Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've been living.

In this deep-dive solo, Jonathan Fields unpacks an idea he calls unmarked lasts, the everyday endings that slip past without ceremony, starting with a story about fifteen years of chairlifts with his daughter and the ordinary Sunday that unceremoniously closed an era. It's a conversation built for anyone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond who has started to notice that the archive of things that ended is getting fuller, and wonders if they should have been paying better attention.

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Why the baby book has a page for every first and not a single page for the lasts, and what that asymmetry does to us
• The structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter how present or grateful you become
• What researcher Hal Hershfield discovered when he asked people to imagine a meaningful place for the very last time, and the surprising thing that didn't happen to their happiness
• The centuries-old Portuguese word for the ache you've probably never been able to name
• Two kinds of lasts, and the completely different thing each one asks of you

The endings you can't remember may be the strongest evidence of a life you were fully inside of.

Episode Transcript

Next week, guest host Cynthia Morris is sitting down with Susan Bratton to talk about why desire in midlife doesn't fade so much as it gets misread, and what actually rekindles it at any age. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

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Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life.

Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things, and Wish You Were Here. Her new one, Hollow Bones, arrives right around the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and centers on a woman whose entire career is built on preparing for catastrophe, who gets blindsided anyway. For three decades, Picoult has done her research by climbing all the way inside other people's lives, including people whose beliefs she can barely stand to sit across from, and a good part of this conversation is about how and why she does that, how it impacts her own life, beliefs, and approach to storytelling. We explore:

• What thirty years of living inside other people's heads has actually cost her, including the nightly ritual one narrator forced on her before she could face her own family
• The moment in an interview when she had to leave the room, splash water on her face, and decide which version of herself was walking back in
• One finding from her research on lying that explains why a small untruth gets harder to take back the longer you hold onto it
• Why one of her books landed on the most banned book in America list last year, and how she responded
• Where the line actually sits between sugarcoating your own life and bending the truth to protect someone you love, and what tends to happen to people who never find it

If you have ever told a gentler version of the truth to protect somebody you love, this conversation will sit with you for a while.

You can find Jodi at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, it's just me, and I want to talk about something that's been on my mind: the moments in our lives that end without us ever knowing they were the last ones. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends.

Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participants read identical biographies, differing only in one line, single or married, the single people who said they were happy were assumed to be exaggerating. The married people were taken at their word.

Bella is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard) and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Her TEDx talk on what no one tells you about single people has been watched more than 1.8 million times, and The Atlantic has called her America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She's been writing the Living Single blog at Psychology Today since 2008, and she founded the Foundation for the Empowerment of Single People.

In this conversation, Jonathan and Bella dig into what her research, drawn from more than 20,000 people across over 100 countries, actually shows about who thrives alone, who doesn't, and why the cultural story about both gets it backwards.

In this one, you'll hear about the single sentence Bella clipped from a newspaper column in 1992 that started her whole body of work. You'll hear why she believes solitude and loneliness are separated by exactly one thing, not personality, not introversion, but choice. You'll hear the surprising story of what actually happened to single-at-heart people during pandemic lockdown, when isolation should have driven them straight into relationships. You'll hear why married people tend to become more insular over time, and what that quietly costs them later in life. And you'll hear the real story behind a bike accident, a hospital, and forty-nine people who showed up.

If you've ever loved your own company more than you're supposed to admit, or if you've ever wondered whether your relationships would survive without one person at the center of them, this conversation will change how you think about both.

You can find Bella at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to talk about how she steps inside the minds of people whose lives look nothing like her own, and why that kind of empathy might be one of the most undervalued skills we have.

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.