18/07/2026
WHAT I NOTICED TURNING 50 IN MEXICO CITY ⬇️
I turned 50 a few weeks ago, at a speakeasy bar in Mexico City that we'd rented out for the night, and I keep starting to write about it and then deleting everything because it felt too much like a Linkedin lesson, and this isn't that.
I just want to describe the room.
We'd planned it for months...down to the hour, honestly.
Open bar. A DJ who moved from soul into 90s hip hop and back again all night.
Parting gifts, of all things, World Cup hats, because someone in that room will always remember the year we all watched matches together and it mattered more than it should have.
Erica and I both gave speeches. People danced until the DJ had to end it, not us.
I projected my Day in the Life videos behind the DJ.. eighteen years of my life, a project I started in 2008 where I make one video a year, every year.
Different cities.
Different apartments. COVID, lockdown, a move to Mexico, a move away from Mexico, a move back.
..Whoever happened to be standing near the screen that night watched eighteen years of my actual life flash by in a few minutes, scored to whatever song fit that particular year, while a DJ played 90s hip hop over the top of it.
It was a strange thing to stand next to.
Here's what got me, watching that screen with a drink in my hand: so many of the people in the room weren't in any of the early videos.
They came later...some only in the last two or three years. There's a specific, quiet math to getting older that nobody explains to you in advance: making real friends gets harder.
Not impossible. Harder.
And almost every new relationship you form as an adult comes with a reason attached to it... a deal, an introduction, someone who needed something from you or you from them.
You spend enough years in business and you start reading that invisible ledger into everything, even the things that were never supposed to have one.
So when someone shows up in your life with nothing to gain from you, no deal on the table, no reason at all except that they wanted to know you and then they just... stay.. you notice.
You're supposed to notice. That's not networking. That's the other thing.
I looked around that bar and did the math anyway.
Most of the room came into my life after 40.
A few flew in from other countries for a few nights... one dinner, one toast, one dance floor and flew home a few days later.
I don't think I understood, before that night, what it would feel like to actually watch that:
grown adults rearranging their calendars, their money, their weekends, to stand in a rented-out bar in Mexico City and watch me turn fifty.
Not one of them needed anything from me that night.
There was nothing on the table.
They just came.
I don't know exactly when gratitude stopped being a word I used casually.
It used to be a sentence...grateful for my health, my family, the kind of thing that slides out without costing you anything.
Somewhere in the last decade it stopped being a sentence and became something closer to a fact, the way you just know your own name.
Every day genuinely counts.
Not because I remind myself to feel that.
Because I've watched it be true, over and over, in rooms exactly like that one.
Erica and I have been together for twenty-five years this year!
We met two weeks before 9/11, which is its own strange thing to sit with...the world tilting sideways right at the start of us, and somehow that didn't undo anything.
She gave her own speech that night, and I don't remember most of what either of us said, only that at some point I looked over and she was crying and laughing at the same time, and so was I.
..I don't have a takeaway here.
I'm not going to tell you to document your life or call your old friends or throw a party with hats.
Eighteen years of video means eighteen years of everything..my mother's last goodbye is in there, so are our basset hounds we had to say farewell to.
Watching it flash by, I understood something I don't usually let myself sit with: some year, this project will have a room like that one with someone missing from it.
I don't know who. Nobody ever does.
That's the only thing turning fifty actually taught me: you don't get to know how many more rooms you get. You just get to notice the one you're in. 🤓
