Hello! Welcome to This Old Man’s Life and my very first blog post! My name is Chris and I’m the voice behind this place. Thank you for taking the time to visit the site!
I published this as my very first post. Looking back at it now, I can see I was still figuring out what I was trying to say — and maybe who I was trying to be.
So I’m rewriting it. Same story. Same crossroads. Just told more honestly.
A Fork in the Road: Time For a Change
Turning 51 felt like standing still while everything moved around me.
I’d spent the previous year watching things fall apart — a job I’d given a lot of myself to, my health sliding in ways I couldn’t ignore, and my mother’s dementia getting worse every time I saw her. I wasn’t okay. I knew I wasn’t okay. And I kept going anyway, the way you do when you don’t see another option.
Then one day I did see another option.
I left the job. It wasn’t dramatic. I just decided I couldn’t keep walking that direction and expect to end up somewhere different. The experiences of that last year — especially the last six months — had made it clear that something had to change. My values, what I actually wanted out of life, what I was willing to keep trading my time for — none of it lined up with where I was anymore.
I had a small emergency fund. Not much. Enough to breathe for a while. And I started asking myself what I actually wanted the next part of my life to look like.
My parents’ health was part of that. Watching my mother go through dementia — the slow disappearance of the person I knew — stirred something in me I hadn’t felt before. A resolve. I didn’t want my kids going through what I was going through. I wanted to rewrite my own story while I still could.
Where I Started
I didn’t have a grand plan. I had a list of problems.
The first one was obvious: I’d put on about 40 pounds. Fast food and vending machine dinners will do that. Work had me basically living at the station for stretches — no real meals, no real sleep. My body had been running on fumes and junk for too long and it showed.
So health was first. Figure out how to eat better. Figure out how to move more. Start there.
The first things I tackled:
- Losing the weight — figuring out a real nutrition plan
- Getting consistent sleep instead of running on empty
- Building an exercise habit that fit my actual life
Sleep was second. I’d been running on so little for so long that I’d started spacing out mid-sentence at my desk. That wasn’t sustainable. Quality sleep became something I started taking seriously for the first time in years.
→ My Nutrition / WOE post → My Sleep post
Then I started doing what I always do when I don’t know what to do — I started researching. YouTube. Google. Whatever I could find on aging, longevity, living intentionally. That rabbit hole led me to two ideas that ended up shaping everything: Ikigai and the Level 10 Life.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept — the idea of finding your reason for being, the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. I’m still working on that one honestly.
The Level 10 Life came from Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning. The idea is simple: take the major areas of your life, rate each one honestly, and figure out what a 10 would actually look like. I drew mine out in my bullet journal — a simple bar graph, not the fancy circle chart most people use — and it changed how I saw everything. Suddenly all that noise in my head had a shape. I could work with it.
What This Place Is
This blog is the record of what happened next.
It isn’t a success story with a tidy ending. It’s just what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and what I’m working through. The health stuff. The financial stuff. Rebuilding a house that needs a lot of work. Trying to be a good dad. Figuring out what it means to actually live rather than just get through each week.
What I’m documenting here:
- My health journey — from weight gain to triple bypass surgery to recovery
- My Level 10 Life framework and how I use it
- The house, the yard, the projects
- The mental health side of starting over
- Whatever else comes up along the way
I’m not a doctor. Not a coach. Not an expert in any of this. I’m a 53-year-old man who went through some hard things and decided to write it down.
There will be a little bit of everything here. My main focus is aging and longevity, with living a Level 10 Life following close behind. I’m no sort of professional in anything. This site is just me trying to do better. Trying to be better.
If something here connects with you — the rebuilding, the starting over, the trying again at an age when people might tell you it’s too late — then this place is for you too.
This is my personal experience — not medical or professional advice of any kind.
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