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. And now the research is saying we got it wrong. They weren’t just eating mammoth steaks by the fire. They were foraging. They were diverse. They were, 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.

Being tribal about nutrition is exhausting. And the research keeps pointing to the same boring, unsexy 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…

The Journey Team & The 9:03