I had a 50-minute drive home from gun training on back roads, which I really enjoy in middle Tennessee. Tree-lined two-lane roads, and where there aren’t trees there are huge green fields. The occasional house or housing development.

I had the windows down and the sunroof open, 78 degrees and a sunny day.

It was glorious.

My friend who’d trained me is ex-military and ex-law enforcement. I don’t shoot as often as I should, and he very patiently took me through a few steps and did his best to drill them into me through repetition.

It was a good couple of hours.

But for a while during that drive, I was focused on the car in front of me. Driving the exact speed limit. Except of course when the dividing line became dashed for passing, and he sped up until we were past it. When I did have a chance to pass, there were oncoming cars. I was irritated for probably 10 or 15 minutes.

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Finally I broke out of that. I took a breath, and looked past his car. At the road ahead of me. The cloudless sky, warm air, and the trees and green fields zooming past.

I thought about what God had created for our enjoyment. How blessed and grateful I am for my wife, my friends, a nice home in a beautiful part of the country.

I felt joy.

Minutes earlier I felt irritation because I was focused on the thing right in front of me. A thing I had no control over. When I took my focus away from that, the car was still in front of me, but I just wasn’t looking at it anymore.

You’re so intensely focused on the thing in front of you. The next bill to pay. The doctor’s appointment that interrupts the middle of your day. It starts to feel like that’s your whole life.

Bills and appointments are important and need your attention. But they can occupy more of your attention than they need, especially in moments when there’s nothing you can do about them.

I think it takes real effort to not do this. The busyness of life makes it easy to feel disconnected from the things that really matter. Your wife bringing you a cup of coffee unasked, the warmth of the sun on your skin while you walk across a parking lot to a store.

Ecclesiastes comes to mind:

Don’t get me wrong, anyone who knows me knows I’m not going to tell you that you should walk around every day in a state of unending joy. There is work to be done, things to do. I’m just telling you to remember to pick your head up once in a while, and take in the bigger picture. Think about what you have instead of what you don’t have.

I notice feeling joy most often when I’m outside. I don’t have to be in the woods, on a hike. Where I live there are a lot of trees, fields, and open sky, and all I have to do is get out of my head, forget my to-do list for a moment, and look out at all of it.

I gave that car 10 or 15 minutes of a gorgeous 78-degree afternoon. That’s all he’s getting.

Every Sunday I write about what rebuilding after 59 looked like. Subscribe free, or go paid and get my book The Last 10 Pounds.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

I’m 65, and I still haven’t reached my peak.

Earlier in my life, I measured my peak in dollars. Net worth. Now I measure it in how I can be of service to others and how well I love my wife.

In my first marriage, I was so focused on earning money that I don’t think I paid enough attention to my family. When issues came up between us, I’d bury myself in work in my basement office. Or I’d stay silent or acquiesce. I’d keep pushing my anger down until, eventually, it exploded.

Now, when there’s a conflict, my first reaction might still be anger or irritation. But I sit down with my wife and we talk it through, rather than letting resentment build.

I’ve started volunteering at church. I make time for men at my favorite cigar lounge when they want advice or feedback. I do things for my wife without keeping score (as she does for me).

Most men don’t want to get old

I can understand that. There are more than a couple of good reasons to feel that way, and I have personal experience with them.

No matter how well you take care of yourself, as you age, parts will start to wear out and break down. I’ve had spinal fusion surgery due to intense back pain, prostate surgery, and three shoulder surgeries. Arthritis in my left knee, right thumb, and my spine. Degenerating discs along the entire thing as well.

Then there’s the fact that as you get older, it’s not just you. I have friends suffering from cancer, a brain tumor, kidney failure, and in need of a knee replacement.

As I get even older it will be the loss of friends through death. I’ve already lost one that I’d known for almost 30 years. Many more to come (assuming I outlive them).

A decline in one part of your life doesn’t have to mean that your life as a whole is declining. My spine has gotten worse. The way I handle a disagreement with my wife has gotten better. Both are happening as I get older.

A better version of yourself could be your future

As you get older you can be as strong as, if not stronger than, you’ve ever been.

You can be closer to the Lord than you’ve ever been.

You can be more patient.

You can be kinder.

You can be wiser.

At 65, I’m better in all those areas than I’ve ever been, and I’m still improving.

The strength part is easy to measure: this week I did four sets of leg presses. My last set was 415 lbs for 16 reps. That was a new personal record. The whole rack with the dial turned to its max 15 lbs.

