Welcome to Age Against the Machine
Aging, planning, adapting: Professional insight plus the messy realities
I’m launching Age Against the Machine to explore aging, planning, and adapting—from the perspective of both an advisor who helps others through it and a human living it in real time.
I’ve spent decades working at the intersection of aging, money, and housing. As a career financial advisor, I’ve worked with countless families navigating the most emotionally and financially complex chapters of life: aging parents, long-term care, senior housing, and urgent decisions that can’t be postponed any longer.
In this newsletter, I’ll bring together what I’ve learned (and what I’m still figuring out) about family, money, health, and the slippery quality of aging that makes it impossible to ever fully understand.
Some themes that I’ll be delving into:
Imagining our future selves: Exploring why clear visualization of our future helps drive better decision-making and what this means practically.
Recognizing where we are on the timeline: Acknowledging where we truly stand in our aging journey to enable realistic planning rather than avoidance.
Planning and adapting: Cultivating both future-oriented thinking and present awareness to adapt when things change suddenly, which they always do.
Antidotes to procrastination: Addressing how procrastination habits collide with immovable timelines and exploring behavioral approaches to get past our unhelpful tendencies.
Elements of aging well: We’ll keep coming back to the core elements of aging well in terms of career and purpose, social connection, finances, physical and mental health, and community.
I’ll share stories from my clients and my own life, along with tools and frameworks that can help all of us gain more clarity on aging.
What are we aging against?
I’m calling this Substack Age Against the Machine—not just to get a chuckle from my fellow Gen Xers—but because aging isn’t a passive act. The machines we age against are both internal and external. The internal gears of procrastination and avoidance, which just get worse as we age. And the external systems—medical, insurance, housing—that discount our agency in later years.
This newsletter is my own way to age against these machines and bring together what I’ve learned, and what I’m still figuring out as I go. I hope it can help you see where you are and where you’re going more clearly.