Last Saturday afternoon I came out of a screening of White Riot at the Folk of Gloucester feeling as though I’d stepped back into a forgotten part of myself.

The film explored Rock Against Racism and the anti-fascist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but what stayed with me most was not simply the politics. It was the energy of that time. The feeling that culture mattered. That ordinary people could shape things. That music, politics, identity and activism were all woven together.

I was there at the beginning of punk.

I remember the Marquee Club in Wardour Street. I remember The Clash, Tom Robinson Band, Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex, The Selecter. I remember the shock around Eric Clapton publicly supporting Enoch Powell and how that galvanised people into action.

But what I’d forgotten until today was how political ordinary young people became.

We weren’t sitting passively watching the world unfold through screens. We argued. We marched. We leafleted. We turned up. People stuffed envelopes, organised gigs, put posters up, made tea at meetings, answered landlines, spread news by word of mouth. Activism was physical. Local. Human. You felt part of something larger than yourself.

And for many women, including me, the contribution was often quieter.

I wasn’t standing on platforms giving speeches. I was one of the many young women doing the unseen work behind the scenes, supporting causes I believed in, campaigning in smaller ways, helping things happen. Looking back now, I realise those experiences shaped me far more deeply than I understood at the time.

One of the organisers speaking after the film described how a local newspaper once published the home address of a Rock Against Racism organiser in Gloucester. The house was later attacked and vandalised with racist graffiti. It was a reminder that media has consequences. Even then.

Watching the film on the same day as the Tommy Robinson march in London felt strangely circular. Forty years later, the names and technologies may have changed, but racism, fear and political division have not disappeared. If anything, algorithms and social media now intensify things in ways we could never have imagined in the 1970s.

And yet I also found myself thinking about solidarity.

Yes, I could probably have watched the film online alone for a few pounds. But sitting in a room with other people who understood the significance of that period felt different. There was a shared recognition in the room, a sense of people who still cared about culture, politics, humanity and community. It reminded me that part of what many people are searching for now is not simply entertainment or information, but connection and belonging.

Seeing Caroline Coon’s name in the credits transported me straight back to the mid-70s. I was living in Maida Vale then, around artists, activists and people living in squats. I remembered my dungarees covered in badges: Rock Against Racism badges, anti-fascist badges, political badges. I wish I still had them.

Perhaps what moved me most was realising that the young woman I was then and the woman I am now are not separate people after all.

Maybe it has simply taken me decades to fully find my voice.

And perhaps writing is how I use it best.

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I’ve been reading Helen Lewis’s long piece in The Atlantic: “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet” - about the rise of misogyny and “masculinism” in American culture and politics.

Some of what it describes is extreme. But beneath the extremism sits something more interesting, and perhaps more troubling: what happens when social roles change faster than people can psychologically absorb.

As I read, I found myself thinking not primarily about younger men, but about transition itself. About backlash. About status, fear, loneliness, and the human hunger for certainty when the ground shifts underfoot.

And I found myself wondering whether this is really a conversation about gender at all, or whether it is, at its core, a conversation about meaning, belonging, and emotional maturity.

I’ve been here before.

I came of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s, not as a spectator, but as a participant. I was in the consciousness-raising groups, the T-groups, the encounter groups, the long arguments about what liberation would actually look like. I saw, close up, what it costs people, women and men, when identity is destabilised by rapid cultural change. And I watched, over the following decades, how that destabilisation played out in individual lives, in clinical work, and in the research that would eventually become the framework I call ThriveSpan.

What I’ve been thinking about since reading Lewis’s article is not who is right in this culture war. It’s why culture wars keep happening, and what they reveal about human development that we persistently refuse to address.

There are parts of the current conversation around masculinity that I find genuinely concerning.

The reflection continues below, exploring why grievance movements flourish when people lose stable pathways into meaning, identity, and belonging.

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In 15 days ThriveSpan comes into the world. This weekend I’ve been reflecting on how it came to be.

There are moments when something ends, not because it has failed, but because it has done its work.

Looking back now, I can see that 2025 was that year for me.

For many years, I was known for writing and speaking about work in midlife, retirement transitions, and the long stretch between the two. I explored what it meant to stay engaged in your fifties, how people navigated leaving full-time work, and how identity reshapes itself when familiar structures begin to loosen.

That work mattered. It still does. It helped people make sense of a phase of life that is often poorly understood and thinly described.

I could have stayed there.

The topic remains popular. The market has expanded. There is no shortage of books, programmes, and voices focused on working longer, retiring better, or reimagining the second half of life. From the outside, it would have looked like a sensible place to remain.

But staying there would not have been moving forward for me.

When Staying Becomes Standing Still

What I began to notice, quietly at first, was that I was circling ground I already knew. I was answering questions I had largely finished asking. And while there is nothing wrong with deepening a field of expertise, I realised that repeating myself, however well-crafted the repetition, was slowly pulling me away from my own edge of inquiry.

This was not a sudden decision. It took time. It took sitting with uncertainty. And it took stepping away from noise.

Much of that reflection happened at my wood, away from professional agendas and expectations, with long stretches of quiet in which nothing needed to be explained, justified, or positioned. In that space, it became clear that the work I had been doing was complete in itself, and it was no longer where my thinking was heading.

Letting go of that identity was not easy. When you’ve spent years being recognised for something, when people know where to place you, walking away can feel unsettling. There is a particular discomfort in leaving a space just as it becomes more crowded. It can look, from the outside, as though you’ve been overtaken or edged out.

That wasn’t what was happening.

The Work That Was Always There

What many people don’t see is that the work I am now focused on did not suddenly emerge.

For at least seven years, well before I began my doctorate, I had been thinking about the whole span of later life, not simply the transition out of work. I was interested in how people live across decades as health, energy, priorities, and identity change, and how wellbeing, purpose, contribution, and meaning interact over time.

This was, in fact, the topic I originally wanted to pursue as my academic research. But it sat too far from the workplace to be taken forward within an occupational psychology department. As a result, my doctorate focused more narrowly on meaning after full-time work, an important and legitimate question, but not the full one I was carrying.

That broader inquiry never went away. It continued to develop through my doctoral research, through sustained academic reading, and through lived experience, my own and that of the people I worked with. Over time, it became clear that what I was developing was not simply a collection of ideas, but a coherent framework for understanding later life more fully.

That work has now taken shape as ThriveSpan.

From Retirement Thinking to ThriveSpan

ThriveSpan asks different questions. It is not primarily concerned with how we exit work, redesign careers, or remain productive for as long as possible, although those questions may sit within it. Instead, it looks at the whole arc of later life, including health, vitality, decline, rest, purpose, and contribution. It explores how our relationship to time changes, how energy becomes more precious, and how choices increasingly need to be aligned with what genuinely matters.

This is not another retirement book. And it is not a conscious ageing or spiritual manifesto either. Those spaces are already well populated. One tends to remain instrumental and work-focused, the other often idealised and detached from the realities of ageing bodies, finite energy, and lived complexity.

ThriveSpan sits somewhere else entirely. It is psychologically grounded, shaped by research, reflection, and experience, and attentive to both possibility and limitation. It does not offer prescriptions for how to age well, but a way of thinking about later life that is honest, humane, and responsive to change.

