457: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World with Bruce Feiler

[INTRODUCTION]

Casey Weade: Hey, I am Casey Weade and it is my mission to deliver clarity and purpose and elevate meaning in your life. And if you're new to the show, I want you to know exactly how we accomplish that. We don't just talk about those boring financial concepts here on the podcast, IRAs, 401(k)s, tax diversification. Now, we do hit on a lot of those important topics, but we also like to take a look at the non-financial aspects of life and retirement and integrate those two pinnacle elements of our lives. And we do that through conversations with world-class guests as well as getting together with you in short form every single week on Fridays to discuss trending topics.

Today, we are welcoming a guest back to the show. We have Bruce Feiler here with us, and he is the author of seven New York Times best-selling books. That's right, seven New York Times bestsellers. He is also the speaker for three TED Talks viewed more than 4 million times. He teaches the Webby Award-winning TED course How to Master Life's Transitions, which were discussed quite at length during our last conversation. He is also a longtime columnist for The New York Times and back in Episode number 267, that was three years ago, we discussed how to navigate life transitions and master change at any age, one of our most downloaded podcast episodes.

I encourage you to go back, check out that conversation where we explored strategies for growing through periods of upheaval and unrest to live an intentional, happy life. Now, three years later, I'm ecstatic to have Bruce return to discuss his most recent book, The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. We're going to explore what it means to pursue meaningful work, how to navigate a workquake. Last time we talked about lifequakes. Now, we're going to be talking about workquakes and what it means to do a meaning audit. I'm really excited to get to that. So, we're going to be walking through the meaning audit process here later in the show. If you want to get a free copy of The Search, we partnered up with Bruce to give that away to our listeners who are gracious enough to give us an honest rating and review over on iTunes.

So, go on over on iTunes, get in your podcast app, write us a quick review, and then all you have to do is shoot us a text with your iTunes username, and we will verify that username with your review. We'll send you out a free copy of the book at no cost. The number to text, you text the word 'BOOK' to 888-599-4491 or you can just check out the show notes and you'll be able to follow the process there.

[INTERVIEW]

Casey Weade: Bruce, welcome back to the show.

Bruce Feiler: My pleasure, Casey. As I just said to you before we came on the air, so to speak, that's what you do in podcasts anymore, but that so many times in the last few years people said to me, they heard our last conversation, Episode 267. What number are we now? I want to know how many episodes you've done between that and now.

Casey Weade: That's a good question. I think we're mid-400s right now.

Bruce Feiler: Wow. Okay. See you at 642.

Casey Weade: Yes. No, I know you're going to continue to put out some amazing content that can really elevate the lives of people around the world, as you already have. And I have so many people come to me as well saying that you were one of their favorite guests. So, that's why we wanted to bring you back on the show. And I think a lot of what drives all of us, and apparently what drives you and created a lot of the passion that you have around end of life and through workquakes and lifequakes comes out of your own personal experience. And one of those personal experiences I want to talk about off the top was your childhood and your experience with your grandfather.

And you'd shared that at a young age, you worked alongside him prior to him taking his life. And I just wanted to ask how you viewed this and the impact that it made and the direction that you have taken in your life.

Bruce Feiler: So, you mentioned in your kind introduction that a lot of my work is about narrative and that we have stories that we tell ourselves. And one of the things that we've learned in recent years is that story that's going on in your head, where you came from, who you are, what's important to you, where you want to go, kind of all of the stories that shape all of our actions, like those stories, they aren't just part of you, they are you in a fundamental way. And so, a lot of the sort of the big idea in life is in the transition to the prior book and sort of the beginning of this work I've done on life narrative is what happens when you lose the plot in that story, right?

When something happens to you and there's this big interruption, what I call a lifequake that happened, how do you sort of adjust your story, add a new chapter to story, and then keep going in your story? And we know a lot about story. This conversation has been going on a while now. But if there's one area of human life where we also have a story like this that we don't talk about that, that we don't talk about enough, and that is your work story, like the story of what is your relationship to money? What is your relationship to work? What is your relationship to how you want to spend your time? And I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, three, five generations, actually, of Georgians.

And I also grew up in a multigenerational family like my grandfather was born in Mississippi. I moved to Georgia, became a lawyer, was kind of one of those scrappy people who took every client that he could get, right? And then my father left, went to the University of Pennsylvania, was sort of summoned back home to come into this business, and sort of in a way that was difficult for my mother, who had been born in Baltimore and moved back to Georgia. But when I was nine, I was summoned to a family ritual. Kind of awakened on a Saturday morning, dressed like in those days, like what was my work outfit. It was baby blue corduroys, right, and like in a button down shirt, walked out the door where we grew up to my grandparents' house, which is right behind.

