Intergenerational Collaboration

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.

Chip’s Note: Sonali has been a remarkable addition to our MEA leadership team here in Santa Fe. After reading this, you may consider moving here as well.

Our kids provide us oodles of long-term meaning, but not always short-term happiness. Harvard’s Bob Waldinger showed me this graph of the challenges of marital satisfaction soon after kids arrive with things getting better until years later when our kids often return home in their twenties. Nearly 50% of kids move in with their parents in their 20s. Sixty years ago, this number was less than 30%.

Have you heard about the new Happiness research? It revealed that, for the first time, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in the world. This downturn has been primarily attributed to the “young adult midlife crisis,” with those under 30 ranking 62nd out of 143 countries in terms of happiness, contrasting sharply with those aged 60 and above, who are in the top 10. So, maybe it’s not a U-Curve, but just a long, slow incline of life satisfaction for those in the U.S.? Whatever the case, it appears easier to be old than young.

Have you ever met an impressive young leader and said, “You’re such an inspiration. You give me hope for the future!”

In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to feel like you're constantly treading water. With endless demands for our time and attention, it's no wonder so many of us feel like we're just on a neverending treadmill, trying to get things done with no end in sight.

Two weeks before my father died, he called my mother over to him and asked her to bring a pen and paper. She later described his state at that time as being somewhere between this world and the next.

Sometimes, we don’t know what’s missing until it sneaks up on us in our lives: iPhones, Airpods, Pickleball…

Let's face it, we didn't structure society to connect with people from other generations. CoGenerate founder and co-CEO Marc Freedman, who is teaching at MEA this fall, calls it "age-apartheid." You go to school with people your age, work for forty years with people roughly your age, and then live in a retirement community or nursing home with people the same age.

One of the beauties of getting older is making sense of our experiences. Our painful lessons of the past become the raw material for our future wisdom. And not just our wisdom but the insight we pass on to those in our lives. After all, wisdom is not taught, it’s shared. So, how might you package up your metabolized experience and deliver it as distilled compassion to someone younger than you?