There is a book I love, have quoted, recommended, and talked about here plenty. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by a palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware. She spent years sitting with people in the last weeks of their lives, and she wrote down what they told her in those last weeks and days.

The list is short.

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.

I wish that I had let myself be happier.

The first time I read those, it left an odd feeling with me. A little like that nervous feeling in your stomach before a race, a big test, a job interview. Each one is so simple and makes complete sense. Yet for many of us, they seem so hard to actually live.

The last two especially, the friends and the happiness, feel like they go hand in hand. Ware writes that almost everyone she cared for named the friends one. That they had let the most important friendships of their lives slip away through carelessness, distance, the slow accumulation of weeks that became years. By the time they realized what they’d lost, the people they wanted to call were also gone.

That book was published in 2011. The same year the smartphone reached half of American adults. About the same time where the phone went from a thing in your pocket to a thing that owned your attention.

Fifteen years later, here’s what it has done.

The average American adult spends about 4.5 hours a day on their phone. Not on a computer for work: on a phone, for personal use, on top of everything else. The average person checks their phone roughly 96 times a day, or about once every 10 minutes from the moment they open their eyes. Gen Z adults are closer to 6.5 hours. Millennials average around 5. Even Boomers, the generation that didn’t grow up with this technology, average over 4 hours a day.

If you take the adult average, 4.5 hours, and multiply it across a year, you get 1,645 hours. That’s sixty-eight full twenty-four-hour days. Or about three and a half months spent on a phone.

Over the course of an average life with a phone in your hand, call it sixty-six years, from 14 to 80. That’s roughly 12 years.

(That works out to almost two years per decade. Pull out your phone and check when you got your first smartphone. Multiply the years since by two. That’s roughly what it has already cost you. And counting.)

12 YEARS.

And let’s be honest. Some of those hours are useful. The phone is a map, a stereo system, a calendar, a payment system, a way to call your mom and your dad, a way to text your kids when they’re in college. Not all of it is waste.

But that isn’t the regret and that’s not how we spend a bulk of that time. The regret has never been about the tool. It’s about what the tool quietly replaces. The hours the dying said they wished they’d given to other things: the friends they didn’t call, the feelings they didn’t express, the version of themselves they didn’t get around to becoming those hours didn’t disappear. They went somewhere. They went into the work they regretted, into the silences they regretted, into the performances of being the person others expected.

The new version of that question is whether the phone is doing the same job now, more efficiently, for an entire generation of adults who won’t realize what it cost them until they’re old enough to be in the room Ware was sitting in.

There is a conversation happening right now about teenagers and phones. The data is grim and well-covered. Books, congressional hearings, school bans, the whole apparatus. I’m not going to add to it, because there is someone else we need to speak to just as much.

The adults. The ones critiquing the teenagers.

The math on the grown-ups is roughly the same as the math on the kids. Adults check their phones almost as often. Adults scroll for almost as long. Adults sleep next to their phones, eat meals with their phones face-up on the table, take their phones into bathrooms and bedrooms and conversations with their own children. The teenagers we worry about learned this behavior from somewhere. They learned it from us.

And we are the ones, supposedly, with the developed prefrontal cortex. The mature judgment. The accumulated life experience that’s supposed to know better. The teenagers have an excuse ,they’re 16, it is designed to capture them, and their brains aren’t fully wired yet. What’s the excuse for the 45-year-old who scrolls for two and a half hours on YouTube, Tik Tok, or Instagram after the kids go to bed?

I’m not asking that question rhetorically. I’m asking it of myself too.

If Ware were doing her work today, not in 2009 but in 2026, in a hospice on the other side of the smartphone era and she sat down at the bedside of a seventy-five-year-old who had lived their entire adult life with a phone in their hand, what would the list look like?

Here originals will all be there. The courage to live a life true to yourself. The work. The unexpressed feelings. The friends. Those regrets are older than any technology. They’re regrets about being human.

But I think a sixth one would arrive. Not replacing the others, but adding to them. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time on my phone.

And it would be a strange regret, because the person saying it wouldn’t quite be able to point at what they’d lost. Phone time doesn’t feel like loss while you’re in it. It feels like nothing. It feels like a small, frictionless thing you did between two other things. The minutes don’t flash above your head in red. The hours don’t announce themselves. The years don’t announce themselves.

But the math shows another story. Twelve years of life, over a lifetime, given to a four-inch screen.

What’s striking about Ware’s list is how connected the regrets are. The work regret and the friends regret aren’t separate items. They are a cause and an effect. The hours that went to one were the hours that didn’t go to the other. The unspoken feelings and the unhappiness aren’t two regrets. Just one regret described twice. People at the end of their lives don’t experience their losses as a list. They experience them as a single thing: they show up in all different forms.

The phone, if it ends up on that list, won’t be the cause of those other regrets. It will be the thing by which they were deferred. The way the hours just scrolled away. The structure that made it harder to stay in touch with the friends, to express the feelings, to live the life that was actually yours.

I think about the idea, the phrase “walk the walk” often. Most of the parents I know have a strong opinion about teen screen time. I tend to believe far fewer have an honest opinion about their own. The teenagers we’re worried about see what we do, not what we say. They see us critique their habits. They see us tell them to put it down while we don’t. They see us, and this is the part I keep coming back to, choose the screen over them, over and over, in moments that they’re paying more attention to than we think they are.

Time is the only currency none of us can earn more of. The only one. And we are spending three and a half months of every year on a device that was sold to us as a helper and has quietly become a habit.

I’m not writing this to shame anyone. I check my phone too. The architecture is designed to be checked. To be consumed. To be addictive. The point of any honest reading of this data isn’t to scream down from a mountain top. It’s just to say: the math is real, and the math will be on the bedside table eventually.

Ware’s book is brilliant because it isn’t a list of mistakes to avoid. It’s an argument about the most important things about being alive. Because at the end, what we will be thinking about are the things that really matter the most. The hardest part is we will be seeing them the clearest we ever have in our lives. Just without the time now.

The phone isn’t an enemy. It’s a question. Asked roughly ninety-six times a day, in the form of a notification.

The question is the same one the dying have been answering, in their own words, for as long as anyone has been sitting beside them and writing it down.

Where did the hours go?

The five regrets answer that question one way. The data answers it another. Both answers are pointing at the same thing.

The teenagers will figure their version out eventually. Right now we should figure out ours.

Physical

Range of motion is one of the few qualities about your physiology that does not have to decline with age. Neglect almost guarantees that it will.

That’s the thesis Dr. Kelly Starrett brought to a FoundMyFitness episode with Dr. Rhonda Patrick

His core line: “We should train for life. Not live to train.”

For most of us, the goal isn’t to get better at exercise for its own sake. It’s to build a body that helps carry us across our lives. One that moves well, recovers well, and keeps doing the things you love for a long time.

The most uncomfortable test in the conversation is the sit-and-rise. Stand up. Cross one foot in front of the other. Lower yourself into a cross-legged seat on the floor without holding onto anything. Stand back up the same way without putting a hand or knee down. Score yourself out of 10. Lose a point for every assist.

A 2025 study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology followed more than 4,000 adults aged 46–75 for over 12 years. Death rates rose sharply as the score dropped. People in the lowest group had nearly four times the risk of natural-cause death and six times the risk of cardiovascular death compared to those who scored a perfect 10.

You can be strong, fit, even fast. And still fail this test.

We’ve spent two decades optimizing for capacity — bench, VO2, deadlift numbers — and quietly let go of the basics. Getting down to the floor and back up.

Starrett’s prescription is simple and effective. Sit on the floor while you watch a movie. Hang from something every day. Take your hips and shoulders through their full range, not just the ranges your sport asks for.

Range of motion isn’t built in a session. It’s built in a life that asks for it.

When was the last time you sat on the floor for an hour?

Mental

In March 2026, University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a paper called The Happiness Crash of 2020. Using fifty years of General Social Survey data, the gold standard for tracking American wellbeing, he documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the U.S. population.”

The crash hit in 2020. It is now 2026. It still hasn’t recovered.

The decline ran 10 to 15 percentage points across every age, region, gender, and political affiliation. No group was spared.

But the cohort that fell furthest is the one that should surprise you most.

The wealthy. The well-educated. The high-income, high-asset, professional-class American household. The people who, by every traditional measure, should have been the most insulated lost the most happiness. The poorest Americans, with the least financial cushion, had the narrowest declines.

Wealth did not protect what it was supposed to protect.

The World Happiness Report tells the same story from a different angle. The U.S. ranked 11th in the world in 2012. We sit at 23rd in 2026. Underneath the slide: a quarter of American adults now report eating all of their meals alone…up more than 50% since 2003. Gallup’s CEO summed it up in a single sentence: “Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back.”

And underneath all of it, one finding worth sitting with. Across fifty years and every demographic, one factor consistently predicted happiness. It wasn’t income. Wasn’t education. Wasn’t IQ or career or health.

It was marriage.

The “marital premium” held even through the crash. Married Americans, on balance, remain net-happy. Unmarried Americans, now 45% of adults over 25, are not. Peltzman calls it “a segregated happiness society.”

Achievement didn’t protect happiness. Connection did.

Financial

My wife is off this week. Sunny morning. I had already lifted, we got the kids off to school, and Alison was heading out the door for a run. She paused at the door and asked if I wanted to come.

I had a full inbox. A list. The day was already accounted for. Should I work? Probably.

I thought about it for a beat. Then as she was pulling out of the driveway, I grabbed my running shoes and my coffee and ran out the door.

We spent an hour on the trails in the national park.

When people throw around words like agency, or freedom, or whatever the buzzword of the week is, that hour is what I think of. Not a sabbatical. Not a beach. Not retirement. A sunny Thursday morning, an hour on the trails, and the choice to actually go.

Did it impact what I got done today? Sure. Was the stuff I would’ve gotten done going to strengthen my marriage? Probably not.

Most of the financial industry, including the version of it I worked in for twenty years, is built around scaling the number. Bigger accounts. Bigger returns. Bigger nest egg. Optimize until the score gets high enough to justify the trade-offs.

But the trade-offs are where the real wealth lives.

Wealth, the way I’ve come to define it, is the ability to look at your wife pulling out of the driveway on a Thursday morning and say yes. Everything else is just the architecture that lets you say yes more often.

If your money plan doesn’t make that more possible… more “yes” hours, with the people who matter, in the places that mean something then it’s not really a wealth plan. It’s a balance sheet.

The score is real. But you don’t get to take it with you. You get to take the trail with Alison.

Glad I went.

Spiritual

I took a picture from our back door last week. One of those red, glowing sunrises that comes up over the trees and lights up the whole back of the house. The kind that makes you stop and just stand there for a second.

A few hours later I was reading through information about my oldest’s transition to middle school next year. Sixth grade. New school. New building. New everything.

That’s how it works. Kids grow up. Years pass. Schools change. Logically I know all of this. We’ve done it before, every step from preschool through fifth grade.

But this one feels big.

Maybe it’s because middle school is the part of my own life I remember clearly. Sixth grade was where I started searching for some independence. Testing limits. Doing things my parents didn’t know about. Girls. Friends. Sports. Grades. I remember the bus rides. The lockers. The first time it felt like I was making real choices that were mine.

Now I get to watch him walk into that.

The part that’s hard to articulate is the speed. Every parent gets warned. Everyone before you tells you it goes fast. You nod. You smile. You don’t really get it.

And then it’s here. The kid you carried into the house from the hospital is signing up for sixth grade orientation.

The clock is moving and you can feel it.

I think the whole spiritual project, whatever you want to call it, is paying attention before the moment passes. Not because you can stop time. You can’t. But because attention is the only thing you actually have to offer the moments while they’re happening.

The sunrise last week. The conversation in the car. The Thursday that turned out to be a memory you’ll keep for the rest of your life.

Be there for it.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Every day in 2025, about 11,500 Americans turn 65.

That’s up from 10,000 a day for most of the last decade. Over 4.1 million people a year will hit that milestone every year through 2027. It is what the Alliance for Lifetime Income calls the “Peak 65 Zone.” The largest retirement surge in American history. And because of the size of the Millennial generation behind the Boomers, that surge will essentially hold for the next 20 years.

At the same time, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory declared loneliness a national public health crisis. Roughly half of American adults report experiencing loneliness. Survey after survey shows we have fewer close friendships, less in-person contact, and thinner support networks than any generation on record.

And what it looks like is a gigantic game of chicken.

More people stepping out of the structure of work into a culture that’s already losing structure in community.

And most retirement planning still starts and ends with the number.

Can you retire? Will it last? 4% withdrawal rate or 5%? Important questions…necessary.

But I read a research paper recently that reminded me even a fully funded retirement can fail quietly if we haven’t planned for what retirement actually means. The paper is a 2024 scoping review by Amorim and colleagues on the meanings of retirement. They reviewed 39 studies and asked a question the financial industry rarely does:

"When people retire, what story are they stepping into?”

Because retirement isn’t just a financial event. It’s a meaning transition. And meaning is what determines whether the time you worked for feels like freedom or drifting in the ether.

What the researchers found is that retirement isn’t one destination. It’s experienced through different “meaning lenses.” And what you step into shapes your days, your identity, your health, and your relationships.

