When I turned 41, I made a five-year plan.
I was going to be earning fifty grand more, twenty pounds lighter, running a side business, sleeping a clean 7.5 hours, fluent in Spanish, and reading 30 books a year.
I had a spreadsheet. I had a vision board, which I never want to talk about again.
I’m 46 now. I hit some of those targets and missed others. The strange thing is, I don’t care about the targets I hit, and I don’t feel bad about the ones I missed. The version of me who made that plan doesn’t want the things he was planning toward. The career he was building isn’t a career I want. The body he was sculpting was a younger man’s body. The life he was optimizing toward was, even at the time, already disappearing—I just hadn’t noticed yet.
It took me five years to figure out that the work of my forties isn’t building. It’s the much harder, much less Instagrammable work of figuring out which goals are actually mine, and which belong to a person I no longer am.
The person I was aiming for is already gone
I wrote him down. The man I wanted to be at 46.
He was some combination of: financially abundant, in great shape, well-traveled, well-read, well-rested, free of certain bad habits, the proud father of children who would later thank me. He was an aggregate of magazine covers, TED talks, and the more impressive versions of my friends from college. I started building toward him in my late 30s, after my dad died and I decided I wasn’t going to die the way he did.
The problem isn’t that I didn’t reach him. The problem is that by the time I got close enough to see him clearly, I noticed he wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore.
The career was someone else’s idea of an enviable career. The body was a body I wanted because younger me had wanted it, and younger me had wanted it because someone on a magazine cover had wanted it. The man I was optimizing toward had been built, in significant part, out of the values of the person I was in 2018. I’m not that person now.
The optimization stopped working when the target moved
Optimization works when the target is stable.
I can optimize the route to my office because the office stays where it is. I can optimize a recipe because the dish doesn’t change between attempts. But when I set out to optimize my life, the life kept moving. The version of me that the optimization was supposed to produce kept shifting in response to everything I did. I was trying to hit a target while the target was being rewritten by my own arrows.
I noticed this around year three. I’d hit some of the early milestones and started feeling, instead of satisfaction, a low confusion. The achievements weren’t producing the feeling I’d built them to produce.
A 1991 paper by Carol Ryff in Psychology and Aging later helped me put words to what I was feeling: Ryff found that younger and middle-aged adults expected continued improvement on nearly every dimension of well-being as they looked into the future, while older adults perceived stability or decline. Somewhere in the back half of life, the orientation flips. I was in the flip. The man I was becoming wasn’t the man who would’ve been thrilled by becoming him.
The plan I was executing went slack in my hands. Nothing visible had changed. But the thing the plan had been animated by—the future self it was building me into—had stopped being someone I wanted to become.
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Letting go of a goal felt like failure at first
I could tell which goals I should release because letting them go felt like failure.
This was the trick. The goals I most needed to put down were the ones whose surrender felt, at first, like quitting. Like proof I couldn’t do it. Like an admission to whoever was keeping score that I didn’t have what it took.
The book I wanted to write. The promotion I’d been positioning myself for. The kind of father I’d planned to be on a trip we never took. The Spanish. The twenty pounds. The business. And when I finally let myself say, out loud, that I wasn’t going to do that thing anymore, the first sensation wasn’t relief. The first sensation was shame.
The shame was misdirected. It was what the goal felt like on the way out the door. The goal was protesting that I was abandoning it, the way a relationship in its dying weeks generates the most intense versions of itself before it goes. I didn’t get to release the goal without feeling, briefly, like a failure. The feeling was part of the release. It wasn’t evidence about whether the release was right.
I grieve the version of life I won’t live
This is the part most people don’t talk about.
I didn’t just release the goal. I released the version of life that the goal was a doorway into.
I didn’t just decide not to write the book. I released the future in which I was a person who’d written a book—the readings, the conversations, the way my daughter would’ve looked at me at the launch, the relationship to my own intelligence I’d been quietly building the goal in service of. I released a life.
I grieved it the way I’d grieve any version of a future I’d cared about and wasn’t going to see. It came in the car on the way home from somewhere unrelated. It came when I saw someone my age doing the thing I’d planned to do, and I had to leave the room.
I didn’t optimize through this. I sat with it. The grief was the price of the disengagement. It came in installments. There was no way around it.
The work is figuring out what to put down
The actual work of my forties turned out not to be building. It was sorting.
I walked through the inventory of my goals. I asked, of each one: Is this still mine? Was it ever mine? Do I want it because I want it, or because I wanted to want it at thirty-two? Some goals passed the test. Some failed and stayed anyway, because I wasn’t ready. Some failed, and I put them down right there, quietly, between two errands.
Around this time, a friend sent me a study by Carsten Wrosch, Michael Scheier, Gregory Miller, Richard Schulz, and Charles Carver in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They’d examined goal disengagement and reengagement across three studies. The finding: the capacity to disengage from unattainable goals was associated with higher well-being, alongside the capacity to engage with new goals once the old ones were released. It was one of the strongest predictors of well-being in the second half of life. The thing I was doing without a name had a name.
The goals that were leaving had something in common. Most had been built when I was 32 or 34, aimed at people who, in some cases, were no longer alive.
Some were aimed at my college roommate, whom I hadn’t seen in eleven years. One was aimed at my dad, who had died a few years before and couldn’t be impressed by anything I did now. The goals weren’t just obsolete. They were obsolete in the specific way of being targeted at audiences who weren’t watching. The goals I was carrying for ghosts came off the list first.
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What’s left surprisingly fits me better
When I finished the sorting—or when I’d finished the first pass, since this is the kind of work that happens in passes—the surprise wasn’t that there was less.
The surprise was that what remained was so much closer to the actual shape of me.
I had expected, when I started this, that the smaller pile of goals would feel meager. That I’d look at it and miss the bigger pile, the more impressive version of my life that the bigger pile was building. That didn’t quite happen. The smaller pile was the size of what I could actually want, with my actual life, using the actual hours, energy, and attention I had. It fit. It had been re-tailored to me. The wanting of it wasn’t shadowed by the suspicion that I was wanting it for someone else’s reasons.
To be honest, I don’t always love the new pile.
There are mornings I keep returning to the old one, the way I’d return to a closet of clothes I used to fit into. But the new pile is mine, in a way the old pile, for all its ambition, never quite was. And when I reach for one of the goals in it and start working, the working feels different—less like climbing toward a person I was trying to become, more like building what’s next from where I actually am.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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