The other day I was driving behind a very slow driver: 25 in a 30 MPH zone (which of course means you should be driving 35). I could feel the annoyance rising in my body, but I took a breath and a mental step back and thought “this will only get me home one minute later than I’d arrive otherwise.”

I spend more time now in prayer in the morning and hanging out with Christian men at the local coffee shop or cigar lounge, which is helping me keep Christ in front of me more throughout the week.

I still get irritated behind a slow driver. Anger can still be my first reaction in a disagreement with my wife. I’ve got plenty left to work on, and at 65 I can see that the work is making a difference.

Getting older hasn’t done any of this for me. I still have to lift the weights, catch my impatience, and stay in the conversation when I’d rather withdraw.

I used to measure my peak by how much money I made. Now I measure it by how well I love my wife and how useful I can be to other people. By that measure, I’m not at my peak yet.

Yours could still be ahead of you.

If you’re working on your health or figuring out what comes next, become a paid subscriber to The Redeemed Second Half. Every paid subscription includes a digital copy of my book The Last 10 Pounds, and founding members can book a 30-minute, one-on-one call with me. Bring something you’re dealing with, and we’ll talk it through.

I respond to every comment.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

I have no idea how it will go. I don’t know whether I’ll enjoy it, be frustrated by it, or feel like a fish out of water. But the only way to find out will be to do it.

Getting to this point took me over a year.

I’d been thinking about how I might serve at my church. There are tons of opportunities, and I didn’t know which to apply for. With my bad back I didn’t want to direct traffic on Sundays. I thought about being a greeter, serving coffee, and security. I looked at how long I’d have to stand, whether I’d need to be there before and after the service, and how many times a month I’d be committing to.

I didn’t want to volunteer for something, end up disliking it, and then feel bad about quitting. This verse came to mind:

Recently, I heard that they were looking for men to help with the kids’ ministry. I haven’t been around children in ages, but I felt led to apply. I joined a group tour to see the different age groups. I didn’t want infants (diapers) or terrible twos (screaming fits), but I thought elementary school kids might be interesting to help with.

So I applied, passed a background check, and was accepted.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll look for another opportunity, but maybe it will be the best thing I’ve done in a while. I spend a lot of my time talking to older men, so this might be a fun change.

Endless research

Research is necessary. But it’s easy to get hooked on the feeling of productivity that can come from researching something and never get around to doing something.

This can apply to all sorts of things, not just work. Endless scrolling on dating apps without connecting with anyone. With Amazon, even a $50 purchase can take us hours to reach a decision while we read endless reviews and summaries and compare prices. I’d hate to tell you how much time I spent deciding on which garden hose or lawn sprinkler to buy.

Researching something feels like we’re being productive. But the research needs to lead to action.

This can sometimes be driven by a fear of making the wrong decision.

Bad decisions

I’ve made my fair share of bad decisions, and I’m still here. The wrong motorcycle. Bad investments (I bought a ton of shady altcoins in 2021 and held them all the way down and below where I started). Poor choices in dating. Some choices were worse than others, but eventually I moved past them all and now they’re just part of my history.

You will make bad decisions. Decisions like which volunteer role to take or which workout routine to follow are easy to change. Even when the stakes are bigger, when you make a wrong decision, there’s usually a way to pivot.

Don’t use research or educating yourself about something as the reason to avoid doing the “something.”

• If you’re researching the best possible, most optimized workout routine, go to the gym and lift something. You can fine tune your routine along the way.

• If you’re trying to find the best diet to help you lose weight, start with cutting the sugary snacks and logging what you eat. Figure it out as you go.

• If you haven’t been able to decide on a church by reading their websites, just pick one and go next Sunday. If it’s not a fit, try another one the next week.

• If you’ve been researching motorcycles online for a year, go to a dealer this week and take a test ride. You’ll learn more about a bike in 10 minutes of riding than you will watching an hour of YouTube videos.

By the time you read this, I’ll be with the kids’ ministry, figuring it out as I go.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

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The canopy opened above me, and I felt a peace I’d never felt before.

Until that moment, I was terrified. I was afraid of heights and had signed up for a solo static-line jump to try to get over it. Decades later, I’m still glad I did it. (P.S. It didn’t work, it’s still an issue for me.)

