Stephanie: Hi Rachel. Welcome to the show.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie: a pleasure to have you here. and I am so looking forward to this conversation because you come so highly recommended from a dear, dear, dear college friend of mine, our mutual, adoration society for our friend. Dave,

Rachel: Yes, he was my boss for my very first full-time position. And I got so, so lucky with him as my manager because he really shaped the course of what was to come for me. I was and probably still am a difficult person to manage because I am high energy. I am a perfectionist. I can't let something go if I feel like it's a really good idea. And there are were so many chances where he could have told me to stay in a box. He could have told me that this is not how it works, that I needed to be different. And he never did. And while he was showing me how to shape that passion into something that works in the corporate world, it brought me where I am today.

And I don't think that I would be here if I had a different manager

Stephanie: Yeah, that's great. it's funny, you're saying those things about yourself, you're describing yourself. And that I thought was, oh God, he must have been thinking these are the ghosts of Stephanie's past, because that description of yourself sounds a lot like me in my early twenties as well, which is when he and I knew each other.

Dave and I went to college together and we co-op'ed the Boston Globe together for many years. So we were in the media together, but more as peers and colleagues.

You know, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on today is, you and I had a conversation a couple of months ago just getting to know each other, saying hello, and you are still approaching 40, so you're still aiming at this transition, but you had all kinds of really interesting thoughts and ideas about your experience of your twenties and thirties as somebody squarely in the millennial generation.

Rachel: Yes, I am so excited for this conversation because I am fascinated and a little predictive, but I'm fascinated to see how the messy middle, how the transition period that we have not only seen from friends and family, but it's also heavily portrayed in the media. How that is going to be what I think is remarkably different for millennials and perhaps generations that come after that.I am approaching it. I'm not that far away. I have started to attend 40th birthday parties. I do think that this is something that is going to come up or is starting to come up for a lot of people in my orbit.

Stephanie: Yeah. And it's interesting that you say that it's well represented in the media and pop culture, and yet one of the things that I have always been frustrated with or,and one of my sort of goals here for this podcast is, I don't think it's common cultural knowledge that there is a transition, a predictable stage of development that we go through sometime in our thirties or forties. And for so many people, myself included, this all starts with my experience of making an absolute mess of my late thirties. So many people are surprised by it, taken off guard by it, don't really get it. And so that's one of the things that motivates me is to help people understand that this is pretty common. Most of us will go through some version of this.

Rachel: And I think that we're also in a stage where conversations like this about life transitions are moving from very personal things that we do in the privacy of our home or in our own brains into something that we talk about. We see that with postpartum. We see that with perimenopause. We're in this moment for what would be decades, a lot of people were contemplating it from a very personal perspective. What am I doing wrong? Why do I feel like this? It seems like no one else is experiencing this. And we've learned, and social media always helps with this, that more experience is, are universal than we give them credit.

Stephanie: For sure. and I agree with you, this is one of the, positives of social media, and not that I would suggest that there are many anymore, but the creation of the global village where we can see that things are, like you said, more universal than we give them credit for.

Let's step back a moment and start at the beginning where I normally start these conversations. Tell me a little bit about the forces that shaped you into who you are when our story begins. So tell me a little bit about your background and how you became the person you are today.

We know that most people are getting their news and information from creators who do not have a background in journalism. And so our programs train creators in things like fact checking and sourcing and public records so that they can give their audiences the most accurate information, and ultimately social platforms can become safer for everyone involved.

Stephanie: So let's pull in one more thread here. At some point along the way, you met someone, fell in love, got married, started a family, right? To thread that into the narrative here.

Stephanie: Interesting. So when you got married and then, had your son, you were early thirties?

Rachel: I was early thirties. Yes.

Stephanie: Okay. Yeah.

Rachel: I was, late for the Midwest and early for New York.

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely. And right on time for you.

Rachel: Yes.

Stephanie: Okay. With that as our, setting, let's talk a little bit about transition, because you have some thoughts on transition. So my thesis comes from a book I read many years ago that was written in the early seventies. It's a book called Passages, by Gail Sheehy, who actually was a journalist, and became a researcher.