My grandmother made this breakfast. It was like a scrambled egg, these hand-cut French fries that I can still taste to this day, 50 years later, and one Krispy Kreme donut. She kept them frozen in the freezer, and she would zap them in the, the microwaves were brand new at that time, for like 12 seconds or whatever it was. And then we would get in my grandfather's Ford and he would drive like six miles an hour. It was like so painful. And he would tell these stories about when he was growing up, about the first time he was ever in air conditioning, the first time he was ever in a plane, the first time he was ever in the car. And then we would go to the family office and I would take rent from our renters. My family built low-income housing and like $16, $18, right?

And it was like, "Look him in the eye, sort of ask about their families, shake their hand firmly". Well, my grandfather would stand over and sort of brag about my grades and penmanship. And then at exactly noon, we would get back in the car and go home. And like sort of the lesson in those Saturday mornings was that, like, the most important thing in life is work, right? Not family, not faith, not love, work. And work in a sort of old-fashioned sense of like industriousness and masculinity, right? It was all about these big, hard things, right, planes and railroads and automobiles and air conditions. And I didn't want to tell that kind of story. I wanted to tell a different kind of story.

In fact, in that same office, my father would collect all of my, you know, sort of my artwork and every poem I ever worked and wrote. And I had this tension between sort of the life I was expected to live and the life that I wanted to live. And this turned out to be something that a lot of people experience. And then quite literally, a month before I graduated from college, I got this chilling warning. My grandfather, who had just been diagnosed with an illness, took a pistol and shot himself. And it was as if he said, "If I cannot work, I cannot live." And like to me was this message but like I wanted to go out and tell my own story and that's really what's driven me all of these years.

And I think that fast forward, if you will, 50 years to when I started this project of talking to people about their stories and it turns out that so many people have the struggle within them, between the story that they think that they should tell and the story that they want to tell. And I think a lot of the work I've done about work now in the last few years is about get off the should train and get on the want train. And the challenge, and you mentioned something about the meaning audit, which we'll get to eventually in this conversation, the challenge is we are not trained to identify the want train. We are trained to identify the should train. What we should do and it's very, very hard for people to say, "This is the story that I want to tell."

Casey Weade: When you think about the rapidly increasing rates of suicide in those over the age of 60, 65 stepping into retirement, I mean, I believe and I don't have the exact statistics in front of me but I believe the highest rate of suicide is individuals that are maybe plus 70, plus 75. Do you feel that that is because of that work story and because they are still shoulding on themselves, if you will, rather than following that want train?

Bruce Feiler: Well, I think if you look, and good for you, by the way, for going to these pain points, if you look at something like suicide, let's look at where the growth has been. So, the growth is in older people, the growth is in males, the growth is in service members, and the growth is in teenagers, right? So, those are the vulnerable. So, what do all of those groups have in common? The answer is these are vulnerable times in people's lives. So, in the case of say people 65 plus, it's, "Okay. I've built my life around certain metrics of meaning if you will and now I don't have that." Maybe it's work, maybe it's family, whatever it might be, service members going off to war, experiencing trauma, coming back and not being able to talk about it.

Men, because there's sort of lots of different issues around that with men losing power and women having more influence in the culture. Teenagers, whether adolescence is challenging, social media is challenging. The point is when, I now have this twice, right? My grandfather had these issues. My father, as you'll recall from Transitions, that book opens with my father trying to take his life. So, I've had generations now of people who have these issues. But a lot of it is and I remember the first time my father tried to take his own life and he did not succeed, I remember what the professionals told us was he can't adjust his story. He can't get out of his own head. And so, fundamentally, there's a lot of things at work, chemicals on these kinds of things, but on some core level, it's fundamentally a narrative event, a rupture in an existing narrative that you can't adjust.

Casey Weade: And these adjustments, I think you have to be focusing on that right time in order to be able to actually make these psychological adjustments. And I think that's the time that you're focusing on in the book, The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World. You're talking about that big transition, which probably is defined as a workquake that transitioned into retirement versus let's wait until we're 70 or 75. Now, we're going through these issues. Now, let's try to fix them. You're really helping people get ahead of those issues by doing this work.

Now, when you talk about a post-career world, just thinking about that title, Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World, I think for a lot of individuals, they go, "Well, shouldn't that be easier? I mean, I've been spending my whole life working for the man or I've been working to please a boss. I've been told that this is what I have to do every day. Whether I find it meaningful or not, it's a means to an end." Now that you've actually reached this point where you no longer have to work in that career, now you can make a transition, and it should be easier to find more meaningful work in a post-career world.

Bruce Feiler: Well, I think that Let's talk about what post-career means in this context. So, yes, so let's just go back and reset the stage here. So, what my work has been now, inspired, in the case of my first book by my father and in some ways in the second book by my grandfather, what my work has been is, okay, there are these problems that I feel that everybody feels, how can I learn to help people with these problems? And the way that I and the kind of the essence of what I do is I go out and I collect stories.