As I remember it, jump school lasted just four hours. Then they loaded us onto a small plane with a gaping hole in its side. Along for the flight were a bunch of young, feisty, “oo-rah” off-duty Marines. We flew to 3,000 feet, and suddenly every single one of the guys in front of me had an expression on his face like he was five years old and had lost his momma at the mall.

I’m sure I had the same expression.

My legs dangled outside the plane as I thought, What the *@#% am I doing?!? But out the side I went.

Until the parachute opened fully, I remember saying, repeatedly and rapid-fire, Oh my God, please don’t let me die, as I mentally hyperventilated, remembered my instructions, and tugged at the steering handles, as the instructor taught, to help the canopy inflate faster.

And then, drifting above the ground, absolutely no sound other than the wind in my ears. Incredible.

I landed gracefully, grabbed another ‘chute, went up, and did it again. This time I was so enthralled I drifted over a lake, thought Oh sh!t, and found my way back to the landing area.

I made those jumps in December 1985, during my Navy years. I’d enlisted at 23 after dropping out of college twice and working jobs that weren’t taking me anywhere. I was a fry cook at Bennigan’s when a coworker told me he’d joined the Navy. About a week later, I walked into a recruiting office. Boot camp at Great Lakes and a posting to San Diego got me out of New Jersey for good.

The choices I'm proudest of in my life are the ones where I had an easy option but took the hard one.

The lift I gave up

At 64, a different hard choice was waiting for me. A woman who’d spent decades teaching the Schroth method for scoliosis put an X-ray of my spine into software that reconstructed it in 3D. I saw the curvature and rotation of my spine and the long screws from the fusion at its base.

I retired the deadlift that day. Barbell squats went the same week.

I’d liked being the man who could still pull heavy weight from the floor. Giving that up felt like surrender. A year earlier, I’d torn a tendon in my right shoulder beyond repair trying bench press heavy. I had a new perspective on what my spine looked like now, and I couldn’t keep treating the deadlift as a test of who I was.

Hip thrusts replaced the heavy pulls. Seated leg press replaced squats, and my numbers kept climbing.

The jump asked me to go through fear. The deadlift asked me to let go of something my ego wanted to keep. I’m proud of both choices now because I made them for reasons that still hold up.

Your version might be a conversation you’ve rehearsed but haven’t had. A workout you’ve postponed for six months. A habit you keep defending because changing it would force you to admit how long it’s owned you. A move you need to make. An apology that loses its value every time you add the word “but.”

Some of those are fear. Some are ego. Either way, the hard choice is the one you keep arguing yourself out of.

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The hard things that took years

Some choices require more than one tough afternoon. In 2011, Google’s Panda update crushed my website Game Rant’s traffic. I found roughly 1,000 articles under 250 words on a site where I’d set a 500-word minimum. The editor had ignored the standard, and I’d trusted him without checking the work. Both facts were true, but I was the owner.

It took about two years for the site to recover. I eventually sold Game Rant and Screen Rant, which I’d started in 2003. I’m proud I stayed with the site and rebuilt the traffic after admitting my part in the failure.

Starting over at 59 took a different kind of endurance. My marriage ended after 24 years. I lived in a rented duplex and learned to cook from YouTube. Then I moved to Puerto Rico. For a while, the new place helped. By my final months in San Juan, the group I’d spent time with had thinned out. I was sitting alone in my apartment with bourbon and no one to hang out with.

I moved to Nashville and became a 60-year-old roommate. The moves were hard. Facing myself and what I needed to change was harder.

I had to own my part in my previous marriage and face what the drinking had been medicating since the divorce. I had to learn to be alone without treating it as proof that I was unwanted. My faith had to exist on Monday as much as it did on Sunday.

I’d read my Bible every morning and tried to pray, and I couldn’t see it changing me. Then I met the woman who’d become my wife, and she showed me what faith looks like lived out.

I’m married to Mai now, and I sit with men I trust every week. I’m prouder of the last couple of years than of anything I did when I was supposed to be at my peak.

A reason worth the cost

I’ve made hard choices that were also bad choices. Stubbornness can feel like courage, and a man can congratulate himself for enduring something he should have left. The reason should justify the cost.

And keep in mind that pride needs watching, too. I know what these choices cost me and I can be proud of them without ranking myself above another man whose hard choices I know nothing about. Be on guard for hubris from your accomplishments.