Her thesis was, from conception to kinda like age 18, there was all of this information on, like you're saying, developmental stages and the things we can expect. But then at that point in time, once you sort of left the home, whether that was to go to college or to go somewhere else, adulthood was like this monolithic thing that you were until you died.

And her contention was, no, actually, there are predictable stages of adult development. And she, pulled out a handful of them. The one that tripped me up personally was this midlife transition that happens for many of us, sometime between 35 and 45. And when I went through it and made such a mess, one of the things that I realized was when my parents and their friends and family and generation were turning 40, there was this sort of stereotypical concept that we I think all think of when we think of midlife crisis, which is, the divorce, the dating the younger woman, maybe it was her secretary, the sports car, the, becoming a yoga teacher, the plastic surgery, right?

Like all of these things that later generations beginning with mine, the Gen X generation kind of rejected. Like that's not us, right? So that by the time we started facing these transitions, we actually had no cultural touchstone to grab onto to say, alright, mine doesn't look as stupid as that one, but this must be what my version is, right?

So today as people face this transition, some people go through it so gracefully, so wonderfully, and emerge from a cocoon of beautiful personal growth. And some people like me make big messes of it or blow up their lives about it or things like that.

So when we first spoke and I posed the concept of transition, you had some really interesting thoughts on transition. Do you wanna take a stab at what those were, or do you remember, shall we, where do you want go from here?

Rachel: Yeah, I think it's so interesting that you bring up the, like traditional 40th birthday, right? The over the hill, the black plates. That is what I remember from my parents going to these types of parties as well. In general, stereotypes in movies and other media, when we think about the sports car, the affair, the like travel to find yourself type of transition, it's often brought in by this sense of is this, it? Is this just who I am for the going to be the next 40 years? It doesn't feel exciting, it doesn't feel, whatever those narratives are that we see in the movies. And when I reflect on those and I reflect on the experiences of millennials as adults, they feel so far away.

Because what I am seeing in myself and in my community of people in like their late thirties, early forties is almost the exact opposite. We graduated from college into absolute chaos. There was no job market. Most people have been laid off. Some of us don't own property or bought homes very late in life. So there's a couple of things about our tradition or our about our transitions that are significantly different.

One is we have been in transition for what I would consider our entire careers or our entire adulthoods. Many people, like I said, have been laid off and whenever you go through an experience like that, you have to take an internal accounting of what am I going to do next?

And I think those types of forced transitions weren't necessarily happening for other generations that had, let's say, more stability. So I would argue that millennials have been doing this this transitional work basically, since we became adults. Everything has been a the tradition. The transitions have never really ended and I think that, when I'm seeing people now start to think about this more midlife section, I almost see them seeing it as peace as, okay, I went through a ton of transition. Maybe I am now in a place where I'm done having kids. I own a home. I have a job that I feel a little bit more secure about. Now is time for a little bit of peace, which is the opposite of what we were fed as kids, of what we were gonna feel as we were approaching 40, which was like that this isn't exciting, that, I need to spice things up, type of narrative.

Stephanie: Yeah. It's so interesting.I'm gonna be really honest with you here. Like I hear you talking about the millennials and how there's been so much chaos and I agree with that completely. But I do wanna point out that as Gen X-er, we had some pretty serious chaos ourselves with, the early nineties recession and the.com bubble and 9/11 and wars in the Middle East.

And there was a lot for us as well. So this is something I like a tension that I struggle with because your contention is what I hear a lot of. And I'm not minimizing it because it's all true. I just wonder about, every generation thinks they're the only ones who have gone through this hard thing.

And I think we all go through our own flavor of it. But I do agree that the millennials have faced a lot of, things right on top of each other. Whereas I think for my generation it was a little bit more of like up and down, right? There was like this, and then we could recover, and then there was that, and then we could recover. As a Gen X-er,I sometimes struggle with that 'cause I feel like, we did too.