So, now in the last eight, is it, where are we now... Seven years that I've been doing this, I've collected and analyzed 500 life stories of everyday Americans of all ages, all walks of life, all backgrounds, all work lives, all 50 states, and I collect these interviews. They're long, they're deep, they're emotional. Pretty much one or both of us cries in every conversation. And then I code them and I look for patterns. That's what led to Life Is in the Transitions. And that's what led to The Search. and what. What I have found when I turned to work is that there are these external truths, I call them lies, that we have been told, and they are breaking down. And the first is that you have a career. So, the first thing to say about post-career is it applies two different ways.

A- It applies, you know, sort of in the way in your day-to-day work, so to speak, of what do you do after your career. But this also applies to people in the middle of their lives to realize that the idea of the career is an artificial construct that basically doesn't apply to that many people anymore. So, what am I talking about? So, for most of human history, there was no idea of the career. Most people lived where they worked and they worked where they lived. It took 90% of the people, 90% of the time just to make the food to survive. And everybody did everything. They tended the crops. They made the candles. They cared for the sick. They did everything. The idea of a job and the way we use it today, which we think about as a basic human thing, is only about 200 years old.

It's only since the Industrial Revolution that people left their home and went to a job. And what happened was, I mean, I was on TV recently and somebody asked me, they said, "Oh! 5,000 people last month lost their jobs to AI. Can you believe it? It's going to transform society." My response, and I said this on live television was, "Do you know how many people lost their jobs in the industrial revolution? Answer: A third of the country. People left farms and they went to cities." And so, suddenly you had all these people in cities needing work. And then plus there was all these new types of work because there was all these new kinds of industries.

So, in 1908, a guy named Frank Parsons in Boston, Massachusetts opens the first career counseling center. And he more or less invents the word 'career.' The word 'career' is a Latin word. It means going around in circles like what chariots used to do. And so, suddenly, within like years, every high school in the country has a career placement center. And what was the idea of the career as it was 120 years ago? It was once in your life if you're a male, you go to an office, they ask you a bunch of questions, they put a list of jobs in front of you, and they give you a career. And it's only once. And if you wanted to change your career, change your work, change your life, you were like a sociopath. They really, like, they said it was a mental weakness in you.

So, this is the idea. It's only 100. And it turns out that that idea is a historical anomaly. So, 50 years later, the idea of job jumping comes along. And so, there's another new invention that everybody thinks has been around forever, which is the resume. The resume is only 60 years old. And because nobody changed jobs before because there were no jobs, and then people only had one job. So, our external narrative of work changes and the change we need to do now is give up the idea that you have a career that once in your life, you pick something. And look at the way we've talked about it, Casey. Okay. The career track, the career ladder, up by your bootstraps, rags to riches, these are all linear concepts.

You get on the bottom of the escalator, you get off at the top of the escalator. It's all about climbing. Bigger office, higher floor, greater salary, more benefits. Those are all linear constructs. That is B.S. That is not how we live now. The average person will have 20 workquakes in the course of their lives, 20 moments or times or experiences in their life where they're like, "Do I want to stay in this job? Do I want to leave this job?" And you can leave any job at any time for any reason you want even as simple as you just want to. And I would say the signature piece of data in this entire project I've been doing now around work, 20 workquakes in the course of their lives, half of them, half, 55%, begin outside of work.

So, a workquake that begins in work is, "I don't like my boss," or, "I want a raise," right? Or I want to, you know, "I want to quit and go do something else." But a non-work workquake is something happens with my health, something happens with my family. I want to go spend time with my children. I want to go start a nonprofit. I want to go run for public office. I want to go, you know, give back to my community. More than half begin outside of the work and that's the change. I mean, think of all the women that we know, in particular, who were told, "Once you get up the escalator, you can never get back on. You want to go spend time with your children. You'll never have a career again."

Like, few things have caused more social harm in the history of the world than that. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and that's what it means to have a post-career world, is the narrative begins inside of you. It doesn't begin in some textbook that says you have to have a career.

Casey Weade: Now, so two out of three of these lies about work are you have a career, you have a job. And I'm asking for myself here, if I don't have a career and I don't have a job, then what do I have?

Bruce Feiler: Well, what is your job, Casey?

Casey Weade: CEO.

Bruce Feiler: Okay. Of what? A business, right? What the heck are we doing right now?

Casey Weade: Podcasting, conversating?

Bruce Feiler: Okay. Do you have a family? It's not that you don't have a job, which you don't because you have multiple jobs. The average person has up to five jobs. One is what we might call a main job. And frankly, if you look at the data now, fewer than half of us have a main job anymore. Fewer than half of us have what might be called the main job. The second is you might have a side job. Well, we know what a side job is. But you also might have a care job, like caring for children or aging relatives. 8 in 10 of us have what I call a hope job, which is something that you're doing often for free that you hope leads to something else, like writing a screenplay, selling pickles at the farmer's market, starting a podcast.