Crossing the Threshold

The decision to step away from retirement-focused work was not a reaction to competition, nor a loss of interest. It was a conscious choice to honour where my thinking had arrived, even though it took time to name it clearly.

Now my writing is shaped by ThriveSpan, by lifespan thinking, and by how we live honestly within the limits and possibilities of later life. This does not erase what came before. It honours it by allowing it to rest.

Thresholds are not always dramatic. Often they are quiet recognitions that something has reached its natural conclusion.

This was one of those moments.

What followed was not an ending, but a deepening.

The ideas that had been quietly developing over many years gradually found clearer form through research, writing, reflection, and lived experience. Earlier this year, that work became part of a published academic paper exploring the ThriveSpan framework for ages 60–80:

Reframing later life: The ThriveSpan framework for ages 60–80
https://nicecjournal.co.uk/index.php/nc/article/view/582

Further writing exploring ageing and later life is now also available as preprints, including:

Olderhood and Elderhood: Why Later Life Is Not a Single Developmental Stage
[LINK]

And On Ageing and Later life [LINK]

The inquiry continues. But it now feels rooted in a broader and more honest conversation about what it means to live well across the whole arc of later life.

ThriveSpan is not a guide to “successful ageing” or endless productivity. It’s a quieter exploration of what matters as we move through later life, and how we might live with more honesty, vitality, reflection, and meaning.

You may also like to return to an earlier article - Seven Years in the Making

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PS

• The Kindle edition of ThriveSpan is available to pre-order at £9.99, with the printed version (£16.99) following shortly.

• I’ll also have a small number of signed copies available directly from me (£20 including UK postage).

• And if you’re part of a group, book club, organisation, or community interested in a reading or conversation around later life, meaning, or ThriveSpan, feel free to get in touch.

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Some films make you think. Others simply make you smile.

I watched The Sheep Detectives the other day, and it turned out to be unexpectedly moving. On the surface, it’s a gentle murder mystery set in an English village, with sheep helping solve the crime after their shepherd is killed. But underneath, it’s really about belonging.

One of the sheep is a winter lamb, slightly outside the flock, never fully accepted. By the end, that changes. And I realised how much the film was speaking to something deeper: our need to feel part of things, especially as we grow older.

The village itself, the church, the butcher, the small hotel, the quiet rhythms of ordinary life, all carried a warmth and familiarity that feels increasingly rare.

Watching it also stirred memories of a different kind of everyday life. Not a perfect world, because it wasn’t, but a slower one. Memories of my childhood.

Half-day closing on Wednesdays. Shops shut on Sundays. Shopkeepers who knew your name. Fathers washing the car while mum cooked lunch in the kitchen. Children going to Sunday school. Afternoon visits to relatives for tea and sandwiches. Sliced white bread with ham, lettuce and tomato. Tinned fruit and Nestlé sterilised cream.

Life could be narrow in some ways, but there was also a stronger sense of shared rhythm and belonging.

Perhaps that’s why films like this resonate. Beneath the humour and gentleness is a longing many people still carry, not necessarily for the past itself, but for a feeling of being connected, known, and part of something human in scale.

In ThriveSpan, belonging is one of the glades people often find themselves returning to. Not belonging in the performative sense of fitting in everywhere, but the quieter feeling of being recognised, welcomed, and at ease among others.

As we grow older, many people begin to realise how much this matters. After careers, busyness, caregiving, and decades of responsibility, the deeper question often becomes simpler: where do I feel at home, accepted, and able to be fully myself?

Perhaps that’s why this gentle little film stayed with me longer than I expected.

Not every meaningful film has to be loud or dark or full of spectacle.

Sometimes gentleness carries its own wisdom.

If you’d like to explore more about ThriveSpan and the glades of later life, you can find out more here

ThriveSpan is available to pre-order for the Kindle, the print book is on sale from 2 June.

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For most of my adult life, money moved in one direction.

Inward.

I earned well, spent well, travelled well. Even when life changed, after divorce, after buying a new home, after replacing furniture and cars and rebuilding parts of my life from scratch, I never really worried about spending money because the flow continued. Money came in each month. Consultancy work arrived. There was always replenishment.

I booked holidays without overthinking them.

Mexico for a retreat. Kenya to spend time with the Maasai. South Africa for game ranger training. I always flew premium economy because I’ve had two deep vein thromboses and need the legroom. It never occurred to me to agonise over the costs. I was still working, still earning, still building.

Money flowed out, but it also flowed back in.

And I think that matters psychologically far more than many people realise.

Because over the past nine months, something has shifted.

My income hasn’t disappeared. I have pensions. I still earn from writing and occasional project work, but it is a great deal less than before. The regular rhythm of income has gone and, although I understood this intellectually, emotionally it still took me rather by surprise.

Now, before I buy something, I pause.

Sometimes for quite a long time.

Recently I bought two dresses and two blouses and found myself mentally calculating the total in a way I never would have done ten years ago. My wardrobe is hardly extravagant. Most of my clothes are years old. And yet I still found myself thinking: Do I really need this?

Even a jacket became a decision.

My mum bought a beautiful sage green jacket for nearly a hundred pounds. I bought a similar one from Matalan for thirty and still hesitated before pressing the button.

What fascinates me is that this isn’t really about affordability.

It’s about adjustment.

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For decades, many of us live inside a psychological model where money is replenished through effort. You work, you earn, you spend, you rebuild. Even if you save carefully, there is still a sense of movement and continuation.

Later life changes the direction of travel.

Money starts moving outward more than inward.

And even when the numbers are fine, even when the pensions work and the spreadsheets reassure you, there can still be a strange emotional resistance to spending from what increasingly feels like a finite pot.

I don’t think we talk enough about that.

Financial advisers understandably focus on whether you can afford something. But the emotional side is different. The nervous system does not always catch up immediately with the spreadsheets.

And that brings me to my kitchen.

I have lived in my flat for eight years and never truly liked the kitchen. It was functional, but only just. Cheap worktops already scarred by previous owners. An awkward layout. An under-counter fridge and freezer that increasingly annoyed me. An oven beneath the hob that required bending. Appliances cluttering the worktops because there was nowhere sensible for them to go.

Last year I briefly considered replacing it, then immediately dismissed the idea as far too expensive.

The kitchen worked. Sort of.

Why spend that amount of money now?

But this year something shifted.

Not dramatically. Quietly.

I began thinking less about whether I could manage with the existing kitchen and more about how I actually wanted to live going forward.

I realised I wanted a higher oven as I get older. An integrated fridge freezer with the fridge higher up. Better storage. Fewer appliances cluttering the surfaces. I’ve chosen a SMEG oven with integrated microwave and air fryer. More beauty. More ease. More pleasure in everyday life.

And yes, I spent a very long time thinking about the money.

Not only the cost itself, but the fact that the money would come from savings already sitting in a decent interest account. I thought about the lost interest. The fitting costs. Whether I was being sensible. Whether this was indulgent. Whether I should simply patch up what I had and carry on.

Then eventually I looked at it differently.

If this kitchen lasts fifteen years, which it almost certainly should, then spread over that time it works out at around a hundred pounds a month.

Suddenly it stopped feeling like one frightening lump sum and started feeling like an investment in the life I’m actually living now.

And I realised something else too.