But all that being said, the thing that I really wanna dig into is turbulence versus transition, right? A lot of what we went through in our twenties and thirties and what you guys are going through in your twenties and thirties is turbulence because it's all external to us. It's all things that are happening to us. Versus I think, you got there at the end of what you were saying, what this transition, this midlife transition, what I've learned it's really about is more internal. It's a more,who am I? what do I want?

Whereas again, from a stereotypical standpoint, for a lot of our teens and twenties and into our thirties, we follow a blueprint that we have been handed, that we have inherited or internalized from somewhere. Parents, society, culture, media, teachers, mentors. The culture at large, right?

These are the things that I should do. These are the things that will keep me happy, healthy, safe, secure, successful. A lot of those twenties and thirties are about head down, work, work, work, check the boxes, climb the ladders, do all the things you are supposed to do until that doesn't work anymore.

It's interesting that your interpretation is about, and again, the previous generational like excitement piece versus what you are saying is the looking for internal peace. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what I just all over you?

Rachel: I definitely agree that every generation has its shit.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Rachel: Every generation has been through things. Research does show that millennials, especially financially, have experienced things that were unprecedented for other generations. And I also think that speaks directly to what you're talking about with this blueprint because we were given a blueprint and many of those boxes were unavailable to us. So the blueprint that we were given with you go to college, you graduate, you get married, you have kids, you buy a house. These are all these steps that you take to be becoming adult. And then, then you're a real adult.

A lot of the things that were in this blueprint were impossible or very difficult, or looked very different than we thought that they were going to look. So it is taking the turbulence of your twenties where everything is chaotic and new and you're trying a bunch of stuff. It's also combining that with transition and, which I would argue when we got to the blueprint it was impossible to buy a house that required that internal work that you're talking about, that required us to think about, okay, if I am unable to check this box, what does that mean? Am I an adult? Am I successful? What does success look like if I am unable to check these boxes? We have been having to have that internal conversation with ourselves throughout this entire process, because the path did not go the way that we thought it would. Especially as you were talking about with these things happening over and over again, I think a lot of people maybe got to a place where they thought, okay, I'm getting it all together now. And then the pandemic happened. And it was, one step forward, two steps back. I feel like we have reliably every few years hit a period of time where we thought maybe we had it, maybe this is it. And then it required that internal soul searching again. And sothat internal questioning of what do I want my life to look like, what does success look like? I think we've been doing that throughout our twenties and thirties in a way that perhaps older generations weren't required to.

Stephanie: It is so interesting to hear you say that because,I think of my own experience, which is the only one I can, knowledgeably speak on. And I had a lot of the turbulence that you're talking about, right? There were layoffs. There were jobs that didn't fit. There were places if I'd stayed any longer, I would've been, booted. Relationships that didn't work, both friendship and romantic. Again, I think one of the reasons I made such a mess of things is that very little of that inspired introspection on my part until I hit that late thirties,stage marker. As a matter of fact, I think I did a lot of distracting myself if I just tell you that, I came of age in the nineties in Boston when, partying was the thing you did. It was a great time. But it was also a way to not get quiet hear and listen, to what either my certainly wasn't listening to my gut. I certainly wasn't listening to things my body was trying to tell me, which I hear quite often from other people as well. So I am, astounded and amazed at the level of introspection you are talking about at that age, at that period of time.

Do you think that's common among your generation?

Rachel: I am sure it exists on a spectrum, and I definitely don't want to oversell us as people who are like self-aware and, in tune with everything our gut is telling us because we're also famously known for making incredibly stupid decisions a lot.

I think as the economy was changing industries faster than companies could keep up with, I would particularly say that I think it is more prevalent for people who went into industries that were undergoing rapid transformation. So for me, being in media, which has been, quote unquote dying since I was born, it required a lot of introspection. I've been laid off three times, and I've worked for companies that were barely making it or, who were making terrible decisions. And those experiences prompted introspection because it perhaps required a bigger transition.