Here are the five the research reflected. I’ll give you the technical term, then the plain-language version.

1.Exploring new horizons — I finally get to build what’s next.

Retirement as expansion. A second act. New projects, new learning, intentional travel, deeper relationships, new communities, a new identity chapter.

How it shows up:
- “I want a second act.”
- “I want to learn something I never had time for.”
- “I want more adventure, creativity, and growth.”

The risk if it’s not designed: Freedom becomes scattered busyness. Or endless “someday” planning that never lands.

2. Absence and search for meaning — Without work, who am I?

This is the one most people don’t expect. And it is fairly predictable.

For decades, work quietly provides structure, status, people, a role, and daily confirmation that we matter. Retirement removes that meaning machine overnight.

How it shows up:
- “I thought I’d feel relieved, but I feel off.”
- “I don’t know what my days are for.”
- “The calendar is empty and it’s unsettling.”

The risk if it’s not addressed: Drift. Isolation. Life that feels smaller. Sometimes a low-grade sadness that doesn’t look dramatic, but changes everything.

3. Contributing in your own way — I still want to be useful.

Retirement as continued contribution, but on different terms. Mentoring, volunteering, board work, part-time consulting, community leadership, coaching grandkids, building something that matters.

Not “I want to stop.” just “I want to stop what doesn’t matter.”

How it shows up:
- “I want to give back.”
- “I don’t want to go from useful to invisible.”
- “I want to stay sharp and connected.”

The risk if it’s missing: A quiet loss of identity and value. Feeling like you’re watching life instead of participating in it. That feeling like we are talking and no one is listening.

4. Time to relax — I’ve been on for decades. I need to exhale.

Retirement as rest and recovery. Slower mornings, fewer demands, regained autonomy, nervous system downshift. Many people haven’t truly rested in years.

How it shows up:
- “I want peace.”
- “I want space.”
- “I want less pressure.”

The risk if it’s unstructured: Rest slides into inertia. Inertia erodes health, energy, and mood. Not overnight, but over time, as those days compound and we find ourselves in pajamas at noon.

5. Acquisition of rights — I earned this.

Retirement as permission. Autonomy after decades of responsibility. Often tied to pensions, benefits, or a cultural story of retirement as “my time now.”

How it shows up:
- “I did my part.”
- “I don’t want obligations anymore.”
- “I want the freedom to say no.”

The risk if this becomes the only meaning: If retirement is only “I earned rest,” it can retire you from growth, contribution, and connection right when those things matter most. The opt out mentality.

And the real insight of the Amorim framework isn’t the five meanings. It’s what they show us.

For decades, work was quietly doing more for us than we realized. It was providing:

- Structure — your week was decided for you
- Identity — what you did became who you were
- Belonging — people, teams, a place in the world
- Status — a scoreboard, a ladder, a role
- Contribution — problems you solved, people you helped
- Momentum — the next meeting, the next goal

Retirement removes every one of those overnight and even if you’re thrilled to retire, with a countdown calendar, your life still has to answer a new question on the other side: Who am I when my calendar doesn’t decide for me?

Well, this is what you get:

- Days that blur together. Is it Wednesday or Friday?
- Health habits slipping because there’s no schedule and no routine.
- Relationships thinning because there’s no built-in contact anymore.
- Too much screen time, too much waiting, too much “I’ll get to it.”
- “Freedom” that turns into “free to do what?”

And what is really interesting about this. What I have learned doing this work.

Too much stress makes people want to walk away from work. But not enough stress, zero structure or demand, creates something worse. Inactivity. And inactivity compounds the same way money does. Just in reverse.

That’s the Goldilocks problem of retirement. You don’t want the grind. But you also don’t want zero gravity. Most people plan to eliminate the grind. Almost no one plans to replace it with a different kind of friction.

Why is this important? Remember the 11,400 Americans a day number.

Now consider this: Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist who has studied aging for 40 years, estimates that retiring Boomers will collectively have 3.9 trillion hours of free time over the next 20 years.

3.9 trillion. This number blows my mind in the same way I think about stars in the universe.

That’s the largest block of unstructured time any generation has ever been handed. And it’s landing in a country that, per the Surgeon General, has already lost the structures that used to make unstructured time meaningful.

Now add that all together. The biggest retirement surge in history landing on the loneliest generation of American adults in history with the fewest functioning community institutions in modern memory.

And that is the game of chicken I started with. And it’s happening right now, in real time, and nobody’s on stage warning us about it.

For me, at 9:03 AM, time stopped feeling unlimited. I believe retirement is another moment when time becomes very visible, because you finally get more of it.

But more time doesn’t automatically become a richer life. It tends to create a reflection. A mirror showing you your health, your relationships, your ability to create structure, your willingness to keep growing, and your definition of “enough.”

If that’s true, then the real retirement question most of us need to start with isn’t how much. It’s…What will my time be for and what structure will protect that answer?

All of this to say that in the end retirement isn’t just a financial transition. It’s a meaning transition.

We’re not just planning our money. We’re planning our days.

That means the real questions, the ones I keep saying should be in the plan, are:

- What will give my week meaning?
- Where will my contribution come from?
- Who will I see regularly?
- What will keep me strong?
- What am I building in this next chapter?

A retirement plan that ignores those questions is incomplete. You can retire “successfully” on paper and still languish in real life.

And the hardest part of this isn’t the math. It’s having to be honest. This is what you have worked so long, so hard, for. The goal isn’t just to retire. It’s to use the time well.

Retirement is the moment you stop buying time and start deciding what it’s worth.

Sources:
- Amorim, S.M., et al. “Meanings of Retirement: A Scoping Review,” (2024).
- Alliance for Lifetime Income, *Peak 65 Zone Research Report* (Jason Fichtner, Retirement Income Institute, 2024-2025).
- U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, *Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation* (HHS, May 2023).
- Ken Dychtwald, Age Wave research; interview in *Kiplinger’s Personal Finance* (December 2025).

Physical

There is a story in the Washington Post this week that is hard to ignore.

A new study found that rapamycin, the longevity drug thousands of Americans are taking to extend their lifespan, may actually blunt some of the health benefits of exercise. Researchers anticipated the drug would enhance the effects of working out while initiating health improvements of its own. It didn’t.

Worth pausing on. Rapamycin runs about $200 a month. People are buying it because they want more years, more healthspan, more of all the things exercise also delivers. And the study suggests they may be paying real money to undermine the one thing that already works. For free.

A few weeks ago I asked the question we keep coming back to. Optimized for what, exactly?

The wellness industry has built an entire economy on the premise that there is always a better protocol, a better stack, a better pill. The marketing is sophisticated. The science around it usually isn’t, or arrives later, or gets quietly ignored when it doesn’t sell. And underneath all of it sits the same boring truth that has been there since we figured out how a body works. Move it. Feed it. Sleep. Connect.

The one tool we are sure works is the thing that costs nothing. Just the commitment to move in some way.

We will keep coming back to this question across all four pillars. Because it isn’t just a wellness problem. It is the same pattern showing up everywhere. Optimize. Buy. Stack. Track. And almost never stop to ask the simpler question. What is this actually for?

Mental

In 2009, Sophie Leroy, a researcher at the University of Washington, ran a series of experiments that gave a name to something we have all felt but may not have a specific word for. She called it “attention residue.”

The premise was simple. When you stop one task and switch to another, part of your attention stays behind. Not metaphorically. Measurably. Her studies showed that people who switched tasks under time pressure performed worse on the next task because a piece of their cognition was still working on the last one. The body had moved. The mind hadn’t fully come with it.

The research has only gotten more relevant since. The American Psychological Association tracks workplace stress every year, and the through-line in the latest reports is unambiguous. People are exhausted, and increasingly the exhaustion isn’t coming from any single hard thing. It’s coming from the constant churn of small ones. The Slack ping. The email notification. The text. The tab. The meeting that ran into the next meeting that ran into the next.

Each switch leaves residue. The residue accumulates and by 2 p.m. you feel cooked and you can’t quite explain why because nothing was actually that hard. Nothing was. The switching was.

I have been thinking about this in the context of presence, which is a word I keep coming back to. I think about it a lot and we talk about presence like it is a virtue. A nice thing to bring to the dinner table. A spiritual goal. The research is suggesting it might also be a performance advantage.

The person who can give one task their full attention for 60 minutes is operating in a different category from the person who gives twelve tasks fragmented attention for the same hour. Same time. Different output. Different fatigue. Different version of yourself walking out the door at the end of the day.

You can’t optimize your way out of fragmentation. You can only protect against it. Block the time. Close the tabs. Put the phone in another room. Do the one thing. It is not just better for the work. It is better for you.

Financial

Northwestern Mutual released its 2025 Planning & Progress Study. The number I anchored to…57%. This is how many partnered Americans say financial uncertainty has impacted their relationship. In 2023, that number was 44%. In two years it has jumped 13 points. Money is now the number one source of conflict in American marriages, and the data is moving in the wrong direction.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Two Sigma situation. Two co-founders, billions under management, and the thing that started unraveling the firm wasn’t a market crash. It was a notebook in a desk drawer.

The Northwestern Mutual data is the everyday version of that same story. Most couples are not running hedge funds. But they are running households, and the same pattern is showing up. The wealth is being managed. The relationship around the wealth isn’t.

What I have seen in the work I do, more times than I can count, is that money fights are almost never about money. They are about the anxiety the money creates, and the avoidance that anxiety triggers, and the silence that grows in the place where a conversation should have been. One person opens the statement. The other doesn’t want to look. One person worries out loud. The other shuts down. And underneath whatever the fight looks like on the surface, both people are usually scared about the same thing and don’t know how to say it to each other.

The portfolio has a plan. The marriage doesn’t.

But the positive of all of this…it’s fixable. Not with a better calculator. With a regular communication. A monthly half hour where you sit down together and look at the numbers, the goals, what is working, what isn’t, what you are scared of, what you actually want. No agenda beyond honesty. No outcome required.

Most couples will spend more time choosing a couch than they will ever spend talking about the financial life they are building together. The data is showing what that costs. And it is getting more expensive.

Spiritual

I am stuck on this topic. Thinking about it more and more. Loneliness.

And not shocking I found another study. This one was a bit different showing that having a sense of meaning in life was as strong a predictor of whether someone felt lonely as their actual physical health, and a stronger predictor than how many friends they had. Read that again. The number of people in your life mattered less than whether you had answered the question of what your life is for.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. We have all felt it. The crowded room. The full calendar. The text thread that never goes quiet. And underneath it, a quiet hum that something isn’t connecting.

For a while I assumed loneliness was always a connection problem. Add more people. More dinners. More community. The research is suggesting something deeper. The connection problem is sometimes a meaning problem in disguise. If you don’t know what you are here for, no amount of company will fully fill that space. The people are there. The why isn’t.

This is the spiritual pillar at its most practical. We have spent the last several issues circling the same idea from different angles. Purpose protects cognition. Mattering protects the years you spent building everything else. Meaning predicts loneliness more than friend count. The pattern is consistent. Whatever you want to call it, the deepest part of being human is also the most protective thing for being human.

And it can’t be borrowed. Nobody can hand you a why. It comes from showing up to the questions. Coming back to them. Sitting with them long enough that an answer finds you.

If you feel lonely in a life that, on paper, shouldn’t be lonely, that is information. Not a verdict. The fix may not be more people. It may be a quieter conversation with yourself about what you actually want this whole thing to mean.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

I mowed the yard last Friday.

Parker came home and saw it. “Nice work,” he said. I told him this is his job next year. “I know,” he said.

Which wasn’t his response a few weeks ago, when I brought the mower home. That time he said, “I didn’t think you would get it.”

He’s about to be 11 with the wit of 30.

I wasn’t planning to write about any of this. It’s just grass. But standing at the edge of the driveway, looking back at what I’d just done…the clean lines, the edged borders, the satisfaction of it complete. At least for a week.

I thought this is something that a lot of us don’t get anymore. And I’m not just referring to a yard we cut ourselves.

The feeling of something being finished.

Not “moved to next quarter.” Not “pending stakeholder input.” Not “let me circle back on that.”

Finished.

And I remembered years ago, I read something I can’t remember exactly where that described the difference between blue-collar and white-collar work in a way that’s stuck with me.

The carpenter builds the table. At the end of the day, there’s a table. At the end of the week, there’s a room full of tables. At the end of the year, there’s a house someone lives in. We see the work. You can point at it. You can put your hand on it. Your grandson can point at it fifty years from now and say, my grandfather built that.

The white-collar worker sends the email. Another email comes back. The deck gets presented, then a new version of the deck gets requested. The inbox empties and refills. They hit the sales goal for the year then start at 0 again.

Towards the tail end of my sales career, I started to feel that. Especially the speedometer rolling over year over year. 12 months of work and it felt like it vanished.

It turns out a lot of smart people have been writing about this, and the research is starting to catch up to what the trades have always known.

In 2009, a philosopher named Matthew Crawford, who walked away from a Washington think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop, wrote a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft.

His central argument is that manual work delivers something he calls “the satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence.” When the carpenter finishes the table, when the electrician wires the panel, when the mechanic hears the engine turn over there’s a feedback loop that closes. The work becomes tangible. It can’t be interpreted away. The building stands or it doesn’t. The lights come on or they don’t.