I’m probably not having a big adventurous holiday this year. Instead, I’ll spend more time at the wood. I’ve got a few sestivals planned, and 3 nights in the Portmeirion village later in the summer. But the kitchen itself has become part of what I’m looking forward to.

Not as a status symbol.

Not because I need a designer kitchen.

But because every single day I’ll wake up, make a cup of tea, walk into that room and quietly think:

I love this kitchen.

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Paid subscribers can read on for reflections on the psychology of spending in later life, why even financially secure people can feel uneasy drawing from savings, and how my new kitchen became less about luxury and more about creating a home I genuinely want to grow older in.

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If you’d like to read further but don’t want to become a paid subscriber at this point, you’re very welcome to buy me a coffee. I’ll send you a gift link so you can continue reading.

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As you read this, I’m spending a couple of nights at the wood.

There’s something very different between going there for the day, almost as a visitor, and actually staying. Lighting the fire. Listening properly. Hearing the deer barking in the distance at night, or the scurrying of mice beneath the hammock.

After a while, you stop feeling as though you’ve arrived somewhere. You begin to feel part of it again. And I think I needed that.

Because bringing ThriveSpan into the world has stirred up a great deal of reflection for me.

Way back in 2009, when I wrote How to Get a Job in a Recession, I initially approached traditional publishers. Several told me the process would take around eighteen months. But the country was already in recession. I remember thinking, people need this book now.

That book emerged directly from the work I was doing at the time, including appearing on ITV (Tonight with Trevor McDonald) supporting graduates trying to enter an extremely difficult job market. Eventually I created my own imprint and brought the book out independently.

I learned a lot during that period. Including quite a few things not to do.

Since then, most of my books have been commissioned by publishers. The last three:

Find Work at 50+ with Trotman.
Rethinking Retirement for Positive Ageing with Routledge.
Career Coaching for Midlife and Beyond, again with Trotman.

I can get publishing deals.

But with ThriveSpan, I wanted something different.

I wanted to make my own decisions about the cover, the structure, the pacing, the feel of the book itself. I didn’t want to be squeezed into a more conventional format or marketing approach.

I wanted the freedom to create the book exactly as I felt it needed to be.

And in many ways, ThriveSpan was shaped at the wood.

I would arrive, pause, breathe, and ask myself:
Which path feels right today?

That eventually became part of the structure itself.

Not chapters, but glades.
Not a linear journey, but a companion you can open wherever you happen to be.

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One unexpected discovery along the way has been learning how different print publishing works when you publish independently; it has changed since 2009, and I hadn’t anticipated that.

The Kindle edition of ThriveSpan is available now for pre-order, but Amazon does not currently allow pre-orders for the paperback version in the same way. The paperback will become available through Waterstones and other retailers shortly, and Amazon print orders will open when the book officially launches.

So some of my original “pre-order” plans have quietly shifted.

And here are some brief details about one of them. What I’ve created is a narrated presentation to guide you through the reflection, but this gives a quiet overview of the themes it explores.

Three Possible Later Lives
A structured reflection

A short, narrated reflection you can also download and revisit.

Not a plan, but an invitation to hold more than one future at once, and to notice what each one asks of you.

You can move through this slowly, or simply pause with one part.

There’s also a nine-minute video where I talk a little more personally about the book and the journey behind it which is also on the website.

Over on LinkedIn

I posted this on LinkedIn last week:

At 67, I was still saying I’d carry on working until my brain stopped. I meant it. I enjoyed my work, I had flexibility, and I couldn’t imagine stepping away from something that had been such a central part of my life.

But something shifted. Not dramatically. Not because I had to. Just a gradual, growing awareness that I didn’t want to keep using my energy in the same way.

That it wasn’t about whether I could keep working. It was about whether I still wanted to.

I see a lot of posts about continuing careers into our 60s and 70s. And for some people, that’s exactly right.

But if you’re in your 50s or early 60s, it’s worth knowing this: You may feel very differently later on. Not because you’ve lost capability. But because your relationship with time, energy, and what matters begins to change. And when it does, the question isn’t “what next?” It’s often something quieter. “What do I no longer need to keep doing?”

23,181 impressions, 74 comments; 261 likes, 6 reposts

Clearly it hit a nerve. You can read the comments here.

Thank you for being here during this final stretch.

Many of you have followed this work for a long time now, through the doctorate, through the woodland reflections, through the slow shaping of these ideas.

I have appreciated the private messages about how much my work, and this book, means to you too. Later life is not only about striving on, unless that’s what you want.

22 days till 2 June

I went to see Exit 8 late Wednesday night, partly because there was almost no other time to see it. I don’t normally go to late films, and I rarely watch Japanese cinema, so from the beginning the whole experience felt slightly unfamiliar.

The film category was horror, but not in the way many Western audiences might expect. There are no constant jump scares, no gore-filled spectacle, no predictable moments where everyone in the cinema leaps. Instead, the horror is quieter and more psychological. It builds through repetition, unease, and the gradual sense that reality itself has slipped slightly out of alignment.

The premise is deceptively simple. A man becomes trapped in an underground passageway connected to a Japanese train station, walking the same route again and again, searching for anomalies that might help him escape. At first the corridor appears ordinary. Then tiny details begin to shift. A sign changes. A face lingers too long. A child appears. The familiar becomes subtly wrong.

What surprised me was how quickly the film stopped feeling like a conventional horror story and began to feel symbolic. Watching people move endlessly through the same sterile corridors, I found myself thinking about working life, routine, and the strange experience many people have when they begin questioning the life they have built.

So many people spend decades moving through the same patterns. Wake up. Travel. Work. Return home. Repeat. For years it feels normal because everyone around them is doing the same thing. Then eventually something shifts. A redundancy. Retirement. Burnout. Bereavement. A birthday ending in zero. And suddenly the life that once felt purposeful can begin to feel oddly repetitive, even unreal.

The corridor in the film began to feel less like a physical place and more like a metaphor for being trapped inside a version of life you no longer fully belong to, yet not knowing how to leave.

That, for me, became the real tension in the film. Not “What is the monster?” but “How do we notice when we are sleepwalking through our own lives?”

The film captures something of that psychological state remarkably well. The endless circling. The uncertainty. The search for clues. The hope that somewhere there is an exit, even if you no longer quite remember what freedom is supposed to look like.

I had gone to the cinema straight after a three-hour creative session at the Wilson, making a zine through cutting, arranging, and collaging images and words. In retrospect, that mattered. Both experiences involved paying attention differently. Collage asks you to notice fragments and hidden relationships. So does this film. Perhaps that is why it stayed with me afterwards.

What I appreciated most about Exit 8 was its restraint. The fear comes less from shock than from recognition. The possibility that many of us are moving through familiar corridors every day, barely noticing how lost we may have become.

I left the cinema unsettled, thoughtful, and strangely reflective about modern life itself. Not bad for a late-night Japanese psychological horror film based on a computer game.

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Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something interesting happening in conversations about ageing. More and more people are using the word elderhood.

Sometimes it’s used to describe wisdom.
Sometimes purpose.
Sometimes continued contribution and relevance.
Sometimes simply reaching a certain age.

And at first glance, this sounds hopeful. A welcome shift away from the old narratives of decline and invisibility. For decades, later life was framed largely in terms of loss. Retirement. Irrelevance. Withdrawal. Decline.