And then nine in ten of us have what I call a ghost job, which is something I just kept hearing it in my conversations and so I named it. A ghost job is something you do that occupies a lot of mental space that feels like a job. It could be sobriety, right? It could be an imposter syndrome. It could be mental health, something that you do up to ten hours a week when I crunch the numbers that feels like a job to you, microaggressions at work, whatever it might be, self-doubt. So, it's that we have multiple jobs because here's why this matters. Why this matter is what's non-negotiable anymore is people want to have a life with meaning. And you mentioned earlier, right, that people 65 plus, people "retiring" sometimes find it hard to identify what will give them meaning in this time of life. What's interesting is the gap.

People under 40 have the opposite situation. They are committed to meaning. They're just not buying into the external narrative. So, there's a kind of tension between the 65 plus worker and the 40 minus worker.

Casey Weade: 65 plus is going, "I don't have meaning because I don't have a job. I don't have a career."

Bruce Feiler: Yes.

Casey Weade: And the person that's 25 is saying, "I don't have meaning because I have a job. I have a career."

Bruce Feiler: Right. Exactly. That's so well put because what they're, and you know what the 65-year-old, you know what the parents are saying to the parents of the millennials and Gen Z, I'm a parent of Gen Z-ers is, "Whoa. Hold on. What do you mean you're moving in together and you're not married?" or like, "What do you mean you're having a baby and you haven't committed?" or, "What do you mean you're quitting your job and you don't know what you're doing next? Are you out of your mind?" Like, "What do you mean you're moving to a city and you don't know what you're going to do when you get there?" And they're saying, "I want to do this and I'll figure the work thing out," because that brings us back to the multiple jobs.

There's multiple ways of making income. Let's just take a practical example that maybe people in your audience, like maybe you have a main job that you do for benefits, right? Salary and benefits. Maybe you have commitments, family, and you do that main job but you don't get the meaning out of it. Then you go to your assigned job or your home job, and that's what you're doing for meaning or for purpose. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you've decided to leave your "safe job" or "main job" to go start something new, but maybe you need some extra dollars until you do the job.

I talked to a guy who was born Sung Kim. He was a first-generation Korean-American. He grew up sharing a bathroom with two sisters in a tiny apartment in Queens but he had the expected immigrant mentality and narrative. So, he goes to law school. He has no interest in law school. He goes to law school. He succeeds. He gets a job at Goldman Sachs like about as an elite job as you can get but he's not getting meaning and fulfillment from this. So, what is his passion? His passion is, "I'm living in that tiny apartment, sharing a bathroom with my sisters. I'm interested in home renovation and in design."

So, he starts on the side what I call a hope job, right? He starts redesigning the bedrooms and bathrooms of his friends. He starts this whole job, and he gets to a point. He says, "Okay. You know what? I'm going to jump. I'm going to jump. I'm going to start my own design firm. I'm going to break the narrative, the immigrant expected ideal work model job." And he goes and he starts a new business. But of course, he doesn't have enough clients at the beginning. So, what does he do? He takes some law clients on the side to pay the bills while the other thing is getting started. That is a way. Once you break the idea that you have a career, break the idea that you have only one job, you use the different jobs to help you get what is non-negotiable, which is the narrative of I'm doing work that's meaningful and that's fulfilling to me.

Casey Weade: Just to get more clarity around what a work story really is, when you think about the Work Story Project, you interviewed 155 people from all walks of life. They all had one thing in common. They all loved what they did. What is a work story that is maybe most prominent or one of those work stories that really stands out to you?

Bruce Feiler: So, we could sit here and talk about stories all the time. Let me just do two that just came to mind when you say that. Let me talk the story about Tim Pierpont. So, Tim Pierpont was born in Connecticut. He is adopted by a family of, again, kind of who have conventional lives and conventional expectations. And he does okay in school but he really likes working with his hands, built a shop in the basement of his parents' house, starts working with his hands up. Only thing he's interested in doing in the summer is he paints. And so, he starts a job where he paints picket fences in Connecticut, whatever. It's like Tom Sawyer. I can't remember what he got, like, 50 cents a picket or whatever it was.

And his parents keep saying to him, "If only you applied yourself, Tim, like you did with this job, you would be very successful." He goes to college, gets a degree in mechanical engineering because he likes working with his hands. He builds lights and he drifts. He can't find a job that he worked. Follows a girl to California. He's working in a ski shop. Somebody comes in, says, "Oh, you like working with your hands? You should go to my husband." He gets a job at a bank, and he spends 25 years working at a bank in the real estate. Like, when new businesses set up, you got to have someone to build out the space. This is what he does.

One day, his boss says to the guy who sits next to him, "You don't look very good. Go home." The guy goes home. Six months later, he's dead. And Tim Pierpont says, "I don't want to be that guy who's sitting in a job I don't like for 25 years. What do I want to do?" And then he does, we'll get to this in a bit, but he does what I call a meaning audit. And he doesn't know the term that I later called. He goes and he sits in a Starbucks and he writes down, "What are the five things that if I could be doing right now would make me happy? Working outdoors, control my own hours, working with my hands," whatever else. And he looks at the list and he says, "You know what all those things have in common?"