That’s the thing knowledge work mostly can’t do.

Crawford calls the opposite experience “psychic homelessness” or the state of being unable to point at anything and say I made that today. You’re paid a lot of money, you have impressive titles, and you spend your weekends unable to explain to your kids what you actually do…been there. You’re metabolizing effort without producing anything your hands can verify.

Then in January of this year, a researcher named James Meaden published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology called “The abstraction habituation model of knowledge worker burnout.”

He opens with this question: why is burnout so brutal among knowledge workers even when conditions are favorable?

Flexible schedules. Competitive pay. Intellectually interesting work. Physical environments that would have been considered a luxury by any previous generation of workers. And yet the burnout numbers keep climbing:

• 82% of employees are now at risk of burnout, and 66% report having experienced it (Forbes/Modern Health, 2025)

• 34% of desk-based knowledge workers report persistent burnout (DHR Global Workforce Trends Report, 2025)

• Burnout can cost organizations 18–20% of total output (research compiled by Meditopia, 2026)

• Maslach’s foundational burnout model — the gold standard in the field — identifies three components: exhaustion, cynicism, and “reduced personal accomplishment.”

And it was the last one that resonated the most for me.

Meaden's argument is that knowledge work keeps us in abstraction mode, always working with concepts, representations, plans, models, meetings about meetings. And our brains evolved in what he calls “immediate-return environments.” Places where action and outcome are tightly linked.

Modern knowledge work has almost none of that. And the nervous system, he argues, gradually habituates to abstraction in a way that degrades cognitive flexibility, dulls present-moment awareness, and erodes the feeling of ever having done anything.

You’re not burned out because you work too hard. You’re burned out because nothing you do lands.

All that to say that knowledge work seems to have no natural endpoint.

In manual work, your body tells you when you’re done. In office work, nothing tells you. You can always send one more email. Refine one more slide. Respond to one more Slack message. The work doesn’t have a finish line because that isn’t how it was structured.

One recent write-up on knowledge worker burnout put it this way: “If you were doing manual labor, physical exhaustion would force you to stop. Your body would give out. But your mind can keep producing output even when it’s running on fumes.”

The treadmill never stops. It just gets faster.

And how did all that come from spending a few hours in the yard. It does every single thing knowledge work doesn’t do.

• It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You start at one corner. You finish at the other. When you turn off the mower, it’s over. There’s no follow-up email. No second draft. No Q2 revision.

• You see your progress…literally. You can see where you’ve been.

• It produces something you can point at. Thirty-six hours later, the lines are still there. You see them every time you pull in the driveway.

It builds competence you can feel. I’ve gotten in a few times this spring, and I can already tell the difference when I pull out the weed eater. The lines are straighter and cleaner. That’s muscle memory, judgment, and care.

And the tools are honest. I’ve been nerding out on the EGO multi-tool setup we got this spring. Mower, weed eater, edger, all running off the same battery platform. There’s a specific dopamine that comes from knowing how your tools work.

And so much of this explains mentorship. Apprenticeship. The handing down of skills.

The motion I’m doing in 2026 is the exact motion my great-grandfather did in the 50’s or my dad in the 80’s. The tool has gotten better. The job hasn’t changed.

The boys are already getting pulled in. They’re going to help me move dirt to level the low spots in the yard this spring. Spread mulch this summer. Look back and see the work they’ve done.

And Parker sees that.

Next summer, he’s going to be the one sweating through his shirt. He’s going to stand at the end of the driveway, I’m sure after alot of complaining, and look back at what he made and feel something that Instagram, TikTok, and every algorithm on earth is designed to prevent him from ever experiencing.

He’s going to feel what finished looks like.

That’s what my dad gave me. That’s what my grandpa gave my dad. The mower is a Trojan horse for something bigger. Time outside together, on a Saturday morning, when he’s 14 and 15 and 16 and wouldn’t otherwise choose to be anywhere near me. The grass is the excuse. The presence is the point.

This year it’s me teaching him. Next year he starts. The year after that he takes it over. And at some point, maybe he teaches his own family. Or perhaps the robots will have taken over by then.

But honestly, he doesn’t know any of this yet. He’s almost 11. To him, the lawn is just a thing his dad does and next summer he has to do it too.

But he’s watching.

He’s watching me take care of something. Finish something. He’s watching me use tools the right way, put them back where they belong, blow the driveway at the end. Something that is hard to see sitting in front of a laptop.

And a few years from now when he’s pushing that mower himself, sweating through his shirt, standing at the edge of the driveway looking back at what he made he will have a similar feeling.

He’s going to feel what finished looks like.

And I don’t think he’ll ever forget it.

Physical

Turns out the cavemen were eating their vegetables.

A fascinating study by National Geographic found that the real paleolithic diet, the actual one, not the one that shows up in a 20 second Tik Tok, included plenty of fruits and vegetables. The early humans we’ve been modeling our elimination diets after were apparently far less restrictive than the influencers selling the idea.

Which is kind of funny when you think about it. We built an entire nutritional movement around what we thought ancient humans ate. But we might have been wrong. They weren’t just eating mammoth steaks by the fire. They were foraging. They had diverse options on their plate. By all accounts, more nutritionally flexible than most of us are right now.

The problem is we can’t exactly call them up and ask. The Neanderthals aren’t doing podcasts. Nobody’s interviewing a cave dweller about their macros. We’re guessing, educated guessing, but guessing.

And that’s kind of the story with all of nutrition, isn’t it? Every decade brings a new villain. Fat was going to kill us. Then sugar. Then gluten. Then seed oils. Then carbs. Then carbs were fine again but only if you ate them before noon on a Tuesday during a full moon and sunshine.

Being tribal about nutrition is exhausting. And the research keeps pointing to the same boring truth it’s always pointed to. Eat real food. Eat a variety of it. Don’t overthink it. Move your body. Stay consistent.

Nobody’s selling that on Instagram because there’s nothing to sell. There’s no protocol. No elimination phase. No 30-day challenge. Just the quiet, unremarkable act of eating like a human being which, it turns out, is what the actual humans were doing all along.

Mental

I love research. Love my studies. And here is another from the Journals of Gerontology. They tracked nearly 10,000 adults over the age of 65 across multiple years. The question wasn’t about diet or exercise or medication. It was about purpose.

The finding: adults who sustained a sense of purpose in life experienced significantly slower cognitive decline over time. Not just at the start, sustained. Meaning the people who kept their sense of why they were here kept their minds sharper, longer. Another study from Rush University found that a person with a high sense of purpose was roughly 2.4 times more likely to remain free of Alzheimer’s than someone with a low sense of purpose.

Its science telling us what Viktor Frankl said eighty years ago. The person with a why can endure almost any how.

I think about the people I’ve worked with who hit the number. The retirement funded. The exit closed. The house paid off. Everything checked. And then the big question arrives because it has time too. Now what?

The structure disappears. The calendar empties. The identity that was built around what you did starts to dissolve, and nothing rushes in to replace it. The financial plan says you’re fine. The mirror says something different.

Having a purpose isn’t a luxury. I think what we are seeing across fields of research is it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives. It protects your brain. It protects your body. It protects the years you spent building everything else.

And the toughest part about it is that it can’t just be handed to you. It’s not in a book. You won’t find it on some magical morning. It’s not in a financial plan. It takes time, hard questions, coming back to something when nobody’s asking you to.

Financial

Bloomberg ran a story a few months ago about Two Sigma, one of the most successful hedge funds in the world. Billions under management. Two co-founders: both brilliant and billionaires. And the whole thing started unraveling. Not because of a bad trade or the models broke. Because the people did.

A feud between the founders. Arbitration. Counterclaims. Accusations of mishandled governance. One stepped away, then came back eight months later. And underneath all of it, a personal divorce. One co-founder’s wife found a journal in his home office where he’d been writing about moving money to Wyoming. She told him the marriage was over. Now the divorce is threatening to drag the firm itself into the fallout.

Someone who built one of the most sophisticated financial machines on the planet. And the thing that undid it wasn’t a market crash. Or an errant trade. It was a notebook in a desk drawer.

I am not trying to judge. Just sharing because it’s one of the most expensive version of a story I’ve seen and heard often. The financial architecture is flawless. The life architecture was never built. The wealth is managed. The relationships aren’t. The portfolio has a plan. The marriage doesn’t.

We spend enormous amounts of energy building the thing we can measure. Keep score. The net worth, the returns, the AUM. And we assume the things we can’t measure will just hold. The partnership. The family. The trust. They don’t hold on their own. They need the same level of intention and investment that the portfolio gets. Usually more.

The financial plan didn’t fail at Two Sigma. The human plan did. And that’s an everywhere problem.

Spiritual

I have talked about this one before, but reread it over the weekend digging into my old articles list.

The headline: “The Retirement Crisis No One Warns You About: Mattering.”

The article told the story of a group of accomplished retirees sitting around a dinner table in Sarasota. Every one of them had planned financially. Every one of them had assumed their decades of experience would be welcomed. And they were ready now…had the time and wanted to share their wisdom, teaching, consulting through volunteering. Instead they found closed doors and unanswered emails.

But what they were grieving wasn’t opportunity. It was relevance.

Mattering. The deep human need to feel seen, valued, and able to contribute. The thing you may have seen in others a few years after they retire. Perhaps running into them in the grocery store or the park. The structure goes. The calendar empties. The phone stops ringing the way it used to. And the question that arrives is the one the financial plan never prepared them for.

Do I still matter?

The data is hard to ignore. Am analysis of over 3,000 retirees found that nearly a third experienced depressive symptoms — and the strongest predictors weren’t financial. They were psychological. Feeling less needed. Less valued. Less connected. A 2024 study found that while most retirees plan carefully for their money, fewer than half give real consideration to what their life will actually look like once they stop working.

More than 11,000 Americans turn 65 every day. The researchers are suggesting it’s time to shift the question from how long will I live to how will I continue to matter while I do.

We plan for our wealthspan. Some of us plan for our healthspan. Almost nobody plans for their mattering span.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

What did you check today?

Your Apple Watch. Your steps. Your Whoop. Your work dashboard. Your GPA. Your health metrics.

Everything has a score now. Your sleep. Your heart rate. Your net worth. Your race finish time. Your company revenue. Your VO2 max. Your portfolio return. Your productivity.

We have built an entire infrastructure…billion dollar industries, wearable devices, annual reviews, dashboards, consultants, financial scorecards — all pointed at the same question: How are you doing?

And somewhere along the way, the score became the answer.

Two of the best books I’ve read in a while, Why Wellness Sells by Colleen Derkatch and The Score by C. Thi Nguyen, met at exactly that place. That we measure, optimize, and anchor to numbers because how else can you tell if you’re winning. Or improving. How else can you tell if you’re moving ahead.

Yet when you look around you can see it. The score is making us all lose.

Metrics are useful and I am not arguing against data. I track things. I get my bloodwork, check my metrics, follow my training plan. I’ve run races with a watch on my wrist, still do, and checked my splits at every mile. I’ve looked at my own balance sheet and understand the importance. Numbers tell us something real.

But at some point, and I think this is what we really need to understand, the numbers stop being a tool and start being the point. The HRV score stops telling you how recovered you are and starts telling you whether you’re allowed to feel good today. The revenue target stops being a direction and starts being your identity. The finish time stops being a measure of effort and starts being your own self-worth.

This isn’t just wellness. It’s everywhere. Corporate America figured it out decades ago: hit the number, get the bonus, reset the target higher. Academia built an entire identity system around GPA and rankings. Social media turned your life into an engagement score. Wellness is just the latest and perhaps most intimate version of the same game.

And an industry that helps you feel better has a structural flywheel built into it: if you actually felt better, you might need it less. So the goalpost moves. There’s always another level of optimization. Another device. Another protocol. Another number that, if you could just hit it, would mean you’d finally arrived.

You never do.

I want to be careful here because I don’t think this was the intention, exactly. And this is far from black or white. It’s the water we swim in. We live in a measurement culture. It’s how we were taught to know if something is working.

Who doesn’t know what A, B, C, D, F means.

But we are forgetting what’s getting lost in the scorekeeping: The best parts of a life are almost impossible to measure.

How do you put a KPI on your relationship with your kids? On what it feels like to have a coffee on a Sunday morning with your spouse and your pup, nowhere to be, just the sunshine and their company? On going to sleep genuinely exhausted from a full day, not depleted but full, and waking up without reaching for your phone to see if your Whoop or Oura says you’re green or red?

How do you score the conversation that changed how you see something? The run where you watched the sunrise and weren’t thinking about your pace? The season of life where everything felt hard and you showed up anyway and something in you shifted and grew stronger at the same time?

I’ve seen people try, but I don’t think you can. And I think that’s something we should be talking about.

There’s a conversation in the endurance world that mirrors this perfectly.

It’s called training by feel. RPE — Rate of Perceived Exertion. Instead of letting your watch tell you how hard you’re working, you check in with yourself. How do the legs feel? Are you tired or ready? The best coaches are starting to acknowledge what elite athletes have always known: data assumes you’re the same athlete every day. Life proves otherwise.