So of course there’s something appealing about language that suggests growth, meaning, wisdom, or continued becoming.

But the more I sat with it, the more uneasy I became.

This week I uploaded a new academic article to ResearchGate exploring exactly that question:

Olderhood and Elderhood: Why Later Life Is Not a Single Developmental Stage

And the more deeply I explored the topic, the more I realised how much modern ageing discourse sometimes risks replacing one stereotype with another.

For decades, older people were told decline was inevitable. Now, increasingly, they are being told they should become wise, purposeful, deeply reflective “elders.” But what if later life is broader than either of those narratives?

What if Olderhood itself is messier, quieter, more diverse, and more human than the frameworks currently being offered?

The subtle pressure to “age well”

Many of the newer models of ageing are well intentioned. I genuinely understand why people want new language for later life. We are living longer. Traditional retirement models no longer fit many people’s lives. There is value in recognising continued growth, contribution, creativity, and development.

But I’ve also started noticing something else. A subtle pressure creeping in. A feeling that ageing successfully now requires us to become somehow enlightened.

Purposeful.
Wise.
Spiritually evolved.
Deeply intentional.

Almost as though later life itself has become another self-improvement project. And I’m not convinced that reflects the reality of how most people actually live. Some people in later life are caregiving for partners with dementia. Some are exhausted after decades of work. Some are quietly rediscovering pleasure after years of responsibility. Some are lonely.

Some are still ambitious. Some are deeply reflective. Some are not interested in reflection at all. Some are gardening, walking the dog, travelling with friends, volunteering locally, or simply trying to make peace with their own lives.

None of these ways of living are lesser.

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Paid subscribers can read on for the deeper distinction I make between Olderhood and elderhood, why cross-cultural perspectives changed my thinking, and why I believe later life needs more spaciousness and less prescription. (1024 words)

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If you’d like to read further but don’t want to become a paid subscriber at this point, you’re very welcome to buy me a coffee. I’ll send you a gift link so you can continue reading.

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Last week I became aware of something I haven’t quite noticed in this way before. Not that I’m getting older, I’ve known that for some time, but the cost of holding everything together has changed.

My mother was staying with me. There is often tension when she visits. She is 93 and wants to move faster than she can, gets frustrated, is quite deaf, and gives me three things to do at once, then gets annoyed when I don’t deal with them together. This time it was easier. I didn’t upset her. There were no difficult moments, no emotional flare-ups, no need to repair anything afterwards.

On the surface, that sounds like a success. And in some ways, it was. But it came at a personal cost I couldn’t ignore.

What I noticed, perhaps for the first time so clearly, was the level of vigilance it required. A constant awareness. Wondering if she might fall, being careful over my words, acting as her personal shopper around the stores, and putting aside any feelings of tiredness. I was monitoring what I said, how I said it, how things might land. A quiet, ongoing adjustment of myself in order to keep things smooth.

By the end of her visit, I felt it. Not dramatically, but steadily. A kind of depletion that wasn’t just physical tiredness. It was something deeper.

At the same time, life didn’t pause around that visit. I was dealing with ongoing production issues with ThriveSpan, going back and forth with the production company on technical changes.

And then I lost my keys. Retracing my steps twice, checking the cost of replacing the car key and garage key, going to the police station, rechecking everything again. Then, three days later, I found them on a cut-off tree trunk near my home. I almost cried. I left a thank you note, and someone decorated it with leaves. People noticed.

Alongside everything else, I also had two client sessions. Both were Highlands Ability Battery feedback sessions. If I’m honest, I would probably have preferred not to have them in that particular week. There was already a lot going on. And yet, once I was in the sessions, I enjoyed them.

Both women, one in her mid-thirties and one in her forties, were thoughtful and engaged. It felt like a proper conversation, something shared and explored together. Very different from working with teenagers, who are sometimes there more because their parents want them to be than because they do.

That contrast stayed with me.

Because it reminded me that the work itself isn’t the issue. I still find it interesting. I still care about it. I can still do it well. But I no longer want it to be the thing that fills my days by default, and that feels like an important distinction.

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I made two visits to my wood this week, one with my mum so she could see the bluebells, and one alone. At the wood there are always practical tasks, and I didn’t mind these at all. In fact, I find them grounding – washing out bird feeders and filling them, brushing down my lotus belle tent, sweeping basecamp, moving some branches.

There is something about practical tasks that I still enjoy. Tidying, sorting, organising, making things work as they should. Not only at the wood, but at home, and for my mum. Sorting out paperwork, finding and ordering things she wants.

What I am becoming more aware of is this - it isn’t the doing that drains me. It’s the holding.

The emotional space. The vigilance. The sense of needing to be available, responsive, accommodating. And that’s where something has shifted.

Because alongside all of this, I’ve also had messages from people. Perfectly reasonable in themselves. A friend assuming we could talk that afternoon. Another reaching out with something she’d like me to be involved in. People assuming that I will step in and take over running an event I’ve done before.

In the past, I would have responded quickly, accommodated their needs, put myself in second or third place. This time, I paused. Not out of irritation, and not out of withdrawal, but because I could feel, quite clearly, that I didn’t have the energy.

And more than that, I didn’t have the headspace. That feels like an important distinction. It’s not just about time. It’s about the mental and emotional bandwidth that sits underneath everything. The background processing. The sense of being “on.”

Once that’s taken up, there is very little left for anything else, including the things that matter most.

And this is where the book comes in. Because alongside everything else, I am also holding ThriveSpan. Not just as a piece of writing, but as something I’ve chosen to publish myself.

There are real benefits to that decision. Control, ownership, the ability to shape it exactly as I want it to be, and to bring it into the world in a way that feels aligned.

But there is also a cost. It requires energy. Ongoing attention. Decision-making. Follow-up. A level of engagement that doesn’t simply switch off. And what this week has shown me is that I can feel that cost much more directly now, not as something overwhelming, but as something real.

Which brings me to a broader reflection.

There is a lot being written about later life at the moment. About reinvention, new careers, starting again in your sixties and seventies. And for some people, that is absolutely right. But it is not the only story.

Because what I am noticing, from the inside, is something quieter, and perhaps less often named. Energy becomes more visible. More tangible. More limited in certain ways. And therefore, more precious.

This doesn’t mean doing less in any simplistic sense. It doesn’t mean withdrawing from life or becoming passive. But it does mean becoming more discerning.

More aware of where energy goes, what it costs, what it gives back, and perhaps most importantly, what is no longer required.

For me, that includes the assumption of availability.

The idea that I can always respond, always explain, always make space. I’m not sure that holds anymore. Not because I don’t care, but because I need to care more carefully.

There’s a subtle but important shift happening here. From capacity as something I rely on, to capacity as something I steward. I can still do a great deal. But I can no longer do it indiscriminately. And, if I’m honest, I don’t want to.

There is something steadier emerging in its place. A quieter sense of what matters, and what doesn’t.

And a growing willingness to shape my life around that. Not dramatically. Just gently, and with a little more awareness than before.

I spent Sunday at Bluebell Wood

The bluebells are moving into their next stage now, forming seed pods that will travel on the wind and return again next year. There is something about that quiet continuation that feels fitting. While I was there, I recorded a few short videos.