Do I need to leave this industry? Do I need to do something else? For people who were maybe in fields less impacted, who could just get another job or whatever it might be, perhaps maybe they were on a different end of that spectrum. But as the world was changing so much, and especially as our finances were not showing up in the way that we thought that they would, we were also forced to either make some hard decisions or at least consider our hard decisions. As the cost of housing and childcare skyrocketed, we were asking ourselves, how many kids do we really wanna have? Or how many kids can we afford to have in a way that, I didn't anticipate. You know, when you're 10 years old and you're like, of course I'll become a mom and I'll have two kids and it'll be a boy and girl, really getting into what actually practically works for my family. And that answer could be very different than what your heart wants.

A lot of people started to really look at how we thought or how we were told our lives would go and how it actually played out, and the chasm between that, I think made us really consider what was important to us. We realized we were only gonna have so much time. We were only gonna have so much money, and we weren't checking the boxes in the way that we thought we would. And so I think that that really lended itself to introspection.

The other thing about parenting I think plays a role here is we had, for the most part in our generation, we had children later than our parents did. I was thinking about how old my grandfather was when he passed away, and I was 14. When my dad reached that age, he had one grandchild who was one. And I really thought about the difference in those two experiences. And I think as millennials had kids later, we were also a different age than our parents were as we were going through the stages of toddlers to kids, to teenagers. As I approach 40 and I think about the difference between sort of that peace and that excitement tension that we were talking about earlier, many people in a younger generation are going to be just out of the toddler phase as they hit 40.

They're just starting to recover from intense sleep deprivation, tantrums, emotional torture. That also lends itself to this idea of like a breath of fresh air. Okay, I can breathe.Maybe I can become myself again. Maybe I can center some of that peace. Whereas for most of our parents, they had been out of that phase for many more years as they approached 40.

Stephanie: Sure. One of the other things you mentioned originally was to your point of having kids later and being in your late thirties and still being in toddler mode. Because you were older, your parents were older, and so while the quote unquote sandwich generation is not a new concept, I think you guys are experiencing it a little bit differently 'cause your kids are younger while your parents are older.

I completely agree with you.

Rachel: Physically, emotionally, mentally, we are changing pullups and teaching potty training while also trying to wrap our heads and support,our parents and their generations.

And at the same time, our friends, our brothers and sisters, our siblings, in their thirties and forties. This is also an age where our generation is being diagnosed with cancer at a higher rate than ever before. Dealing with our own health concerns. And I think even if you take out the health conditions aspect of it, having children later means having older grandparents as well who may not move as fast with a toddler who can sprint down the sidewalk or,

Stephanie: Who may not be able to help as much with childcare because they're not as mobile or sharp as they may have been 10 years earlier.

Rachel: And that's not really an issue for me in my personal life, but it definitely is generationally speaking.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Rachel: It's a really interesting thing to consider because as millennials have made a lot of decisions based around what level of support we may have in having kids, in doing whatever we wanna do, that is a factor.It is definitely a factor, and there are a lot of people who think that grandparents are the answer to everything, and they're not. Especially because millennials are the generation that left home at a bigger pace than any other previous generation. So millennials are also more likely to not live in the same city as their families, which is the case for my husband and I.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Rachel: I feel like that wasn't super articulate, but you get what I was trying to say.

Stephanie: I think it was perfectly articulate. I really do.

When we're talking about our own experiences, I don't think anyone would expect it to come out as a fully formed coherent, A to B kind of thought, especially when it's difficult situations.

I remember my grandmother, my dad's mother, they took her keys away and she might have been like 88 or 89, right? They were in there like sixties when they were having conversations about, you can't do that anymore.

Difficult conversations. So yeah, those are, as the generations are stretching into different shapes in different forms, these things that have happened through history are happening differently and are being faced at different stages. I'm curious though,if you weren't being thrown curve balls at every moment, right? Culturally, personally, in every way. If you didn't need to constantly adapt to what was being thrown at you all the time, what kind of things do you think might bubble up to the surface about who you are, and who you wanna be, and what you want out of life?