I trained for years with an old Timex Ironman watch. The one that kept time, gave you a split when you hit a button, showed you the date. That was it. No zones, no HRV, no recovery score. Just you and the miles and how you felt. Was it RPE? Yes, we just didn’t call it that.

Are we better athletes because of the data? Absolutely. But the pendulum has a way of swinging too far. The watch goes from tool to authority. The score goes from input to verdict. And somewhere in that shift, you stop being an athlete listening to your body and start being a person managing a dashboard.

The same thing happens everywhere else. That’s harder to measure. It’s also harder to fake.

Over the next few weeks I want to go deeper into this…what a flourishing life actually looks like when you stop letting the score define it, and what it takes to build one in a world that is very good at convincing you the number is the thing.

Because the makings of a good, joyful, full life? They’re mostly invisible on a dashboard.

The best things don’t announce themselves with green error point up. They just show up and leave that feeling that is harder to quantify.

And if you’re lucky, you’re present enough to notice.

Physical

A new study published this week in BMJ Open tested five of the most popular AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, and DeepSeek by asking them health and medical questions across five categories. Roughly half of all responses were deemed problematic. Nearly 20% were classified as highly problematic.

The part that stood out wasn’t just the error rate. It was that the answers were consistently delivered with confidence and certainty, with few disclaimers. The tools didn’t say I’m not sure. They answered like they knew.

I use AI every day. I think it is remarkable. But your body is not a search query. A pulled hamstring, a suspicious mole, a lingering fatigue that doesn’t make sense. Those deserve a real discussion with someone who can see you, ask follow-up questions, and be accountable for what they tell you. AI can be a starting point. It cannot be the answer.

Mental

Last year Reuters reported on a growing number of people turning to AI chatbots for emotional support and therapy, not because they prefer it, but because the traditional mental health system is overloaded, slow, and often out of reach. Pierre Cote, who struggled to access care for PTSD and depression, built his own AI tool and says it saved his life.

But clinicians quoted in the piece raised a concern we need to be thinking about with all of this: AI can create the illusion of a therapeutic relationship without the reciprocity, accountability, or genuine human connection that real healing often requires. There are already lawsuits. There are already harms. There is already regulatory backlash.

The same quality that makes AI therapy appealing, it is always available 24/7, always patient, always responsive is also what makes it risky. Because availability is not the same as safety. And simulated support is not the same as being truly heard by another human being.

Financial

This week on Substack I wrote about a number I think about more than most: the number of days in a reasonably healthy life. 31,025. That is 85 years.

I am 46. As of this week I have used 17,001 of them.

I keep a chart on my wall called My Life In Weeks. Every week of my life represented as a small square. I fill them in as they pass. Most people who see it for the first time think it is morbid. I think it is clarifying.

Because time is the only currency that cannot be earned back. Not money. Not productivity. Not optimization.

You have heard me talk about this over and over again. Sharing essays, books, podcasts, etc…I am sure you might be sick of it. But this work, I think more than most, has helped me be much more present in my life. And what I hope is you give it a try for yourself. If you want to see your own number [build your Life In Weeks chart here →] It is harder the first time than you think. That is exactly the point.

Spiritual

Bronnie Ware said this was a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called comfort of familiarity had overflowed into their emotions as well as their physical lives.

I wish I had let myself be happier.

Of the five regrets she catalogued from people in their final days, this one is one I think about often. Not because it is the most dramatic, it isn’t. But because it cites a word we use almost each and every day. The most invisible while it is happening.

We don’t usually notice we are holding happiness at arm’s length. We call it being realistic. Accepting the facts. We call it not getting ahead of ourselves. We wait for the circumstances to be right, for the hard thing to pass, for the moment to earn it. And somewhere in that waiting, the moment goes. And doesn’t come back around.

What I have found is that happiness is less about what is happening and more about what you are letting in. It isn’t a destination. I believe it tends to be moments. The sunrise on a run you almost skipped. The conversation that went longer than you planned. The ordinary day that turned out to be exactly enough if you were actually there for it.

Connecting with others helps. Serving others helps. Getting outside of your own head and into the world be it nature, people, purpose beyond yourself that helps more than almost anything.

The spiritual pillar is about meaning. And meaning has a way of showing up when you stop waiting for permission to be present in your own life.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Since Arlo joined the family my morning routine has shifted. Until he is ready to hang solo in those early morning hours I now have replaced my workout time with puppy time. I have had to adjust the schedule.

He’s up early, I’m the one who gets him, and so that means a dark, quiet house. Coffee. A book.

The other morning, I was reading about a woman who lost her mother. Pancreatic cancer. Fast and sudden…no warning. She said: If I had known, I would have done things differently.

And each time I read a passage like this or a story I tend to think. We all know.

There is one fact about your life that is completely, absolutely certain. It ends. No matter what Bryan Johnson says.

The only unknown is when. And somehow, lost in the background, we’ve let the uncertainty of when cancel out the certainty of the fact. We live like the unknown timing makes the known outcome optional.

It doesn’t. And like always, here is the math.

31,025 days. 85 years. Roughly where the actuaries put a reasonably healthy life. That’s it. That’s the whole supply.

I’m 46. As of this morning, I’ve used 17,001 of them. Which means if the math stays true, which is pretty likely, I have somewhere around 14,024 left.

More than half of my boxes are checked. Colored in.

I keep a chart on my wall, which I have shared before, called My Life In Weeks. Every week of my life represented as a small square. I fill them in as they pass. Most people who see it for the first time think it is morbid…perhaps.

Because it’s one thing to think about the finite nature of life, but it’s another to see it each day. To each week fill in the squares. The actual countdown. And even if I miss a week, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get filled in.

All that to say is those seven days in a week move forward each day. We all have heard it. Where did the week go. I can’t believe it’s Friday. Man, the weekend went by fast.

All circling back to one of my favorite words. Presence. And the importance of it showing up each and every day in your life.

We have all had them. The days where it doesn’t show up. The ones where you get to the end and realize you remember almost nothing. You were there…you drove somewhere, sat in meetings, answered messages, ate something, dropped off at practice…but you weren’t there. Yet, nothing left a mark. Nothing brought you into the moment. And it falls off the calendar like an empty piece of paper.

That is the cost of not being in the moment. Not slowing down. Not trying to look around.

And it is why I loved Bronnie Ware’s book so much.

She spent years in palliative care. She sat with people at the end, when the filters were gone and the time for pretending was over. She heard the stories. The regrets. And what she heard wasn’t random. There was a thread tying them all together.

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself.

I wish I hadn’t worked so much.

I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.

I wish I’d said what I felt.

I wish I’d let myself be happier.

Read that list slowly. Does any of it surprise you? Or do you already know which ones belong to your life right now?

I think that’s why it is so important to me. I read this list, I see these things even in my own life.

We know the ending. And most of us already know what we’ll wish we’d done differently. The only variable is time. And we keep treating time like it’s unlimited.

I’ve written about 9:03 before. If you’ve been here for a bit, you know the story. What I want to say here, I think with more clarity than I have acknowledged to myself before, is that it took me a long time to actually accept.

Years. Not days or months. Years.

Even after everything that morning showed me. Even after walking away that day. Even with the chart on my wall and the pendant around my neck and what I have built my work around. The gap between knowing and living like you know is stubborn. It takes time to close. And some days, unfortunately, it grows wider.

Because accepting the known, and I mean really accepting it in your heart and not just as a concept you can discuss, means accepting that eventually like Tony Soprano in the finale…the lights will go black. Mid-sentence. Mid-bite. Mid-day. No dramatic close. No warning. Just the ordinary moment that turns out to be the last one.

I don’t think most of us ever fully get there. I still have a long way to go, but I’m further along than I was. And the distance I’ve covered has come from one thing more than anything else.

Presence.

Not a practice or technique. Just the decision, made again today, to actually be in the day I’m in. To let what’s happening matter while it’s happening. To not save the good stuff for later. Because later is not guaranteed. Later is the unknown.

Today is the only known.

So I’ll ask it plainly. What would you do differently if you knew?

And then the real answer. You do know.

You have a number of days. You just don’t know the exact number. But the boxes are being filled in. And the people you love, the things you want to feel, the version of yourself you keep meaning to become…none of that is waiting for you on the other side of later.

It’s here. In the days you’re actually in.

Physical Wellness

In the 1960s, a Japanese exercise physiologist named Yoshiro Hatano estimated that increasing daily steps from around 4,000 to 10,000 would raise energy expenditure by about 300 calories a day. A pedometer company turned that estimate into a product name…manpo-kei, or “10,000 steps meter.” And from that marketing campaign and the wearable on your wrist, a number became a law.

It was never a clinical threshold. It was a round number that felt good.

And when you actually read the research you get a lot of different stories. A 2020 study found meaningful health benefits in older women starting around 4,400 steps. A 2022 Lancet meta-analysis suggested 6,000 to 8,000 steps is adequate for most adults. A 2024 review found even 3,000 daily steps offered some protection against early mortality. And Japanese interval walking, three minutes fast, three minutes slow, repeated for 30 minutes, outperformed both steady-state walking and the 10,000-step group in a randomized trial on cardiovascular health, strength, and blood sugar.

And from all this comes a more interesting story and question in my opinion. It’s what are we actually optimizing for.

The badge for hitting 10,000 steps rewards the performance of effort. A leisurely 10,000-step stroll may do less for your heart than 4,000 brisk ones, but your app rewards both exactly the same. The number became the point. And once that happens the why shifts.

This is something I’ve been thinking about across all four pillars lately. The wellness industry, along with a lot of others, has built its model on the premise that there is always a better number to chase. More steps. Higher returns. Bigger homes. More. But I believe the question no one is incentivized to ask is the one that actually matters.

Optimized for what, exactly?

We’ll be coming back to that question across all four pillars in the weeks and months ahead.

Mental Wellness

The American Psychological Association released its 2025 Stress in America report. They titled it A Crisis of Connection. That title is doing a lot of work.

Among more than 3,000 adults surveyed, half reported feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship often or some of the time. Nearly seven in ten said they needed more emotional support in the past year than they actually received. That number went up from the year before.

And 92% of those same adults said relationships are a primary source of meaning in their lives. So we know what matters. We are just not tending to it.

The cost is not abstract. Adults with high levels of loneliness were significantly more likely to live with chronic illness, depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. The emotional and the physical are not separate categories. They are woven together.

We have optimized for productivity and output and somehow ended up with fewer people we can actually call at ten o’clock at night.

The report is worth reading. And the question it leaves me with is not complicated. When is the last time you gave someone your full attention and presence? Not your half-attention, not the version of you that is also managing the inbox, on your phone, looking at your watch, but actually showed up, completely, for someone who needed it?

That is where connection lives.

Financial Wellness

Easter morning was last weekend. The baskets. The carrots left out the night before. The little tracks pressed into the floor to make it feel real. The boys waking up and trying to find their hidden baskets.

This year they couldn’t find one. I did a pretty good job the night before. They looked everywhere and finally my oldest stopped, turned to me, and said…can you help us find it?

I told him I didn’t know where it was.

He looked at me and said — you do. You hid it. We know the Easter Bunny isn’t real.

I laughed. Then I smiled. And then I felt something else entirely.

Because he was right. And in that moment I knew we weren’t going back. Not to that morning. Not to the version of those mornings that existed before that sentence. The Santa mornings. The tooth fairy mornings. The ones where the whole thing was still magic and nobody was asking the obvious question yet.

They are growing up. And time only moves in one direction.

I say this to people constantly in the work I do. I say it because I believe it and because I have watched what happens when people defer the things that matter most. The experiences, the classroom parties, 5^th grade graduations, ordinary weekday games all under the assumption that there will be more time later.

There will be more time. Just not for this.

Time is the only currency that cannot be earned back. Spend it like your life depends on it.

Spiritual Wellness

A series of studies with more than 1,100 participants across the United States and Australia just added more insights to one of my favorite topics…awe.

When people wrote about or experienced something genuinely awe-inspiring, something that made them feel small in a good way, they reported a greater sense of connection between their individual identity and something larger. Their country. Their community. Their university. The group.

Awe, it turns out, doesn’t just make you feel wonder. It fuses you to something beyond yourself.

The researchers published the findings in Emotion and noted that when people experience awe, the boundary between self and group breaks down. Your identity doesn’t disappear, it deepens, and in deepening it connects to something bigger.

I have felt this. In a long ultra race or Ironman. At a concert. Watching the sunrise come up over the ridgeline or mountain. In places and spaces that remind you that the world was here long before you arrived and will be here long after.

Those moments don’t just feel good. The research says they actually change how you see yourself in relation to everything else.

Go find something that makes you feel that this week. Something large enough to make you remember you are part of something larger than your inbox.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

I don’t know Max Schireson.

But when I came across his story I had to read the article a few times and then hop on Google to look him up. Because it was the opposite of everything we’re used to hearing.

It’s 2014, social media and Instagram are beginning to grow. But he posts an honest couple of paragraphs to an old-school WordPress blog. Simple. It wasn’t some call to action. It didn’t launch his brand or some type of program. No DM me for program. It just said…

“Why I am leaving the best job I ever had.”