This is one of them. I was going to post it up on Amazon, but maybe I should have been better dressed. But this is how I show up at the wood.

Hi,

We’re about 4–5 weeks from the publication of ThriveSpan, and I’m just waiting for the final files before it moves into the last stage of production.

At this stage, I’d like to invite a small number of early readers to have advance access.

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I hadn’t planned to watch King and Conqueror (a BBC drama) I already knew it wasn’t historically accurate. You expect a bit of dramatic licence in this sort of production, but what they’ve done here goes far beyond tightening timelines or simplifying subplots. They’ve changed major events, invented confrontations, and layered in symbolism that has no grounding in reality. And I’ve never understood why filmmakers feel the need to rewrite history when the truth is rich enough on its own.

So yes, as a historical drama, it was a disappointment. But as I watched, certain moments still stood out, not because they were true to 1066, but because they revealed something familiar about human behaviour.

What struck me most was the force of ambition. Nobody in this story is satisfied. Everyone wants more; more land, more power, more certainty, more recognition. Even when things could have been stable, they reach for the next rung. It’s framed as medieval struggle, but you see versions of this every day. At work, in organisations, people jostle for promotions, claim ownership of things they didn’t do, and manoeuvre around each other. And like in 1066, it rarely ends well. Ambition has a cost, whether the battlefield is made of mud or meeting rooms.

The scenes on the battlefield captured something, strangely, more real than the invented plot around them. The shouts through the ranks: Hold the wall. Hold the line. That felt authentic. No drones, no distance. Just bodies, shields, spears, slipping in mud, breath against breath. The English shield wall was strong as long as they held formation. Harold knew this, which is why he kept telling them to stay steady.

But then came the familiar moment: the Normans retreating, genuine or feigned, and the English chasing despite clear instructions not to. One break in the line, and everything collapses. That pattern repeats throughout history and in life. People often know what they are meant to do, but impulse, excitement, fear, or a desire to act can unravel the whole structure. I’ve seen it working with others in woodland: a task explained clearly, but someone decides to do their own version and efficiency, safety, and purpose fall away. “Hold the line” works as much in modern life as it did on Senlac Hill.

The drama added its own theatrics, of course. William appearing to fall, the rumour he is dead, and the English losing discipline. That part, at least, echoes something real, William did have to show his face to rally his men. But the film’s version of Harold and William meeting in single combat is pure invention. They never fought one-on-one. They never even laid eyes on each other during the battle. Still, the invented hesitation, Harold pausing when he could have struck, had a strange symbolic truth. History doesn’t hinge on moments like that, but people do. Hesitation has shaped many lives, even if not this battle.

And then the drama slid fully into myth. In the film, Harold hesitates, someone else stabs him, and as he lies dead, William takes an arrow and punches it into his eye. I laughed. No subtlety there. One of his lackeys even declares that the arrow came from God.

Harold’s death becomes “the hand of God,” the arrow framed as divine judgement. When Edith identifies the body, she is forced to repeat the lie, and William solemnly pronounces it to the people. It’s propaganda dressed up as revelation, the old Norman narrative that victory equals divine approval. The real Harold almost certainly died in the final crush when the shield wall broke. No heavenly archery required.

By the end, with William crowned and Morcar conveniently standing by to endorse the new order, I found myself thinking: What a load of garbage. Not because the story of 1066 is boring, but because they’ve replaced complexity with cartoonish symbolism.

And yet, watching it reminded me of something. The past, even when mangled by scriptwriters, still illuminates the present. Power struggles, ambition, fear, loyalty, hesitation, holding the line, breaking formation … these patterns run through human life. You can see them in medieval battles, in workplaces, in communities, and in families. The drama didn’t tell the truth of 1066, but it did shine a light on some truths about us.

I don’t write these reviews for likes or attention. I write them because the act of watching, noticing, and thinking matters to me. Even a badly told story can offer something worth reflecting on, if only a reminder that the real history is still the more interesting version.

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There is a growing body of writing about longer lives. It is serious, well-intentioned, and increasingly urgent. It points to the numbers, a billion people over sixty globally, tens of millions in later life, and asks what needs to change. Systems. Products. Workplaces. Financial planning. Healthcare design.

This is not wrong. Much of it is necessary.

What the longevity conversation leaves out

But something is missing. And the absence is striking, not because no one has noticed it, but because it is so rarely explored.

Most of the conversation about longer lives is outward-facing. It asks: what will you do? How will you remain useful? What will you contribute? What new dreams will you pursue?

What it does not often ask is the quieter question that tends to come first.

The dominant framing is familiar. We have been given extra decades. This is a gift. The task is to use those years well. To stay engaged. To remain purposeful. Perhaps to begin something new. A different career. Mentoring. A long-postponed ambition.

The word that appears most often is longevity. It is positioned as more aspirational than ageing. It suggests a horizon, a sense of possibility.

I understand the appeal of that shift in language.

But much of the time, longevity is still being used to describe extension. More years in which to do more things. The underlying assumption is that the life that follows sixty looks broadly like the one that came before, only with more choice.

For many people, that is not how it feels.

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A different question begins to emerge

In my doctoral research, I spent time with people moving through this phase of life. Not the exceptional cases that make headlines, but ordinary individuals trying to make sense of what these years were for.

What they described was not simply a search for new goals.

It was a more uncertain, and often more private, question. Who am I now, when the structures that shaped me, work, parenting, striving, begin to loosen? What remains, and what changes?

That question does not resolve itself through better systems. It does not yield to innovation in the usual sense. It asks for a different kind of attention.

Where ThriveSpan begins

This is where the ThriveSpan work begins.

In developing the framework, I identified nine dimensions of later life experience, across three broad paths: Self and Well-being, Connection and Contribution, and Exploration and Fulfilment.

What became clear, as I worked through the research, was that many of the most significant challenges people faced were not external. They were internal.

A changing relationship with time. A need for psychological integration. A different quality of presence. The capacity to sit with uncertainty without immediately trying to fix it.

These are not the areas most often discussed in the longevity space. They are quieter, less visible, and harder to package.

But they are, in many cases, where the real work of this phase lies.

The idea of “time affluence” is one of the more thoughtful contributions to the current conversation. It recognises that, for the first time, many people in their sixties and seventies have time that is not already spoken for.

That matters.

But the question that often follows, what are your new dreams, still assumes that time is something to be filled.

A different question might be this.

That is not a question that systems can answer.

It is a question about how to inhabit a life.

If the longevity revolution is to live up to its promise, it will need to hold both sides of this conversation. The structural and the personal. The external and the internal. The opportunity, and the transition that makes that opportunity meaningful.

At the moment, most of the focus sits on one side.

The other is where ThriveSpan begins.

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Below the paywall

Below the paywall, I explore three of the ThriveSpan dimensions that people most often find themselves unprepared for. Not because they lack capability, but because these are areas of later life we are rarely shown how to inhabit. (765 words)

Access note

If you’d like to read further but don’t want to become a paid subscriber at this point, you’re very welcome to buy me a coffee. I’ll send you a gift link so you can continue reading.

☕ buymeacoffee.com/denisetaylor

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I’ve just signed off the final manuscript for ThriveSpan.
It’s complete. And I feel quietly, deeply happy.