He starts a painting company, in which he paints houses and which he gets people to work for them. He gives them good benefits and he builds a painting company. And we talked about tension, the tension between the external narrative and the internal narrative. This is what he wants to do. But he's in a neighborhood where everybody has fancy cars and has Lexuses and Teslas and things like this. He's like, "I have to move from this neighborhood because I'm the only guy whose car parked in front of the house has painting on the side of it," because he's got a little van that runs his painting company. So, he's in tension with the external narrative but he's fulfilling his internal narrative. That's what we're talking about.

Another quick example is a woman named Robin Arzon. She's half Cuban and half Jewish. She grows up in Philadelphia. Her father's a law professor. She sits on his books and studies. She goes to law school. She becomes a corporate lawyer in New York City. One day, she's... But she likes to go out a lot. She's very social. When she's in a bar in lower Manhattan, a guy comes in, takes a sword, puts it on her neck, and holds the whole bar hostage. She has complete trauma. And what does she do to get the trauma out? She starts to exercise and to run. And so, she becomes a super marathon runner. And she's got this passion for sports and exercise and fitness, and she's got this corporate job, and she realizes the two are in conflict.

And the partners call her in and said, "If you want to make partner, you're going to have to give up this fitness thing." And she says, basically, "Screw that. I'd rather do this." So, she spends a year. Every morning, she spends ten minutes in her calendar and she calls around, "How do I get in the fitness space? How do I become an influencer? How do I help people inspire their fitness goals?" And then within a year, she quit her job. She goes to the London Olympics. She meets some people. She comes back. She starts an early blog on this. And then one day she reads about a guy starting a new company called Peloton of Online Fitness. She's the first person hired at Peloton. She becomes vice president.

And when Peloton explodes during the pandemic, she's got a million followers on social media. She's now got her own TV platform and she's a fitness guru because she committed to her personal narrative, not to the external narrative she wanted to build.

Casey Weade: You know, when you look at all of those different individuals, is this the source of the meaning audit? Is this the common thread that you saw a lot of these individuals going through that you're able to discern and create somewhat of a formula out of?

Bruce Feiler: Yes. I think that the essence of it is we are told, we are raised, we are bred. It's in the movies that we watch and the books that we read and the media that we follow that you're supposed to follow this thing that work is supposed to be miserable. What's the most influential story of work ever created? It's Adam and Eve, right? When Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, their punishment is that they have to work. And like that's what we've all internalized. Like, if you look at Latin and Greek, like work means miserable, like miserable obligation. Work is supposed to be unpleasant. That's why we call it work. That's what people say, right?

So, that is the change that's happening is that we people now have the opportunity to make their own work story. They have the opportunity to follow their passion. But no one is teaching you how to do it. So, the question is, when you are in one of these workquakes and you are at this moment where you're rethinking or reimagining, either because you're 27 and you're looking for what you want to do, or 37 and you're about to have kids, or in my case, 57 sending two kids to college. And it might be, by the way, that where you are in your life is you might, "You know, I need to make money because I want to buy a house," or in my case, send two kids to college.

Or it might be that I've made money for 25 years, and I want to do something that will make me happy. Or it might be I've been caring for aging relatives or children, and I want to give back to the community, right? Whatever it might be, the challenge that people have is they don't know what to do. So, what I'm referring to as a meaning audit, right, I also call it personal archeology, is the process of doing the internal excavation to identify what you really want to do because what you really want to do, Casey, is different from what I really want to do, what's different from she wants to do, what's different from they want to do. That's the point. We've just established that, in general, the 65-plus people never did this and the 27-year-old may be doing it every three weeks.

So, maybe we need some sort of balance here. But the point is, what do you do when you're in that situation where you say, "I want to do something that makes me happy and fulfills my purpose"? Well, the only way to do that is to decide what the hell your purpose is.

Casey Weade: Yeah. And let's walk through that. I've been through this process. I did it actually right before we got on the air and took the questions and filled things out. Actually, now I look back on it, I skipped maybe the first two kind of focused on Ascend. Maybe I should have started with Immerse, Reflect. So, walk us through these three steps: Immerse, Reflect, Ascend. And then let's take a little bit of a deeper dive, especially into Reflect and Ascend, some of these ABCs, and the six questions.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah. So, the essence of what the book, The Search, is about, I also have a TED Talk on this called Five Questions to Help You Find Work You Love. And so, yeah, the essence of it is, yes, any story has a past, a present, and a future, right? So, the essence of it is there's kind of three things to do. Go back to the past and figure out what are the earliest influences you have. That's why you began by talking about my grandfather. Like, early on, I knew I had this tension between the life I should lead and the life I wanted to lead. And another way of doing that was the sort of expected, industrial, the sort of tick-the-box kinds of jobs versus the risky or creative more kind of non-linear work that I've ended up pursuing.