Then he goes dark. Then 12 months of silence.

And then a second post appears.

“A year off.”

Again, no manifesto. Not a productivity program or special system. Another honest update about what changed when he stopped living on planes and started living closer to what he actually valued. More time with his kids. More time with his wife. Learning bridge. Skiing. Being around for the ordinary moments that don’t make the highlight reel.

And then, instead of returning to the same life, he steps into a role that fits the one he built during that year.

He ends with something about maybe blogging again.

Then no more posts. And trust me I kept looking for more. Interviews. A book. The only thing I could find was a few podcasts of him talking about startups and tech.

There is something so clean about all of that.

He did the thing without the likes following him. He didn’t monetize the moment. Didn’t turn it into a brand. Didn’t build a program about stepping away or start a podcast.

He just moved into the life he envisioned.

His desire to be honest with himself about what actually mattered drove him to make the choices and changes he wanted. To stop protecting a title at the expense of a life. To design work around his values instead of sacrificing his values to protect the work.

Some outcomes are measurable. Others are not. How do you measure when you were in the crowd when they looked out to see if you were there? Whether you chose presence over performance. Whether the relationships were where you wanted them to be. Whether the health you built was something you could actually live in. Whether the work fit your values and not just your résumé.

I don’t know Max Schireson, but I love his story. So, I'm sharing both posts together as a pair.

1. “Why I am leaving the best job I ever had” (Aug 2014) — the decision, and the honesty it takes to name the real tradeoffs.

2. “A year off” (Sept 2015) — what it looked like to rebuild a life with more of what mattered, without walking away from meaningful work.

This isn’t a story about quitting. It’s a story about redefining wealth while you’re living in the moment and then building a life around that instead of the other way around.

And I have to ask.

If time is your most valuable currency: what are you spending it on today that you wouldn’t again?

And what would it look like to redesign your work or perhaps your life. Not to do less. But to do it in a way that actually matches what you say matters.

You don’t have to post about it. You just have to decide.

I’ve been doing some counting today. A couple of texts back and forth sent me down another one of my typical rabbit holes. What was I counting? A couple here, a couple there. Friends I’ve known for years. Acquaintances I have heard about. Marriages that looked, from the outside, like they were working.

They weren’t.

I’m at that age now where divorce has stopped being for others and started showing up in my actual life. Not everyone and not all the time, but enough that you notice. Enough that you start wondering what you missed or whether anyone saw it coming.

And that rabbit hole was started by a number I was familiar with.

69%.

That’s the share of divorces in the United States initiated by women. Not a new stat, it’s been consistent across decades of research, but one that resonates when you’re watching it play out in real life. Nearly seven out of ten marriages that end, end because a woman decided they should.

The first reaction is to reach for blame. To make it a story about men failing, or women changing, or the culture unraveling. But the data resists that typical interpretation.

More interesting: the gender gap in who ends relationships only exists in marriage. In dating. In cohabitation. Women and men are equally likely to walk away. Something specific to the institution of marriage is producing this gap.

Researcher Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford put it plainly: marriage has been slow to catch up with modern expectations, particularly around equality. Wives still carry a disproportionate share of the domestic load even when both partners work full time. Emotional labor, the invisible work of tending a relationship and noticing when something is off, falls unevenly too. Women feel it accumulating. Men often don’t see it until it’s already been decided.

I’ll speak for myself here. Alison and I are coming up on twenty years married, twenty-five together. For most of that, I’ve done the laundry, the cleaning, the grocery shopping. I won’t pretend that makes me unusually evolved, the honest version is that I’m particular about how things get folded, how a kitchen gets cleaned, the order of a grocery run. My own wiring as much as anything else. But what I’ve learned, slowly, is that it matters anyway. As a way of showing that I’m paying attention to the life we share, not just my portion of it.

Alison is a physician. Her work carries a heavy outcome. The kind where the stakes are actually life and death. What I’ve learned, and I’m still learning it, is that my job in those moments isn’t to add to the pile. It’s to protect the space where she can let it go. A Pilates class. A long run. An hour where nothing to do. That’s not a sacrifice. It’s just paying attention.

And all of this is happening inside a cultural moment that makes it more complicated. Marriage rates are declining. The average age at first marriage keeps rising. There's a real and documented loneliness crisis particularly among men. And layered on top of all of it is one of the loudest, most confused conversations about masculinity in a long time. Which is generating far more headlines than solutions and leaving most men with more to sort through than clarity to act on.

I don’t think the answer lives in any of those directions though. I think it’s quieter than that.

The marriages I’ve watched work, and I’m thinking of specific people, specific couples, share something that’s hard to name but easy to recognize. Both people are paying attention. Not performing, not coasting on history, not assuming that what worked five years ago still fits. I mean actually paying attention, right now, to what the other person needs and whether the life they’re building together still fits who they’re both becoming.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

It requires a kind of ongoing investment that’s easy to defer. There’s always something more urgent. Work, kids, money…life. Marriage becomes the thing you’ll tend to later, when things settle down. When the kids are out of the house. When work eases up. When there’s more time.

But things don’t settle down.

The 69% isn’t a referendum on men or women. It’s a signal about what marriages are failing to provide. Emotional connection, felt equity, a sense that both people are genuinely in it and being seen. Those aren’t extraordinary asks. They should be the baseline.

The hopeful read, and I do think there’s one, is that none of this is mysterious. The gap between what marriages could be and what they often become isn’t inevitable. It closes with attention. With the willingness to ask hard questions before someone else decides you waited too long.

I think about the couples in my life who are doing it well. They didn’t fall into it. They chose it, repeatedly, in ordinary moments that didn’t feel like choices at the time.

That’s the thing about a good marriage. You don’t build it once. You build it constantly.

Or you find out, eventually, that you didn’t.

Physical Wellness

I am a morning person. Always have been. I am out the door before the rest of the house wakes up, not because I have to be, but because that is when the world is quiet and that is one of my favorite things about running.

Most mornings I am out the door before the rest of the house wakes up. Because I know what happens if I don’t. The day fills up. The window closes. And the version of me who shows up for everything else… the work, the family, life — is a worse version than the one who got the run in.

So when researchers at the University of Sydney published a study analyzing nearly 60,000 people and concluded that tiny, combined improvements in sleep, movement, and nutrition could add a year or more to your life, I did not find it surprising.

The headline finding is this: you do not need to overhaul your life. Adding roughly five more minutes of sleep, two more minutes of exercise, and half a serving of vegetables each day, all three together, was enough to move the needle meaningfully on longevity. What made it resonate for me was the combination effect. To get the same benefit from exercise alone, you would need an extra 22 minutes a day. Small changes across three areas outperform a big change in one.

The researchers called it SPAN: Sleep, Physical Activity, and Nutrition. Their point was not that any single element is enough. It is that there is a unique connection between them. They work together in a way that none of them can replicate alone. Much like the four pillars.

This is not a message about optimization. The run you actually take at 5:45 a.m. is worth more than the perfect training plan you never start. The extra handful of vegetables is worth more than the supplement stack you researched for three hours. Small things you do consistently. Over time. That is what the data actually says.

Mental Wellness

I am not a big tennis fan, but I do know Roger Federer. Someone who has won nearly 80 percent of his singles matches. One of the greatest records in the history of professional tennis.

He also won only about 54 percent of the points he played.

This video recently popped up in my feed as I had been research graduation speeches lately. He addressed Dartmouth in 2024 and it is worth every minute of your time. Federer used that number to make an argument we should all hear. The margin between elite and ordinary is not domination. It is how quickly you let go, learn, and move on.

He said it plainly: in tennis, you have about 20 seconds between points. What separates the best players is not talent or fitness or even tactics. It is what they do with those 20 seconds. The ones who carry the last point into the next one, who drag frustration or overconfidence forward, lose that point before it even starts. The ones who learn to reset, quickly, give themselves a real chance.

This doesn’t work just in tennis or sports…it is a framework for life.

Most of us are not losing points in a Grand Slam final. We are losing a deal we thought we had. A job opportunity. A decision that did not land the way we hoped. A season of life that did not go according to plan. The losses are different but the question is the same: how long are you going to stand there holding it?

Federer’s answer is that the people who navigate hard things well are not the ones who avoid failure. They are the ones who accept it quickly, adjust, and walk back to the baseline ready to play the next point.

You will not win them all. No one does. Not even him.

The question is what you do in the 20 seconds after.

Financial Wellness

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week that aligned with all the recent headlines.

How Working in America Became So Joyless.

The story uses Dell charging employees for once-free office coffee as a symbol of something much bigger. A slow, cumulative stripping away of small human pleasures in the name of efficiency. Fewer perks. Bigger team loads. Closer monitoring. More pressure to prove value in the age of AI. And the result, according to workers across industries, is that office life has become something to endure rather than something we might enjoy or perhaps even invest in.

And it resonated for me…someone who spent 20+ years in the corporate environment.

Fifteen of those years were inside one of the best organizations in the financial services industry. Smart people. Mission-driven work. Real impact. And still, somewhere along the way, the experience of work started to feel more transactional and less human. More output-focused and less meaning-focused. More about demonstrating value and less about creating it.

That is not unique to any one company. It is a pattern. And the WSJ piece argues it is getting worse.

And when you dig into research you find people do not primarily leave jobs for money. They leave because they do not feel seen, because the work stopped meaning something, because the environment wore them down over time. Companies are cutting the coffee and wondering why the culture is gone.

But this is not just a leadership problem. It is a personal one too.

If you are spending the majority of your waking hours somewhere that is draining you, that is not a minor inconvenience. That is a quality of life issue. It shows up in your health, your relationships, your presence at home. Back to that 11% percent impacting your full life.

Work should not be joyless. If it is, that is worth paying attention to.

Spiritual Wellness

I have spent a lot of time in nature over the course of my life. The Cuyahoga River and CVNP at dawn. The trails throughout the west. The mountains. The desert. The beaches of Hawaii. Each one does something different to you. Each one has a way of making the things that feel so urgent less so.

And we again found this on our last few weeks in Hawaii. We were out on a boat off the coast of Hawaii, searching for sperm whales. The 12,000 that make the journey there every winter. And then they were there. Breaching. Moving through the water with a slow, deliberate movement. We watched them surface and disappear and surface again.

And then they dropped the mic in the water. We could hear them communicate — a language scientists are only beginning to decode. And their voices carry underwater for up to a thousand miles. 1,000 miles! A whale off the coast of one island can be in conversation with a whale it will never see, across an ocean that dwarfs anything we can actually hold in our minds.

I stood on that boat and felt very small. Not just in comparison to the size of that mammal in the water, but in the way that is actually good for you.

Research from the University of Wisconsin confirms something people who spend time in nature have always known: that encounters with the natural world activate something in us that is hard to name and harder to replace. The researchers describe it as the soul’s encounter with something larger than itself. A sense of connection that deepens both spirituality and wellbeing in ways that no indoor practice fully replicates.

I believe that. It is something I have gotten from nature over 20 years. We spend so much of our lives operating as if we are the main event. As if the inbox and the meeting and the quarterly number are what the world is organized around. And then you go stand somewhere big enough: the valley, the mountains, the open ocean and the world reminds you that it was here long before you arrived and will be here long after.

For me it is a freeing thought. And one that I want to pass along. Go find something bigger than yourself this week. It does not have to be a whale with a fin the size of a car in your driveway. It just has to be something that makes you remember how large the world actually is.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Have you ever met someone who says they don’t really get music?

Not that they dislike it. Just that it doesn’t do anything for them. It’s background noise. They know some artists. Know some songs. Might have a few favorites, but nothing that gives them goosebumps when it comes on or something they play when they just need to hear it.

I’ve never known what to do with that. I don’t say that with any judgment — there are plenty of things other people feel deeply that just don’t do it for me. I get it. I just genuinely can’t locate that experience in myself. Music has never been background to me. It has always been something else entirely.

I got that from my dad.

He didn’t give me a lesson about it or sit me down and explain why it mattered. He just had it. A deep, almost physical relationship with songs and artists and records and it was contagious. Riding in the car with him. Hearing him light up when something came on. Watching him disappear into a memory the second a certain song started playing.

It was truly evident at an infamous BBQ we had. A convergence of things to celebrate — Alison’s and my engagement, a graduation, a birthday, a retirement. Our whole family and friends were there.

I remember my dad on the grill, cooking burgers, a few Miller Lites in. Of course music was going to be played. And then it started. His top 10 favorite songs. A debate and conversation that lasted almost the entire night. My cousin there provoking him, egging him on. Him rattling off “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Stones, “I’m a Man” by Chicago, some Beatles, some Santana. Songs moving up and down the list as the night went on.

But that’s how it works for him. You can be mid-conversation and something comes through the speakers and he’s gone. Back to wherever he was when he first heard it, who he was with, what that version of his life felt like. The rabbit hole opens and he follows it all the way down.

I do the same thing. I learned it from watching him.

And one of those moments.

A show at Blossom Music Center. High school. “August and Everything After” had just come out and the Counting Crows were playing outside on a summer night. I was there with my dad and one of my best friends with his dad there too. Jakob Dylan opening with the Wallflowers. And there’s Adam Duritz on stage, dreads flying, raw energy coming through in the best way, singing like he meant every word of it personally.