When I look back, this book has been with me for a long time. I first began shaping the idea around seven years ago, even before my first vision quest, even before I began my doctorate. It was always there in the background, something I would return to, something that didn’t yet feel ready.

What I’m most aware of now is how important that time has been. Time to grow, to reflect, to change, to live.

If I had written this book back then, it would have been very different. More conventional, I think. More structured in the ways we’re used to. What it has become instead feels much closer to how later life is actually lived.

There was also a more recent turning point. Around nine months ago, I made a conscious decision to step back. To take something closer to a sabbatical. Not to fill the space with new plans, but to allow something to emerge.

That was when ThriveSpan truly began to take shape in its current form.

It wasn’t forced. It arrived through time, through reflection, and through allowing thoughts to unfold rather than pushing them into place.

Since buying Bluebell Wood and spending more time there over the years, something had already begun to shift. But in that quieter period, the deeper patterns became clearer. The sense of cycles, of growth and decay, of moving through different phases without needing to control them. Those ideas found their way into the book.

So ThriveSpan isn’t organised into traditional sections and chapters.

It moves through paths. It offers glades to sit in. It invites reflection, rather than setting tasks.

There is nothing here you need to complete. Nothing to get right.

It’s a book to return to, to sit with, to read in your own way and at your own pace.

My hope is that it becomes a kind of companion. Something alongside you as you move through later life, rather than something directing you.

This is a book for those who sense they are entering a different phase of life, and want to meet it with more awareness, not more pressure.

Publishing this book has also been a considered choice. Having previously worked with publishers like Routledge and Trotman, I’ve experienced both the benefits and the constraints of traditional publishing.

For ThriveSpan, I’ve chosen to publish through my own imprint, while still working with the same professional editorial, proofreading, and production teams used on my last two books.

So this is not a casual self-publishing route. It’s a professionally produced book, but one where I’ve been able to make the key decisions. The design, the structure, the tone, the woodland imagery. All of it reflects what felt right for this book.

Alongside the writing, there has also been a deepening of the academic work that underpins it. Revisiting and questioning the career and later-life theories that have shaped much of my professional work led to the development of a new framework.

This is now published as a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling: Reframing Later Life: The ThriveSpan Framework for Ages 60 to 80. A second academic paper is currently available as a preprint and under review with a journal, and a third is in development.

This matters to me because, while ThriveSpan is written as a reflective and accessible book, it is grounded in many years of research, thinking, and professional practice.

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With five weeks to go until publication, I’ll be opening pre-orders shortly.

I’ll also be sharing a small number of accompanying resources for those who choose to order early, which I’ll tell you more in the next week or two.

For now, this feels like a moment to pause and acknowledge the journey.

I’m glad I didn’t rush it. I’m glad I let it unfold.

And I hope, when it reaches you, it’s something you might take with you, perhaps even into nature, and return to in your own time.

p.s I’m standing on the path which is used for the cover of the book.

I walked into the cinema and it was already dark.

Not the usual dimming as the film begins, but darkness already in place, as if I had arrived late to something I didn’t yet understand. The trailers were still playing, but even they felt slightly off, more unsettling than usual. I wasn’t quite sure whether the film had started or not.

That sense stayed with me.

The film itself wasn’t frightening in the way people often mean. There were no shocks, no obvious moments to react to. Instead, it worked more quietly. Through sound. Through suggestion. Through fragments that didn’t quite make sense at the time.

There were recordings. Voices. A sense of something being uncovered rather than revealed. At one point, they played a tape backwards, trying to hear what might be hidden within it. I found myself caught by that question: why would you listen… and yet, why wouldn’t you?

There were drawings too. Dark, scattered marks on paper that seemed meaningless at first. Later, when they were brought together, they formed something recognisable. A person.

It was that kind of film. Not showing you something clearly, but leaving you to assemble it afterwards.

And what stayed with me wasn’t the story as such, but the feeling underneath it. A low, quiet unease. Not overwhelming, just enough to shift something.

It made me think about how often it isn’t what we see, but how we find ourselves within a situation.

Sometimes it’s obvious. A new place, an unfamiliar setting, something we haven’t prepared for. But at other times, it’s more subtle. The same environment can feel entirely different depending on where we are in ourselves.

I realised, sitting there, that I like to have a sense of what I’m stepping into. Not control exactly, but orientation. A feeling that I know where I am, and what the ground beneath me is like.

“Expect the unexpected” is often offered as a kind of wisdom. But for me, it doesn’t quite land that way. It removes something. A sense of footing.

And perhaps that was part of what unsettled me. Not the film itself, but the experience of being drawn into something without that grounding.

When I left the cinema, and walked the final stretch home, I stepped into a crowd. People heading to the football. Noise, movement, a sense of shared direction. And yet I felt slightly out of step with it.

Nothing had changed, and yet something had.

I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the film. But I’m aware that some experiences don’t ask to be understood straight away.

They simply leave an undertone.

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There is a moment you begin to notice with certain people. Nothing dramatic, just a quiet pattern that repeats itself over time.

They are energetic, intelligent, full of ideas. They move quickly from one project to another, building, launching, refining. They read widely, speak to experts, test strategies. Their energy can be impressive, even infectious.

But the goalposts keep moving. A business reaches six figures and the next aim becomes seven. A successful programme leads to the goal of a million-pound company. A million becomes two. The horizon shifts almost as soon as it is reached, and any sense of satisfaction, if it arrives at all, is brief.

I have been thinking recently about someone like this. He is 61. Capable, prolific, publicly committed to making several million before he allows himself to relax. I do not say this critically. He is genuinely talented, and the drive that has brought him this far is real. But I find myself wondering, with some tenderness, what sits underneath that impulse, and whether the horizon he keeps chasing will ever feel close enough to stop moving.

Because here is what I notice. At 61, he is standing at the beginning of the life phase I write about. The sixties are not a signal to slow down. Most of us don’t experience them that way. The energy is still there. The ambition is still there. The identity built around achievement is very much still there. And there is nothing wrong with any of that.

But the question that tends to arrive, sooner or later, in this decade or the next, is one that striving cannot answer. Not what can I achieve next, but what is actually enough?

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I recognise something of this pattern from my own earlier career, though my path out of it was neither clean nor planned. For a long time I worked exceptionally hard, carrying the financial weight of a lifestyle that had quietly expanded to require it. When my marriage ended at 60, one of the first questions I found myself asking was a surprisingly practical one. If I no longer needed to fund business class flights and six-week long-haul trips, how much did I actually need to earn? The answer was less than I thought. And that single realisation began to shift something.

Around the same time I undertook a vision quest. If you haven’t encountered the practice, it involves a period of solitude in nature, fasting, without the usual distractions or structures of daily life. It is not comfortable, and it is not meant to be. But it reoriented me in ways that are difficult to fully articulate, and that no amount of strategic planning or coaching had touched. I began to see what I had been running toward, and what I had been running from, with unusual clarity.

What followed was not a sudden stop, but a gradual reweighting. I was still working, still seeing clients, still doing the occasional consultancy, but other things began to take up more space. Around that time, I became an apprentice Vision Quest guide, a commitment that took up around thirty working days each year. It was not part of my formal work, but it mattered in a different way. Through it, I continued to learn about myself and to sense more clearly the direction I was being drawn towards. That path led, five years ago, to buying a small ancient woodland in Gloucestershire.

