2026 October 06 Make the new normal, normal

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about letting the new normal be normal. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

This week, we're going to be talking about embracing, rather than repeatedly regretting, our new normal and how we're living. First, we have our pillars to go over, of course. We have the five pillars: identity, mind, body, curiosity, and contribution. We have a freebie course on those at 7EveryMinute.com/five-pillars-freebie if you want to see them in detail.

This week we're talking more about the mind. There's a little bit of an identity piece in there, in how you perceive yourself, but in reality it's mostly about how our mind arranges and interprets all the things around us that we hear.

Just as we get to choose how we react to a particular situation, we also get to choose how we react to how we perceive our own future. This is very important. There is no past. There is no future. There's only the present. I'll repeat that in a second.

The past doesn't exist. It happened behind us. The future doesn't exist. It's in front of us. The past and the future are what we make them to be through our memories and our imagination, respectively. That doesn't mean the past didn't happen, but how it affects us is heavily dependent upon how we frame it in our minds. I'm aware that the past may have had physical and emotional consequences, but even still, we have some amount of input, perhaps with coaching or professional help, in managing their effect upon us.

Similarly, the future doesn't exist except in how we imagine it. On one level, the future is totally wide open. Hence the saying, "Your past does not determine your future," and there are some nice variations on that same theme: your past has a voice but doesn't get the final say, or you're not trapped or defined by who you used to be. The common theme is that your future is not some destiny you have no control over, and in our hearts, we know that this is true. How many movies and books have been made about people who made a comeback and recreated their lives? Very, very many, because it's a theme we love to think about and imagine.

But somewhere along the path, we lose faith that we ourselves are capable of making that sort of change in our own lives, which is really unfortunate, since most of us have already done it repeatedly throughout our lives. It just wasn't presented in such a fatalistic and uninspiring way as aging is.

Imagine if, all through your teenage years and into your twenties, the only thing you heard was how awful it is to get older. How bad it is to have a family and all those responsibilities, to pay bills, to pay too much for a house, and then you need to keep earning more while your taxes get harder, and then you might have to hire an accountant and keep track of all your expenses. You become a senior manager with more people reporting to you, and even more responsibilities, and you keep earning more, and finally you get to a position where you can't advance anymore in your company. You have to leave the company and retire early. Wow, growing up seems pretty horrible, doesn't it?

You might be saying, "Come on, Jim. Nobody believes something like that." And I say, you'd be 100% wrong, because that is what's being said today, in many variations throughout the world. Large businesses are having a hard time getting young people to become managers, because they're saying they don't want the responsibility. They don't care about earning more money. They'll just work until they die. And a personal note: I know somebody personally who said that.

Particularly in China, but also in North America, much of the population is deciding not to start families. The population is shrinking to the point that in China, they're now offering rewards for getting married and having children. These are both fundamental parts of growing up and being part of a society. Not necessarily for every single person, but enough that society and businesses don't just disappear. Growing and responding is a natural cycle. But now young people have been talked out of it.

Now let's move to the other end of the career path. In many societies, the elders are respected and valued for their knowledge and experience. These are the people who remember why we do things a certain way, and what happens when you try things the other way. That isn't ruling out change, but it's a caution against trying a method that's already been shown to fail in the past. Elders are a backup of knowledge about how things work from before everything became automated. That's particularly helpful in things like natural disasters. Need to make gravy or a pie, but all the stores are closed or empty? Ask Grandma. She probably never forgot how. Need to repair a roof that's leaking during pouring rain, like during a hurricane, but the big-box stores aren't available? Ask Grandpa. He might even have the supplies in the basement that you used to criticize for not being all tidy.

The reality is, there's a lot of information, experience, and learning in the minds and lives of older adults. But much like the decline in birth rate and in company advancement, that experience has been criticized and downplayed for so long, to such a degree, that no one values it, often including ourselves. Aging and life changes are usually portrayed as this dismal time of loss in every way, with nothing to look forward to. All the good times are behind you. You've just become a burden to society. You're invisible to all the young, productive people. Pardon my French, but who the freak wrote that script?

It's no wonder our perceived new normal is so frightening. We have a large say in what becomes normal for us. Think about when we were going through our younger and middle-aged periods of life. Things were constantly changing, and what was normal last month may have been completely different today. We may have moved, switched jobs, gotten a promotion, gotten fired, had to take a temporary job, suddenly found ourselves in a way better situation than before, or suddenly found ourselves in a way worse situation than before. And we just kept going.

Then, when we're older and a big career or life change happens, we suddenly feel, "This is it. I'm done." Why the sudden resistance to change? Because of all the negative talk around aging. Just like the negative talk around families and career responsibility has actually changed people's behavior, so too the negative talk around aging has a tangible impact upon our behavior. But believing that story is, to some degree, a choice.

I've talked about my professional friends in Colorado, who started a water purification business for mine discharge water, which I should note is still in business and winning jobs. Ten years ago, when I was there, the youngest founder was about 74, and they were solving extremely difficult cleanup issues with acid. It's called acid mine runoff, and it's a function of the way mining works and the minerals that are in the ground. You end up with this acid that's really difficult to remediate. You can't just discharge it somewhere. But they have a solution. Not bad for a bunch of useless, invisible old geezers. Not! They were still creative, passionate about the work, and having a blast.

