Latest / Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden / Stop Optimizing. Start Living: Choose Meaning Over Wellness

Transcript

Stop Optimizing. Start Living: Choose Meaning Over Wellness · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  Tami Jorden (00:02.252)
• 0:14
  Welcome to MyRalm. I'm Tami Jorden, and this is Butterfly Days, the podcast that proves you're not past your prime. You're living in it right now because women don't have expiration dates. Butterfly Days is a celebration of the extraordinary potential of Gen X and Boomer women. Throughout history, women have shared wisdom to uplift and empower one another, and you're about to learn hard earned wisdom and
• 0:18
  best kept secrets from interesting, inspiring women. So if you're ready to embrace your butterfly season with confidence, find joy in the present, and create a legacy that matters, you're in the right place. No more holding back. Let's spread our wings now. Here we go!
• 0:26
  Tami Jorden (00:54.668)
• 0:30
  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan and you're listening to Butterfly Days. Today is a shorty solo episode, which I do alternating every other week because I know you're busy and you'd like something cool to think about that can make your life better, but uses a little bit less time. So next week we'll return to the interviews, but today is our solo. And what are we going to talk about? Do you think that there are gifts in aging?
• 0:34
  I do. I think that we get bolder about the truth, whether it's popular or not. So here it is. I'm about to touch a golden cow, and I'm a little nervous, but stick with me to the end because I think I'd crack something for us, Jen Jones and Jen Xers, that no one else has been saying. So buckle up, buttercup, here we go. Listen, like you, I've been around diet culture my whole life. Cottage cheese, grapefruit, frasca.
• 0:42
  Atkins and now GLP ones. It just never stopped. It just changed shape. And here's my confession. Now I'm getting fatigued by the wellness and longevity culture too. I'm sorry. It's so focused on how long we might get, and not on how fulfilling that time actually could be. So hear me first, because this matters most.
• 0:50
  If you love moving your body, lifting, running, yoga, pickleball, long walks, whatever, that's good and normal and healthy, and I'm right there with you. Caring for your body, wanting more vital years, none of that am I criticizing today. I'm not critiquing the woman who loves her own strength or who works in health and wellness. That can be beautiful. What I'm putting under the lights is the system that's grown up.
• 0:58
  Around all of it. And the fear it quietly feeds on in midlife women. A genuinely good thing can carry a dark underbelly, and this one hits in a particularly pernicious way for us. The fitness and longevity industrial complex pumps out more to buy, more to try, more to feel guilty about, until caring for your body just curdles into this hamster wheel where nobody's allowed to step off. And
• 1:06
  Tami Jorden (03:17.016)
• 1:10
  To be honest, I distrust any movement that drifts into purity test, because that's exactly when babies start flying with the bathwater and we lose the good stuff. So let's think if it's right. Ask yourself, how much of your time goes to managing diet and fitness? How much real estate in your head have they convinced you it takes to live a good life? And how much room is actually left for what brings you joy?
• 1:14
  And deep fulfillment. So, why does that question even matter? The last one. Well, this is where the Japanese word, ikigai, comes from. And this is something I'd like to teach you about if you don't know. It's the idea that doing personally meaningful things is what makes us feel fulfilled. And here's what strikes me the women who live longest aren't the ones with the perfect workout or the cleanest diet. They're the ones who found something.
• 1:22
  worth waking up for. Ikigai isn't a feeling that binds you. It's a question of where we put our time. And midlife with its losses and its growing awareness of mortality is the exact moment that those questions become impossible to dodge. Because we can't necessarily get more time, but we can live more in the time that we have.
• 1:30
  I'm sorry to say this, but I think there's a denial buried in the optimize your body talk. I think it's not about health. I think it's about control. And under the control, I think is a terror, the fear of decline and death that nobody wants to sit with long enough to learn from. And here's the brutal irony: the very fear driving the obsession is the thing that if faced directly,
• 1:38
  Delivers what we're actually chasing. Purpose, meaning, peace. Accepting your mortality is the healthiest path there is, because it's the only one that stops you from running from the truth. Listen, here's a realization that stopped me cold. I have literally sat in the room as but humans complete their work here, as people labor to die. And I've yet to see.
• 1:46
  Tami Jorden (05:39.302)
• 1:50
  anyone wish they'd done more squats. The dying don't audit their macros. They audit largely their relationships, their regrets, and their unlived choices. Y'all, the wellness industrial complex has monetized the avoidance of that reckoning. Every supplement, every hormone protocol, every clean eating framework can be a way to stay busy, distracted from bigger, scarier questions.
• 1:54
  You know, years ago the wise Seneca said this about his people. We guard our money carefully and squander our time carelessly when it's the one thing that can't be replaced. And I think maybe in this we're still doing that. We're chasing quantity of years over quality of life because time cannot be replaced. Listen, we watched our moms age in a culture that made aging shameful and made them largely invisible.
• 2:02
  And now we're handed a different but equally hollow script that aging is a problem to solve instead of this passage that can enrich us. You know, there's a quiet morality that nobody says out loud sometimes. If you discipline yourself enough, eat right enough, optimize enough, then you've earned a longer, better life. Get sick, age visibly, or die too soon, and you just didn't try hard enough.
• 2:10
  That's not fitness. That's a moral scorecard in athletic wear. And it lands hardest on women because the oldest message that your body is a project requiring constant management just got rebranded as empowerment. Be thin for him became be strong for you. Same shame, same judgment of anyone who doesn't comply, just better marketing. And the workout is innocent, you guys, that's cool.
