Physical

Eight yards of mulch showed up in my driveway yesterday morning.

I had the shovel and the wheelbarrow out by 10. I needed to be done by 4 because we had a baseball game to get to. Six hours, one pile. It needed to be moved, spread, and all cleaned up by the time we needed to leave. No app counting anything, no heart rate zone to optimize. Just a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a finite amount of time.

At 46, I could spend a Thursday hauling mulch across a yard and still make the game, and that is not an accident. It is 25 years of early runs, lifting, and a commitment to being consistent. Over all these years there were races, events, and adventures, but it was really all about this, the capacity to do the work of an actual life when life asks for it.

A lot of what your body gets from movement comes not from structured exercise but from what physiologists call NEAT, everything you do that is not a workout. Hauling, carrying, stairs. The stuff that does not count when uploaded to Strava. And the people who keep moving seem to hold their health longer. The data on heavy, grinding labor with no recovery is a much more nuanced story, but that is definitely not what I am highlighting.

Probably more important and what I actually care about is the next 20-30 years. I want to be the guy still doing this in his sixties and seventies, still carrying his own weight through the world, still useful in his own yard.

I want to let HYROX know we have found our next big event.

I came across the research of Michael Finke, a professor of wealth management who has spent years studying what actually makes retirees happy. He looked at a long list of spending categories, housing, gifts, clothing, transportation, and asked which one tracked most closely with life satisfaction. The answer was not the obvious one

Money spent being with people.

An older Gallup analysis found that nearly 70% of adults over 65 who spent around 4 hours a day in social activity reported high enjoyment and happiness, compared to 44% of those with no social time at all. Finke found the satisfaction kept climbing, peaking around 6 hours a day. The thing most likely to make the back half of a life feel good was not the size of the portfolio, but time with others.

Finke also looked at marriage, the most common social connection most of us have, and found something asymmetric. A good marriage was strongly tied to greater happiness. But a bad one did more damage than a good one did good. The downside was heavier than the upside. And for people without a spouse, he found the investment in friendships mattered even more, not less.

Most of this research is about people who have already stopped working, but I think we now know this isn’t something you just plan for later. The habits that determine whether someone is socially rich at 70 are the ones being built at 30, 40, and 50. When it is easy to let life and our full calendars let connections slip away. Finke is describing a destination.

Make sure you’re making those connections now.

Financial

I read a piece in the Atlantic, and this research paper, recently about what has happened to youth sports. I will not relitigate the whole thing, but it sent me down a road I have not been able to get off of.

Youth sports in this country is a $40B industry. And where there is that size of market money follows. Firms are raising real money, serious funds, to buy up the rinks and the fields and the leagues and the tournaments. The result is a stack of fees that did not used to exist. Tournament dues. Travel. Parking at the complex. In some places a subscription to watch a livestream of your own kid, because the 4K cameras and your child is content. This is not a hockey story or a baseball story. It is the whole model. We have gotten very good at finding a thing people love and a demand that already exists, and figuring out how to put dollar signs all over it. If there is demand, we will monetize it. That is the era.

I think about my own first few years in baseball. Late 80’s, early 90’s. I played for a team called Varsity Isle, named after the little drive-in down the road. My teammates were the kids from my street and my school, the ones I already saw every day. And after a win we would go to our namesake. There was a screen door around back that would swing open to take your order, and you would line up behind it and get a milkshake or a cone or a root beer float. We ran around that parking lot in our polyester uniforms in the heat, sweating, completely happy.

It cost almost nothing. There was no fund behind it, no M &A, no subscription, no complex 4 states over. It was the neighborhood, a coach who probably paid for the baseballs himself, and an ice cream shop that gave the team its name. And it was worth everything. We have managed to invert it. The thing costs a fortune now, and somewhere in the transaction the part that was actually valuable, the kids from your own street, the screen door, the float after the win, got quietly priced out.

Spiritual

I want to share a study, and you are going to wonder why I put it in this pillar instead of one of the other three. Stay with me.

Researchers have spent years testing something they call prosocial spending, which is just spending money on someone other than yourself. The headline goes back to a now-famous experiment where people handed a small amount of cash, five or twenty dollars, were told to spend it either on themselves or on someone else. The ones who spent it on someone else ended up happier. A 2022 review went back through fifteen rigorous experiments to see whether the effect was real or just a nice story from the days of small, shaky studies. In large samples, it held up. Spending on others reliably makes us happier than spending on ourselves.

In one experiment, people spent a small amount the same way every day for five days. The ones who bought themselves the same little treat each day adapted fast, the way we always do, and the happiness faded. The ones who spent it on someone else, same gift, same person, every day, did not fade. Buying for yourself wears off. Giving does not seem to.

So why is this in the spiritual pillar and not the financial one. Because I do not think the study is really about money. I think it is one more piece of evidence for something the other three pillars were circling all week without saying out loud. The mulch was about staying able to show up. Finke found the happiest retirees are the ones who point their money and their hours at other people. The team I loved as a kid mattered precisely because it was shared, neighbors and a screen door, not a transaction. And here are experiments saying we are built to support outward.

That is the spiritual part. The good life is not the optimized one or the self-directed one. It is the connected one. We are happiest and most ourselves when we remember we are a small part of something much larger, and act like it. The research keeps arriving at the same place from four different doors.

Until next week—keep building your moments.

The Journey Team & The 9:03