The Quest for Empty Nest Housing

Hello friends, and welcome to Notes from the Road! Glad you're along for the ride. Each week, you'll get news, advice, tools, and inspiration to thrive in your 50s and beyond, whether you're traveling around the world or blazing a trail in your own backyard. Topics in this issue:

• The quest for empty nest housing.

• An alternative to the “midlife crisis.”

• Sauna might extend healthspan.

• The truth about full-time travel in retirement.

• The advantages of being a “part-time” expat vs a full-time expat.

• Wisdom from Anne Lamott.

Let’s get started!

In 2021, staring down the barrel of an empty nest, we got rid of lots of our things, put the rest in storage, ended our long-term lease, and moved overseas for a few months. Our plans to live there permanently didn’t work out, so we returned to the US and moved into a 1200 square foot, 2 bedroom condo.

Fed a steady diet of books and streaming programs featuring homes that had been Marie Kondo-ized and Swedish Death Cleaned during the pandemic years, we were thrilled to adopt a minimalist lifestyle. After 30 years of filling our garage and basement with our stuff, then later, our parents’ stuff, being free of everything but the essentials felt like a revelation.

The catch, though—as we know now—is knowing what’s essential.

This is a weird stage of life where you need a lot of things “if and when.” If and when children come back home to visit, if and when you want to host a few old friends for dinner, or—as a completely random example—if and when you and your spouse decide to start writing a newsletter, creating online content, and producing videos and your desks are next to each other in the living room with a 3 foot wide table separating you. 🙄 

All this to say, at this in-between stage of life you still need some elbow room for those things that you don’t use everyday but need if you’re going to live a richer existence. For us, that’s a lot of cooking equipment: the blender, the stand mixer, the Instant Pot, the roasting pans. Grandma’s special china, the old soup tureen, the Christmas tablecloths. There is room for none of it. Everything involves a special trip to our storage unit 4 miles away, which—because of our lack of training in inventory management techniques—results in a fruitless search, physical injury, or both.

We’ve begun to realize that really, it’s not about the things. It’s about what the things represent: our ability to meaningfully and joyfully connect with our friends, our family, and each other. We still want to have people visit. We still want to break bread at a big, cozy table. We want to have people spend the holidays with us.

But at this age, are you really supposed to have a larger footprint? You hear about downsizing, but never really upsizing. Then I came across an inspiring story called We Are Old and We Bought a Bigger House Anyway, and it validated our dream of a bigger life. Many of the story’s commenters shared a similar view, despite feeling an obligation to follow a safer, more practical path. More insight came from Time to Give Up Living in a Tiny Home, in which the retiree author catalogues the challenges of living in 588 square feet.

If you’re in a similar predicament, or about to be, I’d encourage you to think beyond downsizing and upsizing to rightsizing. What’s right for you? For those of us in our late working years or early retirement years, there’s still a lot of living left to do. We also know from Harvard’s 85-year study of adult development that the most important key to a happy life is social fitness. What role does your home play in supporting that? Do your grandchildren converge on your home every holiday? Or do you have a smaller family footprint and travel for the holidays?

It feels like there’s a liminal space between active midlife and sedate elderly life. In a previous newsletter, we’ve covered the importance of place as we age. The place where you live is the “canvas” upon which you’ll paint your life after kids and work. But there are different stages of life after kids and work. The key is to find the right space for each very unique and specific time. We’ll keep you posted as we figure it out. See you next week!

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The Weekly Roundup

Worth your time to watch, read, and listen.

📺 An alternative to the “Midlife Crisis.” A short, moving talk about the “dark, and gooey and solitary nature of midlife” and how we emerge as a beautiful creature, like a butterfly. (3.5 min.)

📄 Sauna bathing may extend healthspan. “In recent decades, sauna bathing has emerged as a probable means to extend healthspan, based on compelling data from observational, interventional, and mechanistic studies.” You had me at sauna! (10 min. read)

📺 The Truth About Full-Time Travel. Meet Stephanie and Gillian, a retired couple who’ve traveled full-time for three years. Some good insights here from 12 countries and 40+ Airbnbs. (11 min.)

💡💡What’s on your mind? What’s keeping you up at night as you navigate midlife and your path toward retirement? Let us know and we may write about it in a future issue. 💡💡

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