Rachel: It's a fascinating thing to think about because the number one thing you hear from people or on Instagram is, like, I just need a minute. Can I just have a minute without some sort of, devastating thing happening?I would probably guess that there would be less of that introspection happening and it would maybe hit all at once or a little bit later, like you're suggesting. Maybe it would feel more like a transitional phase than what I would consider like building blocks of answering these questions throughout the years. There is a sort of stereotypical thing happening for millennials where you enter your late thirties, early forties and you have to pick one hobby.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Rachel: You either get really in, you're gonna run a marathon, or you're really into craft beer, or whatever.

Stephanie: Birdwatching, don't forget Birdwatching.

Rachel: Birdwatching. You pick your thing, Yeah right?

The funny thing about a lot of these are that it's also stemming from that part of the generation where we felt the need to monetize all of our hobbies, like side hustle it. In a way, I think a lot of these transitional activities are either monetizing your side hobby or bettering yourself. I'm going to therapy. I'm running a marathon. I'm getting in shape. I'm losing weight. A lot of this transitional work around the next phase, we still feel that pressure to be the best versions of ourselves. And those transitional questions and feelings and hobbies still reflect that, where, someone is,instead of buying a sports car, you are like getting really into marathon running or whatever it is.

It feels like something that you can talk yourself into because you're like, what are you talking about? I'm not addicted to this. It's good for me. I think that millennials have a likelihood, you know, we were talking about checking the boxes of drinking enough water,eating the right foods, working out enough, like those sorts of things that make us feel like we are in control, that we are doing the things that we are supposed to be doing in order to live a healthy, best life.

Like those are the things that we have clung onto because we've had no controlover any of the major elements of our lives.

Stephanie: I love what you just said. I'm really curious, you bring up the concept of the hobbies. And you're right, it's a total meme on Instagram. You've been sorted into one of four houses. But a lot of the hobbies, as you were talking, I was thinking a lot of the hobbies, and even the ones we mentioned, right? So craft beer, birdwatching, marathon running,crochet, knit. You could probably come up with three or four more that, that are common.

Okay. Okay. But aren't all of these, it's interesting. These ones that we've named to me are almost meditative. They're slow. They are the antithesis of the rest of your life. The chaos,the craziness,the hustle and bustle of work and commuting and all of that stuff. I'm curious, 'cause for me, I feel like, are those ways to get quiet. To find quiet from an internal perspective, right?

You're using an external thing. You're using your hobby, but crocheting, knitting, birdwatching, craft beer, wine, running, golfing. All of these things can be really I know there's community around them, but there's also sort of you alone with yourself in contemplation of the thing. And part of the reason I think this is because when I was 40, I took up, aerial circus, aerial silks and like Cirque de Soleil kind of stuff. And one of the things that I absolutely loved about it, I did it for six or seven years. I never got outta level one. I was terrible, but I loved it. One of the things I loved about it was that it required more than 100% focus and concentration, because if I wasn't, then I was dropping myself on my head or I was hurting myself.

So as a small business owner, as an all the identities, I had to put that all away and just be with myself on the silk and really pay attention. That was something that I didn't have in my day-to-day life, I think, in any structured way. It's, this is just bubbling up for me right now as we're having the conversation.

Rachel: Yeah, I think that's a really great point. I don't know that I would have articulated it that way, but I definitely think that there is an element to truth to that. I would say the two things that would strike me as the way that I would describe them would be, one, they're not in front of screens. I think we are very, um, in.

Stephanie: You can just say chained.

Rachel: Screen time is a big thing for our generation. And so I think that people are trying to actively choose something to physically do with their hands, their bodies, that is not in front of a screen.

Stephanie: and.

I hear you. Because I am a voracious reader and, I will only read physical books because the rest of my life is in front of a screen. It's the little screen. It's the big screen. It's the TV screen, it's the work screen, it's the phone screen, it's the tablet screen. It's the,I completely agree with you that separation from screen. And our screens are so,they pull our brains to where they want us. It certainly, like from a work perspective or from a phone perspective, and certainly from an algorithmic perspective on all the platforms that most of us spend a lot of time on. We don't control or we have a hard time kind of controlling where our attention is. And so getting off the screens and getting away and investing in something else is a little bit of taking back that control and closing that door for some part of the day or week.