The wood didn’t feel like stepping back. It felt like stepping into something. Over this past year I have found myself wanting to spend more and more time there, not as part of work but as the place where I think, where I balance myself, where I can simply be. That, alongside a growing clarity that I wanted to write rather than see clients, led me about a year ago to make the decision to stop seeing personal clients altogether. It wasn’t a retirement. It was a reorientation.

I’ve been sitting with a quieter question that tends to emerge somewhere in our sixties. Not about what we can still achieve, but about what would actually feel like enough. It is not an easy question to approach, particularly for those of us who have built our lives around movement, growth, and achievement. What looks like ambition on the surface can be carrying something more complex underneath. Below I explore what happens when striving becomes automatic, why the question of “enough” can feel so difficult to face, and how this shift begins to show itself in later life.

Not yet a paid subscriber? You can buy me a coffee, and if there’s a paywalled piece you’d like to read, just ask and I’ll send you a gift link.

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I cleared out my bookcase. Then my Substack subscriptions. Then, gradually, my thinking.

On what it means to stop absorbing other people’s frameworks and start building your own.

I had over a hundred Substack subscriptions, alongside LinkedIn and email newsletters. Lovely in theory. Honest answer, I wasn’t reading most of them.

When I stopped and asked why, I realised it wasn’t laziness. It was that something had shifted.

For a long time, I read people operating in the same world as me. Careers, retirement, later life. I was in conversation with a field, which is exactly what you do when you’re learning, building, finding your footing. I read to stay informed, to absorb frameworks, to understand what others were thinking so I could position my own thinking in relation to theirs.

At some point, quietly, that changed.

I started reading for a different reason. Not to take in what was already out there, but to notice what it sparked in me. To observe, question, and then ask, how does this connect to what I actually care about?

The writers I return to now aren’t necessarily writing about later life. But something in how they think connects with something in how I think. I take that thread and follow it somewhere else. Writers such as Andrew Gold and James Marriott.

Unsubscribing was an admission. Not that I’ve left the later life conversation, but that I’m no longer participating in it in the same way. I’m coming at it from elsewhere, from ideas, from culture, from psychology, from questions that don’t have tidy answers, and bringing all of that through a single lens: what does this mean for those of us navigating the 60 to 80 life phase?

I’ve also noticed that much of what I read in this space no longer holds my attention in the way it once did. There’s often a pull toward solutions, frameworks, next steps. That has its place. It’s just not where I find myself drawn now.

What I’ve become more interested in is how ideas travel. A concept emerges, often rooted in careful research, and then gets picked up, simplified, passed around, and gradually presented as something new. In that process, some of the depth can get lost.

I’ve spent forty years working with individuals. I completed a professional doctorate at 64. So I find myself drawn back to source material, and writing in a way that tries to hold onto that depth.

I have a paper being published in an academic journal later this month, a second submitted, and I’m working on a third. This matters to me. Not as output, but as contribution. A way of adding to a body of knowledge rather than simply reshaping what is already there.

Around the same time, my hallway was decorated. Four bookcases had to be moved. Books from my living room, spare room, and bedroom all to be reviewed.

It gave me a reason to pause and ask a simple question: are these still needed?

They weren’t all.

I now have bookcases that are easier to navigate. No piles on the floor. Space where there was once clutter. I’ve even put copies of my own books on the shelves, rather than keeping them tucked away.

In total, 134 books are no longer mine.

The bookcase clear-out felt like the physical version of the same shift. Books that had served their purpose. Frameworks I no longer needed because they had already done their work.

I’m not looking for other people’s thinking to adopt in the way I once was. I’m more interested in developing my own. That creates a different relationship with ideas.

I’m approaching 70. I have lived experience of this phase, not just a theoretical understanding of it. And I’ve come to think that what’s often missing in writing about later life isn’t information, or positivity, or even practical strategies.

It’s depth.

Someone willing to sit with a question long enough to understand it, rather than move too quickly to resolve it.

That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I don’t write to be skimmed or quickly agreed with. I write to make people pause and think. It may not attract the same level of likes or comments, but it feels more aligned with the work I want to do now.

There is more to come.

In the meantime:

On Ageing and Later Life - submitted for publication

Reframing Later Life: A Review of Life-Stage Theories and the Development of ThriveSpan for the 60-80 Life Phase - will be published in a journal later this month

Midlife Reinvention - published in Career Matters, April 2026

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I decided to watch Jules, one of those quiet, slightly offbeat films about an older man and an unexpected visitor. It brought to mind Robot & Frank, where connection appears in unlikely places, and where later life is not reduced to decline, but seen in its complexity.

At the start, Milt is simply frightened. A spaceship lands in his garden, destroys his azaleas, smashes the birdbath, and when he does the obvious thing and tells people, no one believes him. Not the police, not the council, not the cashier at the supermarket. And there’s something very familiar in that. It isn’t dramatic dismissal. It’s quieter. A look exchanged. A polite nod. A decision, already made, that he is confused.

From there, the film moves into something much more tender.

He invites the alien in. Offers food. Watches what it responds to. Finds a blanket. Explains the house. It’s all very ordinary, and that’s what makes it work. There’s no grand attempt to understand. Just a willingness to respond to what’s in front of him.

And gradually, others become involved. Two older women, neighbours he might never have really connected with before, find themselves drawn into this shared situation. They name the alien, or try to. They talk. They sit with it. They form, almost without noticing, a small community.

It’s interesting that the real connection in the film isn’t just between human and alien. It’s between people who, perhaps, had been living alongside each other without much contact. The alien becomes a catalyst. Something new enters, and suddenly there is movement, curiosity, even a kind of purpose.

There’s also a thread about ageing and being believed.

Milt’s daughter is trying to do the right thing. She notices small things, a tin of green beans in the bathroom cabinet, newspaper in the freezer, and interprets them as signs of decline. She takes him to a memory clinic. She begins to think about care, about safety, about what might come next.

And yet, from his perspective, these things don’t feel so significant. We all forget things. We all put things in the wrong place. There’s a question sitting quietly underneath this: at what point does difference become diagnosis?

Sometimes the response to those small signs is driven as much by fear, fear of what might happen, fear of responsibility, as by what is actually happening. And while moving someone into a home may feel like the safest or most practical solution, it is not necessarily the easiest thing for the person themselves.

What the film does gently is show another possibility.

Introduce something new, something unexpected, and life shifts. There is engagement again. Attention. Relationship. Even the slightly absurd task of gathering cats to create fuel for the spaceship becomes, in its own way, meaningful. It gets them out of the house. Working together. Figuring something out.

It isn’t about the cats, really. It’s about participation.

And then, towards the end, the tone changes again.

There’s an awareness of memory slipping. Of recognition becoming uncertain. Of time narrowing. They sit together, and there’s a question, does the alien still know who we are?

It’s a simple moment, but it carries something larger. That sense that memory, identity, and connection are not fixed. That they can loosen, fade, become less certain.

And yet, the relationship has already happened. The care has already been given.

In the end, Milt chose to stay. Not to escape. Not to leave Earth behind. There’s something quietly grounded in that decision. A recognition, perhaps, that this is where life has been lived, and where it will continue, however it unfolds.

