacher Keltner’s research has shown the most common way of feeling awe is to witness moral beauty - compassion, resilience, courage, equanimity, humility - and I have to say that this week’s Santa Fe workshop with Christian mystic Richard Rohr was full of moral beauty, including this exquisite human, Dorothy, who experienced her 91st birthday with us on the first night of the workshop. We may have learned as much from Dorothy as we did from Richard.

Science and religion often seem like oil and water, but there are a growing number of scientists who are very public about their faith. And, some of them suggest there’s scientific evidence that the rituals, customs, and community practices of religion over thousands of years offer humans a better life due to basic social science. They’ve even coined the term “spiritual technologies” to describe the tools and processes that a researcher might test in a lab but can see in real-life practice in a religious institution.

"I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me — they’re cramming for their final exam." - George Carlin

Are you a “None,” as in None of the Above, when it comes to religion? 27% of Americans classify themselves as "nones," 17% of whom identify as atheist, 20% as agnostic and 63% as "nothing in particular." This is quite a change from the past. In 1960, 2% of Americans identified as “other,” a category that includes the nonreligious. In 1980, 10.2% did. In 2000, 19.5%. By 2016, it was over a third.

Chip’s Note: In honor of Christian mystic Richard Rohr co-leading our “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life” workshop at our MEA Santa Fe campus this week, all five of my personal blogs will focus on the state of spirituality and religion.

If I didn’t have my hands full growing MEA, my top entrepreneurial idea would be to create a vetted online marketplace of modern elders and young entrepreneurs. I was fortunate enough to be tapped on the shoulder by the Millennial founders of Airbnb nearly 12 years ago, but this could have happened with matchmaking technology.

Midlife is full of transitions from divorce to menopause to changing jobs to seeing your parents pass away. But, one transition that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is having your kids leave home, known as the “Empty Nest” phenomenon. There’s such a wide variety of experiences for parents when this happens depending upon the state of your marriage, whether you’re a single parent or not, your age, how many kids have flown the coop, and how many are likely to come home in their twenties. What’s remarkable is how few academic studies have focused on this particular midlife transition and how few online or in-person courses exist to help midlifers through this life stage.

One of our MEA campuses, Baja, is literally at sea level. The other, Santa Fe, is at 6,500 feet and can play a few games with visitor’s bodies during their first couple days in the Land of Enchantment.

Recently, a compadre in one of our MEA workshops said to me, under her breath, the quote that is the title of today’s post. I thought she was talking about the workshop not working well, but instead she was talking about being the lead actress in her script of life, a script that she did not author. She wasn’t enjoying the script, but she was doing a helluva job pulling it off.

I hit rock bottom at 47. My relationship was on the rocks. My adult foster son was going to prison. My friend, Chip, had taken his own life (and I was having suicide ideation myself…I lost 5 midlife male friends between 2008-2010). I was running out of cash as we were opening 15 boutique hotels in 21 months just as we were catapulting into the Great Recession. I felt handcuffed being CEO of this gargantuan company I’d created over the past two decades. I feared everything was going to crash and I dreaded the idea of being a public failure.