Rachel: I think the other thing that we're both saying, but perhaps in a different way is, the need to just be ourselves. So you are an employee, you're a parent, you are a spouse, you're a friend. And all of these things, especially for women, especially for millennial eldest daughters, where we have been putting others' people's needs before our own, not even knowing that we're doing it, is having any sort of space to just be ourselves. And in some ways, that is to be our worst selves.

I wanna watch reality TV and eat Skittles and have no one speak to me. In some ways that's to invest in ourselves and be our best selves and do all of the things that we think are additive and fill our cup. And I think that those things go hand in hand with being introspective in a way.In some ways, they strike me as brain breaks. Like I need a break from doing all of the things that my brain is considering. And in some ways they give us space for our brain to think about the questions that you're posing.

Stephanie: One of the things you just touched upon is one of the biggest themes that, that I see during this transition, and that is the theme of identity. I think from my reading, from my conversations, from everything I've experienced so far, the transition is that in our younger years, our teens, our twenties, our thirties, we place our identity in things that are external to us. You were saying the millennial, eldest daughter. And I'm a Gen X eldest daughter. The good girl, the achiever, the one you can always count on. All of these things, all of these identities that have been put on us or that we have held onto because they give us something, start to chafe. Sometimes they fall away. Sometimes they're taken away. For example, you experienced this and I experienced this, when you're laid off from a job, when you're fired from a job, that was me, you can no longer be that identity anymore.

And so the transition becomes placing your identity into something more internal, more inherent in you as a human, because those can't be taken away from you. those can never be questioned. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts about identity, right? Because you're all the things. You're a nonprofit executive. You're a mom. You're a wife. You're a daughter. You're a friend. You're like all these things, but those can all be taken away from you. At some point your son will grow up and move outta the house and you will be less mom than you are today. So tell me a little bit about, are there identities that you maybe still are holding onto 'cause they used to be true or because they're comfortable or because they make you feel good. I'm curious to your thoughts.

Rachel: I still very much feel like in it. In the chaos. In the tornado of these identities that need more time and energy than I have to give to all of them. What we were talking about earlier when I turn 40 and when I'm in my early forties, my son will be elementary school-ish. He'll be more independent. And that will feel perhaps a little less intense. I imagine as that happens, and maybe it unlocks brain space or time or energy, maybe some of those things will come up. It is really hard to imagine, uh,in this current phase.

With your plate so full. Yeah.

Yes.It does not sound scary. And I think that is maybe one of the things that is the underlying current to where I'm coming from with our conversation, is that the magazines and the media and the parents over the hill birthday parties, taught us to be afraid of aging. That it was scary. It was something you didn't wanna do. And obviously as women, it comes with a ton of other baggage with how we look externally, and what that means for our value in society. But for millennials who are in this phase, who have all of the things on their plate that we've talked about with the sandwich generation, with having kids later, with maybe not being where they wanna be financially. Maybe being a little less stable, maybe being a little less intense, that doesn't sound scary to me. That sounds wonderful. And perhaps that unlocks like a ton of internal questions that becomes scary, which I definitely could see happening, but it is also something that perhaps we're a little less afraid of than we thought we would be when we were 20.

Stephanie: I love that. Yeah. I think that might be common as well, right? Because when you're 20, it's so far away that there's no shape to it, there's no color to it. It's just this sort of looming, scary thing. But as you get closer to it, the mountain starts taking shape and it's like, oh, well it's actually not as tall as I thought it was. The road isn't as steep as I thought it was. All of those things. I love the way you're saying that. One last question for you, 'cause I know that I could go on, rolling around with this, with you for a long time today. But tell me a little bit, do you feel pulled more by purpose now than you did in earlier in your career? For you, this is a specific question because journalism is such a purpose-driven career anyway, but as I was thinking back on how you were talking about the nonprofit and why you started the nonprofit and the passion that you were talking about these communities, these mom communities that really are shaping a whole new way of thinking for you. I'm curious, do you feel like purpose or meaning or becoming more important to you?