So, I knew that very early on. And a lot of these things, a lot of these questions that people ask that I've sort of codified in the search are sort of helping people. You ask the questions that you instinctually are already asking. And a lot of it is to go back to the very beginning. So, let's just take the first of the six questions like who is your who? Like, who are the people? So, let me ask you the question. Who were the earliest people in your life that shaped your understanding of work?

Casey Weade: My grandfathers as well as my father.

Bruce Feiler: So, tell me, pick me a grandfather and what did you learn from him?

Casey Weade: Yeah. Well, I learned two very different things from both my grandfathers. One that retired and worked very hard but then ended up sitting on the couch and living a relatively short life in retirement, definitely lacked that purpose but learned hard work, right, learned hard work. And dad was one that made a lot of sacrifices as well and always pursued his dreams and knew he could achieve whatever he wanted if he applied himself. And also retired early, unhappily. And then my other grandfather was someone that worked until his mid-90s and really helped people achieve their dreams. And he seemed to be the happiest of all of those individuals throughout his life.

Bruce Feiler: Okay. So, as someone who listens to these stories every day, here's what I heard in what you just said. First of all, with the first grandfather, first of all, it's interesting when I said to you who, you said grandfathers and fathers. You started with the grandfather. So, that's right there a tell. The first thing you said about the first grandfather was the word retire. Okay. And you basically said he retired and didn't know what to do. And then the first thing you said about the second grandfather was he lived to whatever the age.

Casey Weade: Mid 90s. Worked until his mid-90s.

Bruce Feiler: Mid 90s and had a smile on his face, right? So, what you've set up right away is for you the most influential people are the older people, okay, not the immediate parent or peers, which a lot of people mentioned, or sports stars or whoever they would mention. Older people not knowing what they do want. So, that's the tension that you created. So, we are 24 seconds into this and we already can understand just in you, what is it that's driving you. I talked to a guy named Mark Savickas, who's the dean of modern career counseling. And the essence of modern career counseling is what they call narrative career construction, right? This idea that you have a story and that the purpose of the therapy, if you will, is to help you identify the story.

And he said, "What we just have right here in front of us, which is that within five minutes of meeting somebody, I know the answer, but it's not my job to tell them the answer. It's my job to help them discover the answer." So, we're 24 seconds into this, and we have the answer in front of us that you're interested in longevity, that you're interested in the tension between not knowing what to do and knowing what to do. Now, one of the practical day-to-day necessities of how to achieve that is to give people the financial freedom, right? And we've established already in this conversation that that's your day job, giving people the tools and mechanisms to create the opportunity.

But we've also established in this conversation that your side job or your hope job or whatever you're calling it, this podcast, is focused on the second. In fact, the first thing you said in this podcast conversation was, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about 401(k)s and we talk about IRAs and we talk about tax brackets and whatever, but we're really here to do this," okay, which is your way of saying, "Yeah, we're going to acknowledge the issues that affected my first grandfather, but we're also going to acknowledge the issues that animated my second grandfather." So, the point is, now I do this a lot, but the point is you can find in the stories the straight lines between the story and what you do.

Now, you would also, I'm venturing to say this, but I feel qualified to say this. You're also somebody who likes what they do. Now imagine somebody who has this story in the back of their head that they want to help people with longevity and resolve the tension between being unhappy in retirement and being happy in retirement, right, who's I don't know, whatever that they're working as a welder, that they're working to sell cars or whatever it is for whom there is a gap between the story they're telling and the work that they're actually doing. And one of the great benefits of you don't have a job is there's multiple ways to advance the purpose even necessarily without quitting your job. I'm turning to page 164 of The Search.

And so, I asked people, everyone I talked to in these conversations, "What's the number one upside of work you learned from your parents?" Top three answers, exactly what you just said. Number one, hard work. Two-thirds of people said that the number one value they learned from their parents is the value of hard work, followed by number two, love what you do, and number three, be true to yourself. But those range like 17%, 16%.

Casey Weade: I didn't get the last two.

Bruce Feiler: So, number one upsides, hard work. Oh, you didn't get the last two. Exactly. Right. Exactly. By the way, most people, that's 16%.

Casey Weade: Not from the parents.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah. Not from your parents. So, I started out, okay, so this is what I do all day is I talk to people like I'm doing most of the talking here but usually I'm doing most of the listening. And I asked everyone this question. Everyone said the same thing, hard work. And I was like I'm not asking the right question. So, then I started asking people, "What's the number one downside of work you learn for your parents?" Let me ask you. You said the number one upside and you just hinted at the answer but what's the number one downside of work that you learned from your parents?

Casey Weade: Lack of quality time where it really matters.