Then there's my friend who still runs a boutique metal atomization facility and who's a year younger than me. He has numerous people who want to buy his company, but only if he'll stay on to consult. So I guess he isn't so outdated after all.

Another professional acquaintance, whom I congratulated after he retired and sold his company a few years ago, said it was time for the next generation to take over and he was getting out of the business. I was kind of surprised, because he was a real innovator. I guess he finally decided to agree with me, because now he's a successful angel investor in startup companies in his previous field, and I expect a lot of that success comes from both his experience and his mentoring of those companies.

There's also my wilderness first responder alma mater that I talk about often, SOLO Schools in Conway, New Hampshire. Yay, SOLO Schools! The founders are Dr. Frank Hubbell and his wife, Lee Frizzell. When Frank founded the school in 1976, he was just Frank, no title. But in 1991, he finished his medical degree, in his late thirties, early forties. Today he's still actively working, contributing to the emergency medicine field, and now developing courses in field medical care and rural and disaster medicine worldwide. Not bad for an old dude around my age in his seventies.

I could keep listing many more, but the point is they are just like you and me. They made the choice to see their strengths, not to believe the story that they were moving into a time of invisible weakness. Simply put, the script you've been reading was written by people with an agenda, and there's no reason you have to follow that agenda.

It's why I teach about life envisionment, and why envisioning your life as you age is so important. When we were younger, we tended to focus on shorter-term goals. Those are important, but they don't have the long-term vision that keeps us on course through life's changes. Imagine a boat or a plane in a storm. Short-term goals are like the compass, trying to keep a single direction as life tosses you around. You'll kind of get where you're going, but you'll probably spend a lot of time making little, ultimately inconsequential decisions and corrections.

Instead, imagine you're looking at something like the North Star or the Southern Cross, way far away, and you keep steering toward that very distant goal. Yes, you might get blown left, and then you get blown right, but those small errors will probably even out. If they don't, you can shift your focus slightly. All the while, you're keeping that same far-sighted goal as your target. That is what having a life vision means. You have many small goals for the short term, within an overarching vision of what you want to accomplish and how you want to live, and that keeps you on track overall.

So the better script to live by is the one you write for what you want to do and what you want to accomplish, totally irrespective of what others may think or feel is appropriate for you to do. This isn't to criticize someone else's path, but that's their path, not yours. If they think aging is about sitting around looking at the past, kind of unfulfilled and unsatisfied, that ultimately is their choice. But it should have zero influence on how you decide to live your life.

To be clear, this may cause some friction with some of your friends and acquaintances. They may tell you it's time to slow down, or that someone your age shouldn't be doing these sorts of things.

There was recently a story about Betty Bromage, who on August 4th, 2026, became the oldest female wing walker at age 97, breaking her own world record. Her flight included a barrel roll. She said she started wing walking at 87 after seeing it on television and thinking it would be a fun thing to do. Be like Betty. About a year before this last wing walk, she had a stroke, so she used the flight to raise money for the stroke unit at Cheltenham General Hospital, where she received her care for her stroke and where she previously worked as a nurse. One of the best parts of the story is that she says she performs these stunts to stay active and to challenge the frustrations of aging. Betty also said, "As long as I'm alive, I've got to do things." Again, be like Betty.

Yes, aging has its challenges, but you have your own experience to overcome and even maximize those challenges to be consistent with your own life vision. So, what's your new normal? To a large degree, as we said at the beginning, it's dependent on what you want it to be. Betty and my friends mentioned above could all be sitting around complaining about how good times used to be and how things used to be much better. Instead, they decided to set world records, solve world problems in medicine, manufacturing, and environmental cleanup, help young people get their businesses started, and pursue so many other positive, world-changing endeavors. They're no different than you and me. They just decided to make those things a priority in their lives.

It isn't the result that's significant, although that's a fantastic bonus. What really matters is that they continue to pursue something that was important to them, something that was the focus of their passion, and to bring something good into the world. There's no expiration date on being amazing. You can continue to do it for as long as it matters to you.

So write your own life script. Make sure it's the life you want to live, and then just live it to the fullest. Life throws challenges at us all the time, but we also have all the power of life inside each and every one of us. Have faith in your own power. Believe in your own abilities. And don't be put off by the naysayers. You're free to choose a life path consistent with your vision and to live it as you want. We've been through many changes in our lives, with many new normals, and they all quickly became normal because we allowed them to. Enjoy the best years of your life, because every year can be a great year. And that can be your new normal.

That's it for this week. As a reminder, we have the five pillars of life and aging, a short free course that explains how our lives are shaped by the five major influences we talked about: identity, mind, body, curiosity, and contribution. It's actually kind of interesting when you read through the whole thing. It has a lot of relevance to us throughout our whole lives, but especially as we age, so I'd encourage you to check it out and take a read through. If you have any questions, give me a ring and I'll be happy to talk them over with you.

As always, remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. And remember UKR7.com. That's a link to a place that helps the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org, that's World Central Kitchen. Those are both international sites. But there are lots of opportunities around you, too. Local charities can always use your help. And even something as simple as a smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, hit that like button, and send me a message. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.