Rachel: Purpose and impact have always been really important for me. I really consider journalism to be a foundation of democracy, and it has always been my way of impacting my local community or the world at large. By providing information, by working to uncover the stories that matter to two different communities. Having work that I am proud of and that I feel like I am making a positive impact on the world is paramount for me. That is something that I've always known, but became even more crystal clear throughout these layoffs because when you start to ask yourselves these questions around what do I wanna do next?

What other fields could these skills translate to? What would I like doing? I just really could not imagine myself working at a bank or a tech company or something where I didn't feel like I was like directly having impact or making the world better.

So for me, I have always really been driven by purpose. For a lot of people who are now in this stage with a very full plate, it is around intentionality and in asking themselves what has the biggest impact. Sure, I could do all of these things, but if I'm gonna let something go,what is it gonna be? And I think those things are really driven for a lot of, I would say the people I know the most are moms. A lot of moms are thinking about impact in everyday decisions. Should we get an Elf On The Shelf? What is the impact on my family for that sort of decision and for that sort of energy. But I do wanna caveat this by saying that I think my experience of being so driven by impact is not universal in my generation. I think that there is also a huge segment of people who have become totally disillusioned by what we thought adulthood was going to be and have completely recalibrated the role that work plays in their lives. The role that work plays in my life is huge. It is a part of my identity, and I know that they say that shouldn't be the case, but I actually don't care. If that is just something that is what makes me, me. A lot of my friends, that is not the case.They have a career that they try hard at, that they're good at, but at the end of the day is a paycheck to support their life. In many ways I wish I could be like that. It sounds great. But, I do think that they are finding purpose in other ways.

Stephanie: When you think about ambition, because building a brand new nonprofit is ambitious, are you able to separate ambition that feels truly your own and ambition that was inherited with the blueprint to check boxes and climb ladders? Are you able to pull any of that apart? Do you feel like what you're pursuing is your own ambition?

Rachel: I think so. I've always been very ambitious. I often say I have the inability to half-ass anything. And so I have to be really careful about what I take on because I will never just give enough. That ambition feels inherently me. Now, when it comes to the blueprint, what happened for a lot of millennials in their twenties and thirties was looking at the blueprint and deciding which of it we wanted and which of it we wanted to throw away. And by now most people have a blueprint that is edited to be their own. Perhaps that ambition, that drive that they are bringing to their work or to their families are now being done towards this edited blueprint, let's call it.

Now, that definitely will not stop boomers from telling you that rent is throwing away your money. We're still getting a ton of outside messaging. A lot of the media headlines have forgotten that millennials have grown up and we have kids and, we're not babies anymore.

We're still very much getting external messages of what we should be doing. But I think that most people that I know in these communities and in this, sort of as we're entering our forties stage, Have a blueprint that feels more authentic to them. And I would caveat that by saying realistic as well. That was shaped perhaps both by internal desires and external factors.

Stephanie: I love that.

Rachel, this has been such a wonderful conversation and I just so appreciate your time thought and generosity around this topic that I just love to talk to, explore and dig into. If your thoughts on this change, if your experiences on this change in the next couple of years as you approach The Big Four Oh, I would love for you to come back and tell me about your experiences and whether or not your thoughts and insights from this vantage point remain true and consistent as you move through the next five or six years of your life.

Rachel: I would love that. I cannot wait to listen to this in a few years and think how silly I was. I'm sure I will have a completely different viewpoint. But yes, I would love to do that. And I think it's gonna be really fascinating to see how this evolves probably over the next five to 10 years, as we bring in just totally new experiences into the forties club.

Stephanie: I love that you've just given me an idea. There's another woman that I interviewed maybe a year and a half ago, who was also in her late middle thirties. I love to bring new people on the show, but I think I might start reaching out maybe annually to you guys and just review what we talked about and see how your, interpretations change and your perspective changes as we go through. So I love that.

Rachel, thank you so much for being with me today. I've really loved this conversation.

Rachel: Thanks for having me.