Bruce Feiler: Okay. So, here are the top three answers for the number one downside of work you learned from your parents, all basically around a third. So, the hard work is two-thirds. With the downsides of work, they're all more or less the same thing. Number one, overwork. They work too hard. Number two, strain on the family. Number three, unhappiness. There's...

Casey Weade: I get all three there. I summed up all three.

Bruce Feiler: There is modern work and a second. Let's put these two things on the screen. Number one upside you learned from your parents, the value of hard work. Fact. Number one downsides, overwork, strain on the family, unhappiness. Yeah. People are still prepared to work hard. This gobbledygook you hear like, "Oh, young people don't want to work," that's crazy. That's not true. But they're not prepared to overwork, put a strain on their families, and be unhappy. You know, long before I met you, Casey, I spent, you know, a fair bit of my life is, I don't know we've ever talked about this part of my life, where in my early 40s when I had three-year-old identical twins, I got a life-threatening cancer.

I asked a group of men around me to form a council of dads for my daughters in case I died. And so, I have been a very big vocal father out there talking about men and how men are changing. And one of the biggest changes is the rise. There have been two big changes in work that sort of related with this. Number one is women working outside the home. It's now up to 77% of women work outside the home. But the other, that has a parallel change that we don't talk a lot about, which is men being much more involved in parenting. And men in their 50s did more fathering than men in their 60s, men in their 40s more than their 50s, men in the 30s more than... Every generation of men is devoting more time to fatherhood. And that's an enormous change, right?

I mean, I remember I told you at the beginning of this conversation that someone said, you know, people said to me, they heard me on your podcast. I was invited to a family wealth event in the Dakotas a few months ago, and I spent a couple of days giving a bunch of different talks. And one of the things I talked about in this conversation was like the sort of patriarchs of multi-generational families often have this idea that, "Oh, the kids don't work so hard." Well, I'm sorry but when you were working so hard building your company, you probably had a spouse who was staying home doing the parenting, whereas young men today don't have that, okay? Their spouses are working and they want to be involved in parenting.

So, the rules are entirely different. So, the point is the circumstances change but this is the tension. Younger people want to work hard but not at the expense of giving up meaning. And that's what's changing things and they are prepared to break the model, walk away from jobs. A third of the workforce quits every year, Casey, and another third is saying, "I don't want to commute so far. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to sit in a train or sit in traffic. I want to work part-time from home." These are massive changes that are affecting the workplace.

Casey Weade: I want to make sure we talk about identity a little bit before we bring it to a close because I know so many of the families that we work with, that's their biggest challenge as they make this transition into retirement has to do with this sense of a loss of identity. And in your meaning audit, you talk about identity and really what identity really is. And I think this loss of identity that we feel when we step away from work, we step into retirement, it has to do with the way that we define identity for ourselves and what identity really means. So, I believe we can get there if you can help us define what identity is, which is the ABCs of meaning here. If we can understand those ABCs of meaning, maybe we can safeguard ourselves against this sense of loss of identity as we step into retirement.

Bruce Feiler: Yeah, I think that. So, I think that that's a beautifully put point and I think that there are different words for it, identity, purpose, meaning. It's all the same thing. I mean, and the way I would define this topic is as follows: that if you go back 100 years ago, most of the ways we define identity, meaning, purpose were given to us. Most people had to do what their parents wanted them to do, believe what their parents wanted them to believe, love who their parents wanted them to love, live where their parents wanted them to live. All of these big questions in human life were forced on us by the external world. And if you fast forward and cut to today, that doesn't apply anymore.

You can live where you want to live. You can love who you want to love. You can do what you want to do. You can believe what you want to believe. And particularly for people who are sort of outside the mainstream or outside the majority, so for minorities, for women, for people who have maybe LGBTQ or whatever it is, this is an enormous change that gives people opportunity. If you want to use the Oprah phrase, you know, like to live your own truth but to write your own story, whatever frame you want to use. But it's hard because no one tells us what to do because we get sort of writer's block writing the story of our lives. And so, what I've learned is that to take this very complex topic and to simplify it, we have three sources of meaning.

I call them the ABCs of meaning. The A is agency. That's your work. That's what you do, what you build, what you create, what you make. It's the things that you can control in the world. That's your A. Your B is belonging. That's love, relationships, friendships, coworkers, coreligionists, people you play on the tennis team with, people you march in rallies with. That's B. That's your belonging. And the C is your cause, your calling, your purpose, something higher than yourself. In sort of narrative terms, I think of it as your me story. That's your A. Your we story, that's your B, your belonging, and your the story. Okay. That's your sense of cause. So, what I've learned, Casey, is that each of us has all three. So, me for example, I'm an ABC, okay?