I’ve seen them a handful of times since. In college with Rusted Root, in a completely different chapter of my life than that first show. A few years ago with my wife, watching Duritz older now, dreads gone, aged the way we’ve all aged. But that made it more meaningful. Because the songs hadn’t changed but we had. And there they were, still giving me that feeling. Pulling me back through those memories. Back to every version of myself that ever listened.

That’s what music does if you let it. It keeps a record.

Junior year. I had an English teacher who taught me that it was okay to be curious, okay to be your own person, okay to ask questions that didn’t have a perfect answer. We were debating “Recovering the Satellites”, whether it was as good as what came before, what it meant that it sounded different and he stopped and recited the lyrics to Mr. Jones from memory.

A perfect song.

Not to make a point. But to show me what lyrics and stories can mean to each of us.

Because for him there wasn’t a debate. How could there be. He found what he needed in that first album.

I understood something in that moment about what it meant to be a person who actually inhabits their life. Who carries their experiences in their body and not just their memory. Who is shaped by what they’ve loved.

I wanted to be that kind of person.

And how do you find that person. That moment. That experience..

Silverchair. Freakshow tour. The Agora in Cleveland. High school, driving up without our parents, which felt like an adventure, which it was, and standing in a room of maybe a few hundred people watching this band play like the walls couldn’t hold them. The mosh pit. The energy. A drumstick landing in the crowd and somehow ending up in my hands.

How do you manufacture those moments? You can’t stream it. YouTube isn’t sending you that drumstick in the mail.

It existed in that room on that night and then it was gone. But because I was there I got to take it with me.

Then last year. Oasis. Back together for the first time in fifteen years, eighty-five thousand people, Liam and Noel on the same stage again like no time had passed and all the time had passed at once. I saw them in college in front of a few thousand. Now this. Same songs. Completely different gravity.

I thought about my dad the whole time.

Music has shown up everywhere in my life for most of these 46 years.

On a long run when the right song arrives at the right mile and something shifts in you. You speed up, the effort becomes easier, or the feeling becomes heavier, or you just suddenly know something you didn’t know before.

In the yard with my boys, something playing in the background while we’re just living in the day. Playing catch or raking leaves. Hoping they will hear those songs someday and be pulled back to this. To these yards and these afternoons and whatever version of their dad was out there with them. That’s not a small thing. That’s how it gets passed down.

In conversations with my dad where Sirius lands on something and he’s off “Oh, I remember where I was when I first heard this” and I know exactly what he means because I feel it too. Because he gave me that.

And that is why music and presence are absolutely linked.

A song doesn’t just store a memory. It stores the feeling of the moment. The specific quality of that Tuesday night at Blossom. The feeling of being sixteen and standing in that crowd. The wisdom you bring to watching a band you love twenty years later with the person you love most.

There is some nostalgia in that. But perhaps more than anything it is presence all wrapped up in those lyrics, that music, those emotions.

And maybe that’s why I struggle when people say they don’t get it. Because what I hear underneath that is that they haven’t found the thing that anchors them to their own life. The thing that says you were here, this happened, this mattered.

We all need something that does that. Music is mine.

My dad handed me a gift without knowing he was giving it. He just loved something openly, without apology, and let me be a part of it. And somewhere in there I learned that it was okay to feel things fully. To let a song make you remember. Or cry. Or give you that warm feeling. To follow the rabbit hole wherever it goes.

Pay attention to what moves you. Not because someone told you it should. Because it actually does.

Those are the things worth following.

Physical Wellness

I love coffee. It is how I start every single day. Not just for the caffeine…I actually love the taste. Alison and I have built an entire travel tradition around finding great coffee shops wherever we go. Every city, every island, every new place we land, we find the coffee first.

So when the research lines up the way it has been lately, I take it personally. In a good way.

A study published in JAMA found that people who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of tea daily for decades had lower rates of developing dementia than those who drank little or none at all. And the key word is caffeinated. Decaf did not have the same effect. The researchers accounted for a long list of variables: health conditions, medications, diet, education, family history, BMI, smoking, and mental illness. After all of that the data still showed the impact.

But it does not stop there. A study published in the European Heart Journal found that people who drank their coffee in the morning, before noon, were 16% less likely to die from any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease compared to non-coffee drinkers. All-day drinkers did not see the same benefit. The timing matters as much as the habit.

And earlier this year, the FDA officially recognized plain coffee as a “healthy” beverage. Which I am choosing to accept as validation of a lifelong commitment.

Some of the things that are good for us are not the most complicated. Not the stack, not the protocol, not the optimization tool. Just two cups of coffee in the morning. For decades. A ritual that can doubles as relationship time, creative space, and, apparently, brain and heart protection.

Mental Wellness

The 2026 World Happiness Report dropped last week. Something I pay attention to each year.

A key headline: heavy social media use is contributing to a stark decline in well-being among young people, particularly in English-speaking countries and Western Europe. In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, life satisfaction among under-25s has dropped by nearly a full point on a ten-point scale over the past decade. Meanwhile, in 85 of 136 other countries around the world, young people are actually happier than they were twenty years ago.

The numbers in flashing red: adolescents are averaging 2.5 hours of social media per day. Those who use it less than one hour report the highest levels of well-being and, even oddly enough, higher than those who use none at all. And algorithmically driven feeds built around visual content and social comparison are the most damaging. Platforms designed for actual human connection do far less harm.

And this is not just a teenage problem, though that is where the numbers are most potent. It is a generational mental health shift happening in real time, to adults and young people alike. The report’s authors put it plainly: if social media platforms did not exist, many users would be better off.

I think about this in the context of everything we talk about here. We are investing more than ever in mental health: therapy, meditation, breathwork, retreats. And at the same time, we are handing a generation a device that is scientifically designed to make them feel worse. The tools are running in opposite directions.

Financial Wellness

The latest KFF Health Tracking Poll found that two-thirds of Americans worry about affording healthcare. More than food, more than housing, more than utilities. Healthcare costs have become the number one financial anxiety in this country. And a majority of those surveyed expect it to get worse, not better, in the coming year.

And this is probably not surprising to anyone, because it tells us exactly where the pressure is sitting in American households right now. Not in the investment account. In our own bodies.

Leading me to something I don’t believe gets talked about enough: one of the the best long-term financial strategies for reducing healthcare anxiety may not be a better insurance plan. It may be a better relationship with how you move and what you eat.

The research on this is consistent. Studies show that every dollar invested in preventive care: exercise, nutrition, lifestyle intervention saves between three and six dollars in future healthcare costs. Approximately 80% of US healthcare spending goes toward treating preventable chronic conditions. Heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity. Conditions that are largely driven by how we live, not just by genetics or circumstance.

The gym membership, the whole food grocery run, the consistent sleep schedule aren’t just wellness choices. They are financial decisions with a long time horizon. The body you are building or neglecting today is the healthcare bill you will or will not be paying a decade from now.

Most financial planning conversations start with the portfolio. Very few start with the body. But if healthcare is now the dominant source of financial anxiety for American families, maybe the most important investment conversation is about prevention. And it starts not with an but with another retirement calculator, but with a run, a set of pushups, and a better plate of food.

Spiritual Wellness

Hawaii has been part of our family for a long time. I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time there over the years. For work, for vacation, and as a family. It is one of our favorite places in the world. What makes it special is not just that it is beautiful, which it obviously is. It is that each island is completely its own thing. Oahu and Maui and Kauai and the Big Island do not feel like four versions of the same place. They feel like four entirely different worlds that happen to share an ocean.

We were there in November and again recently. And while we were there the North Shore of Oahu was hit by catastrophic flooding. The worst in twenty years. Homes destroyed. Families displaced. Neighborhoods underwater. More than 230 rescues in a single night. People were being pulled off rooftops. One family was paddled out on surfboards.

Hawaii News Now captured what happened next in a simple headline: “We are grateful. Community support powers North Shore flood recovery.”

By Sunday, less than 48 hours after the worst of it, hundreds, possibly thousands, of volunteers showed up. Not organized by a government agency. Not deployed by a disaster relief foundation. Just people showing up for people. Neighbors clearing mud. Strangers handing out food and water and shovels. Someone paddled out on a surfboard to reach a family who was trapped.

One organizer said it plainly: “I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of my community. All I see is people helping people.”

This is what a community does. This is what community is. Not the word on the wellness t-shirt. Not the private membership club. Not the curated online group. The thing that shows up with a shovel at sunrise because someone needs it.

We optimize our sleep scores and track our HRV and invest in our longevity. All of that is worth doing. But none of it replaces this. The willingness to show up without being asked. The instinct to paddle toward the problem instead of away from it.

The North Shore will rebuild. It always does. Because that is what that community is made of.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

I used to fly out Monday morning and come home Thursday night.

The alarm would go off. Bag already packed the night before. A quiet drive to the office in the morning and then directly to the airport in the afternoon. That was my routine. Every week. For years.

Before the boys came along, before moving back to Ohio, before trying to build any of this. Alison was in residency. I was at Vanguard. At the time it made sense and fit our life. The airports, rental cars, hotel gyms, the consistency of a life that felt like it was moving forward because it never stopped moving.

I was pretty good at it. I liked the work. It helped me grow, personally and professionally. And I told myself the miles and hotel rooms were fun, because they were in those years, and that it was giving me something. The routine had a payoff in adventure and freedom.

And it did. All those years of fun cities and weekend trips added up. Baseball games. Beaches. Weekends in the mountains. New trails. Great food. I stacked moment after moment.

But eventually, that pace started to get old. The routine became routine. And all that work led me to a new role at the firm, one where the travel slowed down. A few nights here or there, every other week. A new challenge. Still on planes, still on the road, but a schedule that wasn’t completely dictating my life. Or so I told myself. And I enjoyed it for a few more years.

And then along came Parker.

Like everyone who becomes a parent realizes, everything changes. All at once. And I began to feel it walking out the door after saying bye and heading to the airport. Having to be gone on a Saturday or Sunday to cover a conference. Some mornings knowing I wouldn’t actually be home when his day was over. The bath and bedtime routines I would miss. The small ordinary moments that weren’t actually small.

But you accept it. You tell yourself it’s the price of admission. The work and the routine got you here, so you can deal with that. And I did…for a while. But something felt off. Not wrong exactly. Just not right.

Then Beckett arrived and those feelings doubled. And then a couple of summers happened that changed everything. Arizona was hot, we wanted the Midwest summer, and we wanted family. So we went back to my parents’ house, the one I grew up in, and spent those summers there with the boys. Watching them run the same yard I ran. Watching my parents with them. Three generations in the same house, the same kitchen, the same backyard.

That’s when I wanted to rewrite the story. Because if I kept on this arc I wasn’t going to love the ending. The life I was building on the road didn’t add up to the life that was right in front of me in that yard.

And then the guy who doesn’t love math did the math.

How many summers?

How many nights?

How many hours and minutes?

Those answers are what led us to moving back home to Ohio in January 2020, when they were five and three. Closer to family. Closer to the life I had begun to envision. To the life we wanted.

And then Covid hit.

The world stopped. The planes stopped. Travel stopped. I was home, for what was the longest stretch in those early months since I’d started traveling thirteen years earlier. No Monday morning flights. No long drive. No Marriott hotel room. Just 168 hours a week in the same house as the people I loved most.

I never went back.

Not because of a grand realization or a dramatic moment. Because I began to truly understand what I was giving up. What time actually meant to me.

And this all came up the other day. I was talking to someone about my old travel schedule, the Monday-Thursday life, and I started running the numbers out of curiosity.

A week is 168 hours. My boys are awake roughly 14 hours a day. Take that job I had those first six or seven years at Vanguard. If I was gone Monday through Thursday, like I used to do, that’s close to four full days. Roughly 56 of their waking hours, gone. Every week.

Over a year, let’s say 42 working weeks, that’s about 2,350 hours I wouldn’t be in the house while they were awake.

My oldest is ten. If I’d kept that schedule since he was born, I would have missed somewhere around 23,500 hours of his waking life.

He’s only been awake for about 51,000 hours total. I would have missed a little less than half. Half.

Even the kinder version, the schedule I was actually on, a night or two every other week, costs about 600 hours a year. That’s not nothing. That’s hundreds of dinners, bedtime stories, school drop-offs, sports games, dog walks, bike rides, and the random Tuesday afternoon where nothing and everything matters.

But 23,500 hours. That’s a different conversation. That’s not a trade-off. I’m not sure there’s a word for what that is.

And the thing about numbers is they don’t lie. You can tell yourself quality matters more than quantity. You can tell yourself the money you’re earning is buying something better for them down the road. But try reflecting on that decades later in life.

I know because I lived inside that lighter version for a handful of years. I know what it feels like to walk in the door and realize you missed the thing you can’t get back. That FaceTime bedtimes are not the same. And that time gives you the things that nobody planned. Bath time. The conversation in the car. Catch in the back yard. The question at the dinner table that came out of nowhere and now they’re finally telling you what happened at school. The moment where your kid looks at you and you’re actually there to see it.

Those moments don’t get put on a calendar. They just happen. And they only happen if you’re there.