It’s a gentle film. It doesn’t push its message. It doesn’t try to resolve everything neatly.

But it leaves you with a few things to sit with:

What does it mean to be believed?
When do we decide someone is no longer reliable?
And how often do we overlook the possibility that something new, even something unexpected, might bring life back into focus?

Above all, it’s about connection. Not perfect, not always understood, but real enough to matter.

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The film is currently available on Channel 4 in the UK

I was listening to a radio discussion about the decline of British pubs the other day. The presenter asked whether what we’re witnessing is inevitable or avoidable. It was a simple question, but a thoughtful one. It separates what is unfolding beyond our control from what is shaped by choices, culture, and systems.

It struck me that we rarely make this distinction when we talk about ageing.

Instead, everything gets folded together. Physical change. Social invisibility. Loss of purpose. Diminished relevance. All placed under the broad and rather vague banner of getting older.

And because some aspects of ageing are indeed inevitable, we are subtly encouraged to accept the whole experience as natural, unavoidable, and beyond question.

Yet I find myself wondering whether this quiet conflation does something more than simplify. It may also discourage discernment.

If everything is inevitable, then nothing needs to be examined.

If everything is “just ageing”, then we stop asking where biology ends and culture begins.

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What Is Actually Inevitable

Some changes are part of the human life course.

Bodies age. Recovery can take longer. Energy rhythms shift. Muscle mass declines without attention. Hearing and vision may change. These are not cultural myths. They are biological realities, shaped further by health, class, work history, and circumstance.

Ageing is not infinitely malleable, despite what optimisation culture sometimes suggests. No amount of positive thinking, productivity hacks, or wellness routines can fully override the passage of time.

There is also something quietly human about adaptation. Most people do not simply decline. They adjust. They pace themselves differently. They notice their energy more carefully. They become, in many cases, more reflective about how they live.

What is inevitable is change.

What is far less inevitable is how those changes are interpreted, socially and internally.

The remainder of this essay explores what is often labelled “inevitable” in later life but is, in fact, culturally constructed and therefore open to challenge. If you would like to read it but not yet ready for a paid subscription, you are welcome to ‘buy me a coffee’ and I’ll send you a gift link. ☕ buymeacoffee.com/denisetaylor

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Over the past few months, I’ve found myself returning to a question that sits underneath much of the current conversation about ageing.

When did we start assuming that meaning in later life has to be built from scratch?

So much of what I read now, in books, programmes, and online spaces, rests on that premise. That once work ends, or roles shift, we are left with a kind of blank page. That meaning is something we must actively construct, often through effort, intention, or reinvention.

But that isn’t what I’ve observed.

Not in the lives of people I’ve spoken with over the years. And not in the generations I’ve watched more closely, those who came before us, who may not have used the same language, but who still reflected, questioned, and made sense of their lives in quieter, less formalised ways.

What has changed, it seems to me, is not the presence of meaning, but the structures that once carried it.

And when I think about previous generations, I sometimes smile. If we had asked our grandparents what gave their lives meaning and purpose, they might well have looked at us as if we’d been on the sherry.

Life itself was enough.

Since stepping back from one-to-one work, I’ve had the space to reflect, research, and write in a more sustained way.

That thought, on meaning in later life, stayed with me long enough that I wanted to explore it properly, not as a short article, but as something more considered. Something that could hold the psychological ideas alongside the historical context, and look more carefully at how we’ve arrived at the narratives we now take for granted.

The result is a longer paper, drawing on thinkers such as Carl Jung and Erik Erikson, alongside the social history of later life.

It’s probably the clearest statement I’ve made of how I now see this field, and where I think some of the current conversation begins to drift away from its original foundations.

You can read the full paper here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403724895_On_Ageing_and_Later_Life

Newspaper Articles

Alongside this, I’ve continued writing for The i Paper, exploring similar themes in a more applied way, looking at how these ideas show up in everyday decisions about work, health, and family life.

They are all behind a paywall but I share as gift links (you just need to accept ads).

A few recent pieces:

• Stop calling boomers selfish for not downsizing – we don’t have a choice

• At 68, my good health isn’t down to expensive supplements – it’s something more achievable

• This is how often grandparents in Britain actually see their grandchildren

If you’d like to explore more of those, I’ve gathered them here:
https://denisetaylor.co.uk/media/newspapers-magazines/

I don’t often bring these different strands of my work together.

The academic writing, the public pieces, and the quieter reflections tend to sit alongside each other rather than being presented as a whole.

But I’m beginning to see that they are part of the same conversation.

A way of thinking about later life that is less about optimisation, and more about understanding what this phase of life actually asks of us, and what it allows us to release.

This is also the thinking that sits behind ThriveSpan, my forthcoming book.

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I watched Drama the other evening, not entirely sure what to expect. With school holidays there wasn’t much choice.

At first, it feels like a familiar kind of film. A couple, young, attractive, finding each other. There’s a softness to the early scenes, a sense of ease. You settle into it thinking you know the territory. A relationship forming, something light, perhaps even tender.

But it doesn’t stay there.

Something shifts. Quietly at first, then more decisively.

The film begins to move into more uncomfortable territory, not through action, but through what is said. A moment, a question, a response that lands badly. And from there, everything starts to unravel in ways that feel both unexpected and, somehow, inevitable.

What struck me was how quickly something small became something irreversible.

As a viewer, you find yourself drawn into the question at the heart of it.

What is the worst thing you have ever done? And perhaps even more unsettling, what is the worst thing you could do?

You start to think ahead. To rehearse possible answers. To imagine how you might respond if asked the same question.

And then to realise there may not be a safe answer at all.

That whatever is said carries consequences that can’t be contained.

There is a kind of emotional claustrophobia to it. Not in the setting, but in the dynamic between them.

Even the music seemed to contribute to that unease. There’s a slight discord to it, something just off enough to put you on edge without you quite noticing why. It sits underneath the scenes, subtly unsettling, as if hinting that what looks ordinary is already beginning to fracture.

There is a wedding later in the film, or at least something that resembles one. And again, it doesn’t unfold in the way we expect. We carry an internal script for how these moments should look, how people should behave, what should be said and felt. The film disrupts that, and in doing so creates something that is difficult to watch at times.

I found myself aware, too, of the distance between my life and theirs.

Watching as someone older, you don’t just see the characters. You see the patterns. The fragility. The ways in which moments like this can shape what follows. There’s a kind of hindsight that sits alongside the viewing, a sense of how easily things can turn, and how long the consequences can last.

After a full day working on the detailed, meticulous task of checking the index for my next book, ThriveSpan, making all the small edits and adjustments that come with that level of precision, I probably could have chosen something lighter. A comedy, something easy to sit with.

But this is not that kind of film.

It asks something of you. It unsettles. At times it feels uncomfortable to watch, not because of what is happening, but because of what it quietly exposes.

And perhaps that is the point.

What begins as something familiar shifts into something far less certain. It unsettles the idea of how relationships are meant to unfold, how people are meant to behave, and what happens when something is spoken that cannot easily be taken back.

It stayed with me afterwards, not as a clear message, but as a question.

Perhaps this is a film that takes you somewhere deeper than you first expect, if you are willing to sit with where it leads.

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