The Biology of Becoming, Part IV: Fifty

Welcome To My Half Time Show.

For about a year now, turning 50 has done something interesting to me, and more specifically, my nervous system.

It doesn’t feel like an ending, but there is an undeniable shift. Not in the dramatic sense, but one that started in my mindset and has run like a river into the other parts of my life.

I had set myself a goal close to 20 years ago, that by the time I was 50, I would have a certain amount of net worth so that I could (fill in the blank). That blank got filled with a good number of terms: so that I could retire, take the foot off the gas, enjoy my kids as teens, make up for the mat leaves I never took, be available for my parents, take a sabbatical and write a book, travel more, all the things.

When I turn 50 today, I proudly report that I hit twice that goal about three months ago. That’s what you get for goals, motivation, embracing struggle and growth mindsets fueled by a personal obsession with the mechanics of money, and an incredibly powerful network of coaches I have consulted with along the way.

As we will unpack in next week’s instalment of The Biology of Becoming where I start to survey the human lifespan neurobiologically from a wealth perspective, by the time we hit 50, it turns out the brain has also become really quite good at pattern recognition. It has lived through cycles. It has watched ideas rise, fall, and the very best things and people seem to keep returning in new forms. By this point the brain knows deep down what looks permanent rarely is, but there are cycles and seasons and reincarnations all the time.

That knowing matters more now than ever.

This is why I started to think of the first 50 years as “gathering the pieces” for a game played on a stable but sometimes invisible board.

If you were born in the mid-1970s, the world you grew up in rewarded linear learning and patient accumulation. Even though I was only a kid, I was a kid in a family in the wealth management business, and there were quiet financial undercurrents and money scripts happening around me all of the time.

But compared to now, markets were slower. Information was scarce, and expertise compounded quietly. My Dad paid my sister and I 5 cents a piece to stuff and stamp envelopes for direct mail marketing to help him grow his business. It was a simpler time.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen:

• The end of the gold standard which dramatically reshaped monetary policy and inflation dynamics – basically so we can usually count on what a dollar can buy
• The rise of personal computers (late 1970s–80s) which turn specialized computing into household infrastructure – my parents got us our first Apple Macintosh around 1986, and I’ve had a mouse in my hand ever since.
• The creation of RRSPs and expansion of registered savings in Canada, formalizing long-term retirement planning and giving the business I run an engine for both investing and wealth building advice
• The 1987 market crash, where prices moved faster than human reaction for the first time, and I viscerally remember the shock this caused for my Dad – maybe more than anyone even acknowledged at the time
• The birth of the internet (1990s), which democratized access to information without yet causing the kinds of crushing attention strain we know today
• The dot-com bubble and collapse (2000–2002), which in the sudden shocking style of ’87 taught a whole generation the difference between innovation and speculation

Through all of this, the underlying message I believe I absorbed subconsciously was to learn every system as it comes along, work hard and stay invested.

Without a doubt, there were some serious shocks to the system once in a while, but they were moments that happened and with a steady cadence, we all walked out of them. There was a sense that with consistent effort, hard work would keep compounding and I could trust that time would do the rest.

The game board was moving slightly over time, but more like thick lava – slowly enough that experience stayed relevant. Whether it was me maturing or the world changing or both, up until about 19 years ago, my nervous system enjoyed a world where patience and delayed gratification worked. But then the board began to slide.

Around the time many of us Gen Xers were entering mid-career and early parenthood, the environment changed, this time more subtly, and then all at once.

Consider what we’ve all lived through since 2007:

• The birth of the iPhone (2007) which is nearly exactly the same age as my oldest son, who often feels as much like “Me 10.0” for all that we have in common, but for how much faster he thinks at speed because he has grown up in a world that has moved faster and faster since then, largely because of this very device.
• The great financial crisis (2007-2009), which I credit along with my father and my son as the thing that allowed me to cut my teeth on crisis as a business owner. When you get wired to thrive on that level of pressure, there is no better training ground to become anything in the world you want to. For everyone else, this was a turning point moment when trust in institutions evaporated so painfully that the only good thing to come of it was the musical Hamilton (and I’m so glad it did).
• Near-zero interest rates which distorted risk, reward, and negatively impacted saving behavior
• Social media algorithms, which monetized attention and determined that actual wisdom was less important than likes
• Index investing and ETFs, which accelerated market participation while making investment products start to look a lot alike
• Bitcoin, Crypto and decentralized finance, and the questioning of money itself
• COVID-19 global pandemic, which proved how quickly “normal” can dissolve, how incredibly we CAN cooperate at scale, but which also gave us the fastest market crash and recovery in recorded history
• And now the arrival of generative AI, shifting the value of labor, knowledge, and creativity in real time, and a Facebook for AI called Moltbook. That’s right, AI’s now even have their own online community and have started to bid on humans.

These headline global transformations over recent years have started to feel less linear and more exponential. And it wasn’t just a period of technological change, it was also a period of massive cognitive pressure, so much so that we might be reaching a limit on what the human brain was designed to handle.

We don’t want to admit this because – well, if you’re reading this it’s because you’re a fighter, a peak performer, someone who never quits. But I’m here to tell you: the board is no longer stable, and your nervous system has noticed.

Why Midlife Feels Different Now

It’s completely natural that when people turn 50, it’s a big deal and we start to use deprecating language to make light of it – half time, second half, second or maybe third act, heading over to the back 9 of life, cresting the mountain top, however you want to put it.

But folks: we are actually more capable than ever. We have all of the game pieces and we even know many if not all the rules of the game. We have experience and we have even started learning how to say no to the stuff that doesn’t serve us.

Oh. I forgot to mention. We are also more easily exhausted. And some of us are afraid to admit it, but we are actually scared.

But this isn’t because of our age, or because we allowed ourselves that drink (or two) on a Friday night after work. It’s because of a misalignment between ancient biology and modern velocity.

Our brains evolved to manage slow feedback, local threats, scarce information and a relatively small group of people to coordinate with. One of the most exhausting parts of being a human today is the insane mismatch between our circle of awareness which is massive, and our circle of influence which is often devastatingly small by comparison.

Our brains did not evolve for algorithmic persuasion, 24-hour financial markets and news cycles, constant performance comparison, or all of this massive exponential technological change.

But somewhere in all of this, we must remember that humans adapt. So given this grace-saving perspective I am offering up, the question I have devised for myself after 50 is this:

Do I keep playing the old game on a board that no longer exists – or do I update how I play?

My Second 50 Years: Playing the Pieces Well on a Moving Board

There’s a powerful metaphor embedded in this moment for me, which the video I offered up as part of this essay alludes to. The first 50 years were about gathering the pieces, and the second 50 will be about playing them well, because:

a) I can see the board but also

b) I am aware that it’s constantly moving.

So “playing well” no longer means using a linear playbook like it could when I was stuffing envelopes with one hand and using MacPaint with the mouse in the other. It means cultivating adaptive intelligence and that requires a very close relationship with my nervous system.

A dysregulated nervous system in an exponentially changing AI-saturated world becomes reactive. A well-regulated one becomes discerning. I have chosen the latter.

This is why growth in the second half of life for me will not be about indulgence, it’s protective, it’s picky, it is so much more guarded as to what it lets into what I call “the physical plant” which is my muscles, my mindset and even my money. The way I deliberately allocate my time, energy, money and attention works according to a framework, and everyone who knows me knows this, and it turns out, they all want to know more.

Growth for me in this next 50 isn’t going to be about keeping up – it’s going to be about staying sovereign. Remaining free. My muscle and money and mindset will shift from wealth accumulation to wealth allocation in every sense of the word.

Let the games begin.