I’m not writing this to tell anyone how to live. I know what it costs to change a career. I know what it costs to stay. I know some people don’t have the option I had, and I know how fortunate I was to make the jump. To not go back.

But I also know this: I ran the numbers on the life I used to live, applied them to the life I have now, and I couldn’t have done it.

Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

That’s a different word. Wouldn’t is a preference. Something you’d rather not do. Couldn’t is a line you can’t cross because you’ve seen what’s on the other side and you know the cost is more than you’re willing to pay.

I couldn’t have missed 23,500 hours of my boys’ lives and called that a good trade. I couldn’t have built a career on time I was borrowing from the people who needed me most. I couldn’t have looked back at the end and said the airports were worth it.

So I stopped.

A week is 168 hours. That’s all any of us get. It doesn’t magically add more. It doesn’t make exceptions. It doesn’t care about your title or your sales pipeline or your next promotion.

The only question, the one that lies underneath everything I write and everything I guide, is whether the way you’re spending those hours reflects what you’d fight for if the math was suddenly non-negotiable.

For me, it became undeniable when I did the math. And it became permanent when I realized that the life I wanted wasn’t waiting at the end of my travel schedule. It was happening in the rooms I kept leaving.

168 hours.

What are yours telling you?

Physical Wellness

Most conversations about strength training are framed around performance. Getting faster. Looking better. Lifting more. A new study published in JAMA Network Open reframes the whole conversation.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo followed 5,472 women between the ages of 63 and 99 for more than eight years. They measured two things: grip strength and how quickly each woman could complete five unassisted sit-to-stand chair raises. Then they tracked mortality.

The results were direct. For every 7 kgs (15.4 lbs) of grip strength, there was a 12% lower mortality rate. Women who completed the chair stands fastest had significantly lower death risk compared to those who were slowest. And the findings held up even after accounting for how much they moved, how much they sat, their cardiovascular fitness, and markers of inflammation in their blood.

That last part matters. Most earlier studies on strength and longevity couldn’t cleanly separate strength from the fact that stronger people also tend to be more active. This one did.

The results were plain as day: when they scaled the strength measures to body weight and lean body mass, the mortality relationship held true. Size didn’t explain it. Strength itself was the thing.

My biggest takeaway from this study was not only who it was about, but what it broadly means. Women ages 80 and older are the fastest growing age group in the country. And what the data keeps pointing to is that the ability to get out of a chair, to carry your own body through space, to maintain functional independence—that’s not just about quality of life. It’s about how you experience life and being alive to have one.

You don’t need a gym. You need to move against resistance, consistently, across time. That’s it.

And this applies to all of us. Right now. When did you last do something that actually challenged your muscles? Not a walk. Not stretching. Something that made them work.

Mental Wellness

It’s one of my favorite times of the year. Spring training and opening day is coming soon. The other day I was reading about Brandon Guyer, one of the heroes of Cleveland’s Game 7 in 2016. One of the greatest, most soul-crushing games I have ever seen.

He went 3-for-10 with four walks and four runs scored in the 2016 World Series. But the article wasn’t about what happened on the field, it was about what happened inside his head during Game 7.

Bottom of the eighth. Two outs. Runner on first. Cleveland down by three. Aroldis Chapman, the hardest thrower in baseball, walking in from the bullpen. Biggest at-bat of his life.

And right on cue, what Guyer calls the “scared sheep” showed up. Don’t strike out. Just put the ball in play. Don’t look bad.

Most people would try to fight that voice. Push it down. Guyer did something different. He’d trained for it.

He had a name for the version of himself that shows up under pressure…the Hungry Lion. An alter ego. A flip the switch identity he built and found in a zero-gravity chair, visualizing exactly this situation before it arrived. Chapman on the mound. Down in the count. An umpire’s bad call. Everything against him.

“I believe everything happens twice,” he wrote. “First, in our mind, and then in real life.”

He fell behind 1-2. Stepped out. Found a speck on the barrel of his bat. Took a breath. His last thought wasn’t don’t fail. It was bring it on.

RBI double to right-center field.

This isn’t just a baseball skill. It’s one we all need. The ability to build an approach or practice in our minds so that when those moments show up, we’ve already been there. And that requires practice, repetition, and the willingness to accept it in the moment.

In the high-pressure moments of your own life, the hard conversation, the big presentation, the decision that matters which version of yourself shows up? And have you actually trained for it?

Financial Wellness

McKinsey titled the research bluntly: Help your employees find purpose or watch them leave.

Nearly 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is primarily defined by their work. And yet only 15 percent of frontline workers say that work actually fulfills that purpose. Meanwhile, 85 percent of executives say it does.

Same company. Completely different experience of meaning.

They found that this gap isn’t just a wellness problem. It’s a financial one. People who live their purpose at work are more productive, more resilient, more likely to stay, and more likely to innovate. The inverse is also true. People who feel disconnected from meaning don’t just underperform quietly. They cost the organization in turnover, in disengagement, in the slow erosion of culture.

The most striking stat: frontline employees were ten times less likely than their managers to say they’d had any opportunity to reflect on their purpose. 10x. That is a pretty massive gap.

Clearly, purpose shouldn’t be a perk. It doesn’t just live in a mission statement on the wall or in that annual employee meeting. The research suggests it’s one of the most powerful performance levers available and most companies are leaving it almost entirely untouched.

Whether you’re leading a team, building a business, or figuring out your own relationship with the work you do every day, the question underneath the data is the same.

Does your work feel like it means something? And if not, what would it take to change that?

Spiritual Wellness

There is a trend here. These types of classes are showing up all around colleges and universities.

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans built what became one of the most popular courses in Stanford’s history. They called it Designing Your Life. A pretty simple premise: apply the principles of product design to the way you build a life.

In a recent podcast, they shared their approach, philosophies, and wisdom with students. From the idea of the transactional vs. flow world to the pursuit of your best self and all of it pointing to the importance of just showing up, paying attention, staying curious. Curiosity, they said, is the gateway drug to wonder. And wonder might be the closest thing we have to a universal spiritual experience.

I think about this in the context of the loneliness epidemic we keep talking about. Part of what’s been lost isn’t just connection with other people. It’s connection with that flow state, with moments that feel genuinely alive rather than just scheduled. With meaning that doesn’t have to be earned or optimized.

The question they kept coming back to: when was the last time you were so absorbed in something that you completely forgot to check your phone? Hard to do these days.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

I’m a Golden God And other things we used to believe about ourselves

I watched Almost Famous again, for the umpteenth time, on a flight this week.

If you haven’t seen it, Cameron Crowe wrote it as a love letter to his own adolescence. A 15-year-old sneaking into concerts, riding tour buses, falling in love with rock and roll before the world told him what it was supposed to mean to him. It’s one of the most honest films ever made about the moment just before you become who you’re going to be.

For me, when I first saw it, it made me wish I had grown up in that era. Because it made me see what I wanted growing up in Cleveland.

The bands in that film stayed at Swingos Celebrity Inn on Euclid Avenue. Led Zeppelin. Bowie. The Rolling Stones. It was the place where rock and roll came to sleep when it came through Northeast Ohio. A building I drove past years later without knowing its history until I was old enough to understand what history meant. Cameron Crowe was writing about a world I was adjacent to without realizing it. That’s what great art does. It shows you that your hometown was always more alive than you knew.

But this isn’t about Swingos, which I have already written my love note about. This was different. This was about one scene. One real night.

Russell Hammond…the guitarist, the rock star, the guy the whole movie orbits around has a fight with his lead singer. The tension that’s been building all tour finally breaks. He storms off. And then he ends up at a house party with a group of random kids who pull up in a van and ask if he wants to hang out after his show. In Topeka.

He goes. Not because he’s reckless. Because he’s tired of what’s fake and looking for something real.

He takes acid. He climbs onto the roof. And he spreads his arms wide and screams into the night:

“I am a golden god!”

Then, a few minutes later, still on the roof: “I’m on drugs!”

It’s a moment you both laugh at and long for. Not just because it’s funny. Because I recognized something in it.

My sophomore year of college. St. Patrick’s Day. Cleveland.

We did kegs in the morning, because that was what you did, and hopped the Rapid Transit down to the Flats. Somehow, with a fake ID and the particular confidence that only a 19-year-old possesses, I got into a few of the dive bars and patios along the river.

The parade had ended. The day was building. The patio was packed and the sun was out. And someone, I don’t remember who, looked out at the Cuyahoga River and said: “You think you could swim across?”

I want to be clear about something. This was not a good idea. The Cuyahoga River is cold. It is not clean. It has, famously, caught fire. It is not a river you swim in, let alone swim across on a St. Patrick’s Day afternoon after beers and partying in the Flats.

And yet.

There was a negotiation. There was a collection. And for some cash and the signature of my fraternity’s pledge president in my pledge book, I stripped down to boxers and socks and jumped off the patio into the river. Dead fish and empty bottles be damned.

It wasn’t that the pledge book was the most important thing in the world. But I was pledging that semester which meant I was in the middle of something that mattered to me. Wanting to belong. Be a part of a group of people I was choosing, and who were choosing me back. We did dumb things together. A lot of dumb things. But I spent more real time with those people than almost anyone I’ve known before. The kind of time that only happens when you’re young and broke and living on top of each other. And all of that creates moments like this. Those friendships shaped me for years. The river was just one afternoon in the middle of all of it.

I made it across.

I climbed up a ladder on the other side. The bartender at the old Shooters looked at me the way you look at someone you’re shocked, confused, and a bit impressed.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “And stupid. But man that was wild. Haven’t seen that on St. Patrick’s Day.”

He handed me the towel. He handed me the beer. And for about thirty seconds, two strangers stood on the other side of the Cuyahoga River absorbing an oddly surreal moment.

That’s it. That’s the whole memory. But I’ve told that story a hundred times and that bartender is always in it.

Not because it was smart. Because it was real. And real things have a way of teaching you something long after the moment is over.

My friends showed up with my clothes. I got dressed, started walking toward a cab, and watched two police officers heading toward the spot I’d just vacated because someone else had apparently followed me in.

One of the dumbest things I have ever done in my life.

And the best thing that came out of that. The story.

We had disposable cameras back then. You bought them at CVS, used them over a weekend, dropped the film off, and got back a sleeve of 24 photos a week later. Some blurry. Some dark. Some inexplicably sideways. You taped the good ones to your dorm room or college house wall. The rest went into a shoebox that, if you’re like me, is still somewhere in a closet thirty years later.

The stories from those nights didn’t live online. They lived in your head and in how you told them. And here’s the thing about stories that only exist in the telling: they get better. They get funnier. The river gets colder. The cops get closer. The crowd on the patio gets bigger and louder. Nobody fact-checks you. Nobody pulls up the video. The story belongs to you and the people who were there, and together you are its only editors.

Now we document everything. And I understand why. The cameras are right there, the moment feels worth capturing, sharing feels like connection. Perhaps go viral. But something changed when the comments moved from your friends the next morning to a thousand people you’ve never met.

Your friends knew you. They laughed at you because they loved you. They gave you grief because you’d earned it together.

A thousand strangers don’t know you. They just see the clip.

And the difference between those two kinds of response…one that shapes you, one that just exposes you is everything.

I’ve been digging into the data on how young people are socializing less, dating less, spending more time in the managed and observable world of their phones and less time in the unobserved chaos of actual life.

In 2003, young adults spent 12.3 hours a week with friends. By 2024 that number had fallen to 5.1 hours. The percentage of 12th graders who have ever been on a date dropped from 87 percent in 1980 to 46 percent today.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think part of what’s driving it is the audience.

When every moment is potentially documented, shared, and commented on, the rational thing to do is take fewer risks. To avoid something real. Stay closer to home. Do things that look okay from the outside. The cost of a bad night used to be a story you told your friends. Now it can follow you forever.

But something is getting lost in that calculus.

The chance to find out what you’re made of. Who you are. The chance to find something real the way Russell found it in Topeka, the way I found it in the Cuyahoga. In a moment you didn’t plan for and probably shouldn’t have said yes to.

You don’t know it’s a boundary until you’re already crossing it.

That’s the thing about being young and unguarded and not yet fully formed. You say yes before you know what you’re saying yes to. That openness doesn’t disappear as you get older. But it gets harder to find. Life builds walls around it quietly. Responsibility. Reputation. The weight of knowing better.

Russell Hammond on that roof wasn’t just being reckless. He was doing something I think a lot of us did in those years. Something we don’t talk about enough when we talk about growing up.

He was finding out.

Jumping into the Cuyahoga didn’t create wisdom. But it taught me something about what happens when life puts you somewhere you probably shouldn’t be and you say yes anyway.

Not because you planned it. Not because you were ready. But because the moment was there and something in you answered before your brain could object.

That feeling doesn’t leave you. It becomes part of how you understand yourself.

I think about it when things get hard. When life puts me somewhere uncomfortable. Somewhere I didn’t plan for. Not the river specifically. Just the memory of what it felt like to say yes before I knew what I was saying yes to. To climb the ladder. To find someone waiting on the other side.

There’s always been a bartender on the other side.

I’m not telling you to swim across the Cuyahoga. Please don’t. Water and alcohol are a terrible mix.