• 2:18
  The scorecard is not. Listen, the body's just a vessel, and it holds the best of us. And here's the trap. A life built around maintaining that vessel has no answer for when the vessel fails, which it will every time. That's not pessimism. That's a universal fact. And chasing control over what we can't control steals something real from our experience.
• 2:26
  Tami Jorden (08:06.252)
• 2:30
  You know, the Stoics had a better idea, and here's our second word for the day. It was called amur fati, love of your fate. In other words, accept what is. Not resignation, not giving up on health, but a fundamental orientation that says I'll live fully within my limits instead of pretending they don't exist. I'll be healthy, but not because aging is shameful, and not because I'm hoping to live forever.
• 2:34
  You can be all in on fitness and still be doing your inner work. They were never enemies. Love your strong body, just refuse to use it as a hedge against dying. Listen, we cannot buy security and aging. This culture sells the idea that death might be negotiable if you're virtuous enough with the right peptides and creatinine. But that's not wellness. That's magical thinking with a macro count. The truth is
• 2:42
  You can do everything right and still get a diagnosis. Or you can get hit by a train on the way home tonight. We don't get to earn our way to a guarantee with our health. So the only real lever we have is intentional investment of the time we actually have. And that's what makes the timing of all this that we're being told so insidious.
• 2:50
  Because midlife is exactly when our body starts telling the truth, regardless of effort. Hormones are gonna shift, recovery slows, visible aging begins, and right when we should be asking, what fills our cup, what do we bring to the table? The culture hands us a harder optimization protocol instead, pointed at something that was never gonna last anyway. Listen, we're told brevity is life's tragedy, but it isn't
• 2:58
  Brevity is what moves us to live now. A piece of music isn't diminished by the ending. Think of it like that. It's made by it. Think. Tension plus resolution, and then the silence. The silence is what makes the notes matter. Because you know what? An infinite song is just noise. We're built for the same bounded experience as humans, and urgency, love, creativity, sacrifice is.
• 3:06
  Tami Jorden (10:31.886)
• 3:10
  None of those make sense in an infinite life. They have value because our time is short. You are not just a body trying to last longer. You are a life trying to matter more. And where you invest your time should prove it. The women who get that in midlife, who stop negotiating with mortality and start mining the time they have, they're not just happier.
• 3:14
  There's shining stars for all of us. Listen, I bet you've done the things, checked the boxes, maybe even held the performance, and something's whispering there has to be more to the next decades than a better supplement stack and a smoother neck. And there is. I don't think anyone in these movements means harm. Most hold real truths. My concern is
• 3:22
  Is never build your life on someone else's blueprint. I don't care how nice it sounds. A healthy body is good, but it will never bring you the joy of a life that means the world to you. Modern culture has no room for grief, limitation, the slow work of meaning making. None of it's monetizable, photogenic, or algorithm-friendly. So grief gets medicated, limitation gets denied.
• 3:30
  Meaning making gets buried under more productivity, and what gets lost is the very thing that research says matters most. You know, globally, the wisdom traditions knew better. They built containers for this, elders, ritual, rites of passage. Heck, like even the hospice movement itself is a countercultural act, saying that this moment deserves presence, not avoidance.
• 3:38
  Listen, the most important work of your life has nothing to do with how you look or what you achieve. Our goal in midlife is not to build a brand. It's to find the quiet, durable things that make our one particular life feel worth living and then to do them on purpose. And here's what's incredible. That is available to every woman in midlife, regardless of body size, health status, income.
• 3:46
  Tami Jorden (12:52.15)
• 3:50
  or your Instagram following. So here's your homework this week. Look, really look at where your time and attention go. Then ask the braver question Is diet and fitness my smokescreen? Something that keeps you feeling productive so that you never have to face what's harder. Now pick one thing you genuinely love doing or love being. Learn to paint.
• 3:54
  Take your dog to the lake. Make dinner for the widow next door. Whatever moves you, this is about you. It's your time. Commit to it this week, not someday. Commit to it. There. I touched the golden cow, but you've got this. The world needs you shining because you love your life. And that's actually an ike guy in a morfati combo platter for you. So here's my benediction for you.
• 4:02
  May these ideas settle in your heart and your mind. May you chart a course that lets you write deeply meaningful next chapters from your own values and your own experience. May you find deep fulfillment in whatever you make of this life. In a garden, showing the world to a grandchild, building your business, serving veterans, or maybe finally writing the book that's been waiting inside you.
• 4:10
  And may you treasure that your worth, your meaning, and your potential have never lived in your body, but in your heart and the unique expression of your choices. There's only ever gonna be one you, and the world is better when you show up fully, without any shame about your age. And this week, when you're thinking about these things, remember, I'm rooting for you. So get it, girl.
• 4:18
  I'm so glad that you joined me today for this solo episode. Next week we'll have a great interview. But for this one, chew on some of the things that I've shared and please feel free to speak back to me about what you've learned. You can comment below or you can email me directly, whichever one works best. I'll see you next week.
• 4:26
  Tami Jorden (15:12.438)
• 4:30
  I'm so grateful you listened to this episode. I hope it was a real value to you. If there's a sister in your life who needs this message, please share it. Just like women have done to lift each other up over the centuries and across cultures. Women lifting each other is so important. It's why I do this work. And to avoid FOMO and keep up leveling your own life, make sure you don't miss the next episode.
• 4:34
  You may be losing hormones, but your life has given you powerful perspective. And I believe you have something to give that no one else does, that the world needs. So remember, I'm rooting for you. Let's go.