I'm a writer. I'm a creator. I'm very agentic. I'm a super involved family member and dad. So, I'm probably, cause, less important to me. I'm probably 50/40/10. Okay. Maybe 40/40/20 if I were to define myself. My wife is a CAB, so she's an entrepreneur. She started an organization called Endeavor that supports high-impact entrepreneurs in 50 countries around the world. And so, she's cause-oriented then she's very agentic. She's a founder and CEO. Belonging, you know, like outside her family like she doesn't have that many friends. So, she's a CAB. So, let me just first ask you, what is your order and how would you allot the percentages?

Casey Weade: It's really tough because I feel like you could say, "Well, so what? Your family's not that important because you're a CAB?" I think that's where it becomes a little internal. The tension rises, right?

Bruce Feiler: So, where I worked it out internally, my family is outside of her family. So, relationships are less important to her.

Casey Weade: Yeah. No, I would probably say that that is true. I would probably put it as a CB.

Bruce Feiler: Got it. Okay. So, here's the thing. In a workquake, in a lifequake, we adjust the percentages. So, let's take your retirement example. Maybe you've been an A your whole life. Maybe you've been working and suddenly you retire and you want to devote more time to B or devote more time to C. Maybe in retirement, you were a primary caretaker. Maybe you were devoting much of your energy to your children, or maybe to have aging parents, and maybe the children have flown the coop and maybe the parents are no longer living. And so, you're like, "You know what? I want to do something for myself now. I'm thinking of a couple right now who will go unnamed in this conversation, but they're friends of mine.

He spent 40 years building a business. He's just sold the business, okay, and he's now ready. He wants to travel with his wife, enjoy themselves, and give back. Well, she spent all this time focusing on their children, and now she has more time and she wants to work. And he's like, "I'm in exactly the moment that I want to travel and she's exactly the moment where she needs to stay home because she's teaching what she's teaching and volunteering in a way that she's volunteering in ways that commit her to home." It's a fascinating thing because it gets at the truth, which is in workquakes, in lifequakes, we adjust the ABCs to find the meaning that we crave.

And this is really what's gone through this whole conversation. Maybe not both conversations, Episode 267 or whatever we are now, which is we are all involved in writing the story of our lives. And what is a story? What is the story? It's like you think it's a simple question. There's a lot of people who study the hell out of this and they don't really know. But we know that the story is two things that are connected over time, right? So, a snowball is not a story. A bloody nose is not a story. A snowball and a bloody nose, now that's a story. Like, what happened with the snowball and the bloody nose? I'll give you another example. It snowed last night. It didn't because we're taping this conversation in late summer.

But it snowed last night, I came downstairs, I put on my jacket, I opened the door, and what did I see? When I say that, I'm telling the story and your mind is finishing that story. So, what do you think I see? It snowed last night, I come down, I put my jacket, I open the door. What do I see? What do you think I see?

Casey Weade: A street covered in snow, snow plows driving by, Christmas lights.

Bruce Feiler: So, let me then tell you the story. It snowed last night. I come downstairs. I put on my jacket to open the door. What do I see? A giant pile of donuts. So, what is that? That's something that disrupts the story. That's something shocking. So, first of all, you're going to pay more attention. Like, why is there donuts? What are you going to do with the donuts? Okay. The pile of donuts in this case, it's the lifequake. It's the workquake. It's the thing that disrupts the normal story. So, now the question is, what am I going to do? Am I going to take my jacket off, go inside, and say, "Forget it"? Am I going to push? Am I in a hurry? And I got to get someplace. I'm going to push the donuts aside and going or am I going to start eating the donuts?

Or am I going to pack up the donuts and give them away to people who need donuts? I don't know, but that's what it is. And the answer to what I'm going to do with my pile of donuts is what value matters most to me in the story. What meaning? The story does not have meaning. You have to give this story meaning. Your life story does not have meaning. You have to give it the meaning. And that's what we're talking about. And in order to do that, you have to decide what means the most to you, which is why these questions are designed to help you do that, so that you can write the story in which you are the hero of your own story. Not your father. Not even your grandfather, Casey. Your grandfather shaped the story, but you are writing the story. That's the big change, that's the opportunity, and that's what we're here to help people to do.

Casey Weade: That's beautiful. And that's what an opportunity that this generation of retirees has. You have the means. You have the time freedom to really write that story that's going to elevate the most meaning in your life and make the biggest impact in the lives of others. You know, Bruce, I know we have to bring things to a close. I wish we didn't because there's so much more I want to talk to you about but I'm sure this won't be our last conversation. I want to thank you for joining us, Bruce. It's been an absolute pleasure. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into some of Bruce's work, we really just scratched the surface today. I would highly recommend this book for anyone that's in that search, which is almost all of us.

And so, to get a free copy of the book, just write an honest rating and review over on iTunes. Then shoot us a text with the word 'BOOK' to 888-599-4491. We'll send you a link to verify your iTunes username, send you the book for free. It's that easy. Bruce, thanks again. It's been a true pleasure.

Bruce Feiler: My pleasure, Casey. We'll get to this, everybody.

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