I’m not telling anyone to take acid at a house party or climb on a roof or do any of the things that Russell Hammond or 19-year-old me did in those years.

But I am asking a question I don’t have a clean answer to.

When we built a world where every risk is documented, where every mistake is searchable, where the cost of doing something stupid is no longer just a story you tell your kids but a permanent piece of your digital identity: what did we also take from them? Or ourselves?

The chance to be a golden god, even briefly, even incorrectly, even while standing on a roof telling the truth about your current state.

The chance to find something real in a moment you didn’t plan for.

The chance to jump and make it and climb out the other side and know, in the way that only experience teaches, that you could.

Russell Hammond comes down from the roof. He gets back on the bus. He makes it through.

I got dressed on the other side of the river. I got in the cab. I made it through.

And somewhere in the making it through — in the cold water, the dead fish, the borrowed towel, and the two cops heading the wrong direction — I became slightly more the person I was going to be.

I hope your kids, my kids, get some version of that.

Not the river. Not the roof.

But something real. Something uncertain. Something with a bartender on the other side who hands them a towel and a beer and says: man, that was wild.

The album comes out. The tour ends. The golden god comes down off the roof.

And the story, if you’re lucky, is yours forever.

Physical Wellness

You already know sleep matters. What you might not know is how much.

A study published in JAMA Network Open looked at people actively seeking mental health care and tracked the relationship between sleep, physical activity, and daily mood. What they found wasn’t complicated, but it was pretty clear. Both sleep quality and physical activity were independently associated with better mood outcomes. Not one or the other. Both…together.

Here’s what I find interesting about that. Even though this relationship is starting to shift and becoming increasingly important for people. Most treat sleep like a variable, something that gets whatever time is left over after everything else is done. And most people treat physical activity the same way. It’s the first thing to go when life gets full.

But this study isn’t talking about elite performance or optimization. It’s talking about people who are already struggling. And even in that population, the two fundamental basics: move your body, protect your sleep were making a measurable difference.

The foundation isn’t complicated. It’s just inconvenient to prioritize. And it almost seems to easy to have that much impact.

If there’s one question worth asking yourself this week: which one are you short-changing right now, sleep or movement? And what would it actually take to protect it?

Mental Wellness

Look at this chart.

In 1976, 85% of 12th graders said they went on dates. Today that number is 46%.

Everyone talks about lonely teenagers. I keep thinking about what comes next.

The kids who stopped connecting in 2012 are adults now. They’re in the workforce. Leading teams. Starting families. And that same pattern… loneliness, difficulty with real relationships, discomfort in unscripted conversation is showing up everywhere.

Accomplished. High-performing. And somewhere underneath it, disconnected in a way they can’t quite explain.

This data doesn’t just tell you where we are. It tells you what’s coming down the funnel.

The loneliness epidemic isn’t coming. It’s compounding. And the generation behind them has even less practice at the thing that matters most. Like showing up, being present, communicating and connecting without a screen between you.

I see it every week in the work I do. The skill of real connection doesn’t just happen. It has to be practiced. And for a lot of people, that practice stopped a long time ago.

When was the last time you had a real conversation? Either unplanned, unhurried, and with no agenda with someone who matters to you?

Financial Wellness

Two people. Same income. One feels financially secure. The other is anxious about money every single day.

Research published in the Journal of Economic Psychology examined exactly this gap. The distance between what you have and how you feel about what you have. What they found was that the relationship between objective wealth and subjective wealth isn’t automatic. It’s filtered through two things: your ability to feel in control of your finances, and the anxiety you carry around money.

People with higher perceived financial control felt significantly better about their financial situation than their actual numbers alone would predict. The inverse was also true. Money anxiety didn’t just make people feel worse. It actively distorted how they evaluated what they had.

How you feel about your money isn’t just a reflection of how much you have. It’s shaped by whether you feel like you’re in control of it and by how much mental and emotional weight you’re carrying around it.

I’ve seen this in practice more times than I can count. Someone with significant assets who can’t sleep at night. Someone with far less who feels genuinely at peace. The number definitely isn’t the whole story.

The real work in financial wellness isn’t just growing the balance sheet. It’s building a relationship with money that doesn’t cost you more than the money is worth.

Spiritual Wellness

Harvard Medical School recently convened one of the more interesting conferences I’ve come across. They brought together psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and chaplains to examine what the research actually says about spirituality and mental health.

The conclusion wasn’t a soft connection. Researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Duke found strong evidence linking spiritual practice and community, in whatever form that takes, to lower rates of depression, reduced suicide risk, better recovery from substance use, and meaningfully better overall health outcomes.

And what is remarkable is what lies underneath it. What seems to matter most across all forms is a sense of shared purpose, connection, and meaning within a community. Religious communities tend to do that consistently. But it’s the elements, not the institution, that drive the outcomes.

Now more than ever, people are searching for exactly that. A sense of meaning that holds across time. A community they actually belong to. A framework that makes the hard moments navigable.

That’s not entirely a spiritual problem. It’s a human one. And the research keeps pointing in the same direction.

The question isn’t what form it has to take. It’s whether what you have brings you a deep sense of community, practice, and a way of making sense of things that goes beyond the day-to-day chaos life can bring us.

And In The End

From all of us at The 9:03 Collective: thanks for reading. Keep showing up. Stay curious. And never forget that the clock is running, so make it count.

If you’ve been enjoying Four Pillar Friday, the best way to support is simple: share it with a friend, forward it to someone who might need it, or subscribe if you haven’t already. The more people we reach, the more conversations we can spark about living with intention.

Until next week…

Adam

In 1967, a 25-year-old son of Greek immigrants took over the restaurant of a failing hotel in downtown Cleveland for $12,000.

The city was in decline everywhere you looked. The infamous scene of the Cuyahoga River catching fire would happen in two years. It was a national punchline… The Mistake by the Lake. Theaters, storefronts, and bars were shutting down. Businesses were leaving for the suburbs. Nobody was coming to downtown Cleveland. Not for anything.

But Jim Swingos came anyway.

He opened the Keg & Quarter inside the Downtowner Motor Inn at the corner of Euclid Avenue & East 18th Street. Good food and good wine. Not much else to work with. His customers were mostly the handful of business travelers still passing through the city. The one everyone else was laughing at.

Then Elvis called.

Well, Elvis’s people called. Colonel Tom Parker, his infamous manager, was looking for a centrally located base of operations for a Midwest tour. He drove to Cleveland, walked through the Downtowner, and sat down to eat. On the menu they had fatback, cornbread, and collard greens. The Colonel liked what he tasted. He called Elvis and told him to come see the place for himself.

Elvis booked over 100 rooms. Three full floors. Running up a $20,000 bill in room service alone. And when the tour was over, he came back. Again and again.

Swingos renamed the place the Celebrity Inn.

And then something happened that no marketing strategy could have created: Elvis told people. Not in an interview or press release. Just in the ordinary, analog way we all want someone to know about. One conversation at a time, backstage, on the bus, in a green room somewhere. There’s this place in Cleveland. You have to stay there.

Word traveled. Fast. And it changed everything for Jim Swingos.

Led Zeppelin showed up. The Who showed up. Frank Sinatra showed up. The Rolling Stones showed up and later wore Swingos t-shirts in a spread for Rolling Stone. Kiss. Deep Purple. Mott the Hoople. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Bruce Springsteen. Muhammad Ali. Wilt Chamberlain. President Jimmy Carter.

The names filled the iconic guest book.

According to stories, on any given night at the Keg & Quarter bar you might find the FBI in one corner, Hells Angels in another, mob guys in a both, and local politicians at a table by the wall. And upstairs, Keith Moon would be handcuffing strangers together while dressed as a cop. Or Jerry Lewis might be drilling out the locks on rooms and replacing them with his own. Or Jim Swingos would be refereeing Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore in and all out brawl with Yul Brynner.

And Led Zeppelin, the rock gods of hotel havoc, were tearing rooms apart so thoroughly and often that Swingos came to love their visits. They were the only band that traveled with an accountant. Whatever they destroyed, the accountant pulled out a checkbook and paid for everything. Jim would get brand-new rooms out of every stay.

WMMS, The Buzzard, program director John Gorman described looking around the room on a typical night: someone from Jefferson Airplane at one table, Roxy Music at another, and you’re having dinner with a third band entirely. On a Tuesday.

Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople may have said it best:

“Swingos was a place you remember checking into and checking out of, but you can’t remember anything in between.”

And what amazes me the most.

This wasn’t happening in New York, L.A., or London. It was happening in Cleveland. The mistake by the lake. Where the river caught fire. Where the downtown looked like a boarded-up wasteland.

And in the middle of all of that was Jim Swingos.

He had created something special. A place with authenticity, connection, and good food and drinks to keep it all going. But more than anything an owner who understood one thing: if you take care of people well enough, they’ll tell the story for you.

And Swingos didn’t exist in isolation, either. He was part of a collective. You had WMMS radio, rock critic Jane Scott at the Plain Dealer, Scene Magazine, the Agora Music Hall. Together, without a coordinating strategy or referral program, they built something that none of them could have built alone: a music scene so powerful it became the compass for rock and roll in America. Cleveland didn’t become the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by accident. It earned it because of people like Jim Swingos. A man who gave the city a living, breathing identity worth preserving.

A good friend of mind is obsessed, in a wonderful way with this story, and she recently sent me down rabbit hole. Eventually landing on one of my favorites…Almost Famous. The story of Cameron Crowe’s and his time writing for Rolling Stone. And he was so shaped by the place that when he made the film in 2000, he insisted on including Swingos and demanded authenticity down to the pattern on the carpet, even though it appeared on screen for only a few seconds.

That’s what happens when a place is real. It shows up in stories decades later. In the memories they have. The nostalgia.

I think about this story often. Because I love music and I love Northeast Ohio. And I think about him because I’m trying to build something, too.

The 9:03 Collective isn’t a hotel. It isn’t a restaurant where the greatest bands of my favorite era in music will be swinging by. As much as I might love that. But the question I like to ask myself is the same one Jim Swingos answered: Can you build something so real that the people who experience it carry it forward on your behalf?

Everyone wants to scale now. That’s the word. Scale. Maximize your impact because that’s what the new world allows you to do. One viral post, one podcast episode, one ad, one imprint and suddenly thousands of people know your name.

But his story taught me: Knowing your name is not the same thing as being changed by your room. Your experience.

Swingos never went viral. He never scaled awareness. Most people outside of Cleveland and the rock & roll circuit had never heard of him and if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you hadn’t either until about five minutes ago. But his impact was undeniable. Google his name. The Celebrity Inn. The Keg & Quarter. He ran that place for nearly two decades and it shaped the identity of an entire city. He influenced how a generation of musicians experienced Cleveland. He ended up in a major motion picture. He became a lasting piece of American rock and roll history.

And none of it came from trying to go viral. It came from going deep. In one room, on one corner, in one forgotten city.

There’s one thing I keep turning over in my mind: the difference between scaling impact vs scaling awareness. They are not the same thing.

A viral post scales awareness. The likes, the name recognition, that little impact to ego. A room full of people having an experience they can’t stop talking about scales impact. One spreads your name. The other spreads your meaning.

Elvis didn’t take a selfie with Jim and post it. He ate the cornbread. He stayed three floors. He came back. And he told people. Not because he was paid a sponsorship fee, but because the experience was real enough to retell.

That’s the thing about telling someone. It filters for something that an online review doesn’t. When someone tells you a story in person about a place, an experience, a meal, a night they’ll never forget…they’re spending something. Their time and credibility. Their attention. It means something to that person listening.

An algorithm doesn’t decide what’s worth recommending. A person does. And they do it because something was real enough to warrant the risk of their own reputation.

Jim Swingos died in 2015 at the age of 73. The corner of Euclid and East 18th Street, where Elvis ate, where Zeppelin raged, where Sinatra became a close friend. The same place that helped Bruce Springsteen when he was getting started because he couldn’t afford the $15 a night so he let them stay for $8…it’s now a Comfort Inn and a Subway.

No plaque or special landmark designation. No monument.

But that seems right. That feels rock and roll. Because it was never about the building itself. It was about what happened inside those walls. The moments and stories and the fact that people who were there still can’t stop talking about it fifty years later.

Museums and monuments are great. But the thing that makes the story worth telling, and much of life worth remembering, isn’t the stuff on display. It’s the memories.

Where something happened that was so real, so special, so felt, that people carried it with them long after the doors closed.

I’m definitely not trying to build the next Swingos. I’m just trying to give people that feeling. Those moments. Those memories.

A space where families sit together and do something they rarely do: look at the life they’re living and ask whether it’s the life they actually want. Where a couple counts how many summers they have left with their kids at home together. Where someone puts words to something they’ve been carrying for years and finally lets it go.

That’s not going to go viral.

But if I do it right, if the experience is real enough, the people who sit in that room will leave and tell someone. Not because I asked them to. Because they can’t help it. Because something happened in that room that was worth telling.

Elvis didn’t need a sponsorship fee and a 30 second Tik Tok about the Celebrity Inn. He just needed a Boston strip steak and cornbread to tell you about a guy named Swingos who gave a damn.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it always was.