Make the hard choice. More often than not, you'll look back years later and be glad you did.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

At 65, I ride a Ducati Diavel V4, and there’s nothing about the life I’ve rebuilt that I’d trade back. This week I watched the movie The French Connection again and spent its famous chase staring at the 1971 Pontiac LeMans.

My father drove a green ’72 (if I remember correctly) LeMans with a tan vinyl roof and the automatic shifter on the floor instead of hanging off the steering wheel. I was around 12, and I remember praying that he wouldn’t wreck it and it could be my “high school car.”

He wrecked it.

More than 50 years later, I watched that chase scene feeling like something had been taken from me.

Popeye stood on the corner

Director William Friedkin, better known for The Exorcist, shot the chase scene on Brooklyn streets under the elevated train. Most of it was planned and rehearsed. Stunt driver Bill Hickman made a 26-block run at 70 to 90 miles an hour through traffic, with Friedkin inside the car.

The chase feels real because part of it was dangerously real. At least one of the collisions was unplanned.

The rest of the movie runs on effort and is a time capsule of what life was like back then. NY City police detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) stands outside in the cold with a slice of pizza and a cup of coffee while the man he’s tailing eats dinner in a warm restaurant. To find someone, you walked around until you found them. To reach someone, you found a phone booth and hoped they were home to pick up.

Life looked more real then. You had to work harder for answers and getting in touch with someone took some effort. Now every answer sits in our pockets, and we spend half our waking hours looking at screens.

I don’t trust that feeling by itself.

Old cars were death traps that got 12 miles to the gallon (at 36 cents a gallon it wasn’t that big a deal). New cars beat the old ones on almost every metric.

But we’ve lost something.

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Shades of gray

Crash rules raised hoods and rounded off the sharp edges. Wind tunnels and EV range sloped windshields back. Bodywork is now more about airflow than it is about style. Where once the difference between models was unmistakable, now everything looks similar. And don’t get me started on car colors, where now everything is muted and shades of gray.

The current Nissan Z kept the 240Z’s silhouette, but it’s so… smooth. No details to catch the eye.

Dodge did a decent job with the Challenger, then discontinued it.

And the Charger that came back in 2006 was a four door “sport” sedan. (To Dodge’s credit, the latest model does harken back to the original.)

The ones that kept their face

Porsche took a different approach, God bless them. The 911 has had the same basic shape since it went on sale in 1964. In 1997 Porsche replaced the iconic air-cooled engine with a water-cooled version. The company changed the machinery, but protected the silhouette.

Porsche did stumble a bit with the headlights. The 996 was mocked as having “fried egg” headlights, and that was corrected in the next iteration.

Another one that respects its roots is the Mercedes G-Wagon. It’s been a box since 1979. Mercedes gave it a big redesign in 2018, but kept the exposed spare tire, old door handles, and turn signals on top of the fenders. It’s a design you can identify from across a parking lot.

Both of those cars changed what needed to change while protecting what made them recognizable.

You face the same choice when you rebuild.

Where I got it wrong

For a while after my divorce, I drank on nine days out of ten.

It was a great numbing medicine for me, rationalized under the category of “I’m learning to be an amateur mixologist.” But that level of drinking didn’t deserve a place in whatever I was going to build next.

I also know what happens when practicality starts making every decision.

When I moved to Puerto Rico, I sold my Corvette rather than pay the import tax and drive it on pothole-filled streets in San Juan. I bought a grey Volvo SUV because I thought it made sense there. Those reasons were legitimate, and that sensible, anonymous car matched who I was at the time. I wrote about that Volvo here.

I’d made that kind of choice since I was a kid. I grew up lower middle class. Dad worked construction, mom worked in a leather jacket factory sweatshop. We never lacked for the basics, but I was very dialed in to being frugal.

When I was a kid my mouth would hang open when a C3 Corvette, a black Firebird Trans Am with the gold “screaming chicken” on the hood, or a Triumph TR7 drove by.

But the first car I bought with my own money was a gold Mazda 626 coupe. For about $1,000 more (1979 dollars) I could have bought an RX-7. I talked myself out of it because transportation was transportation.

Man, how I wish I hadn’t done that.

The other side of me ran deeper than cars. I was raised in Elizabeth, NJ, in a Portuguese-speaking house, and learned English from watching TV. As a teen, I made a Super 8 movie with a friend, complete with a backlit demon mask and smoke effects we shot in an abandoned train station near his house.

That kid continued his love of movies, and eventually built Screen Rant around them. The same guy who watched The French Connection this week and paid more attention to the Pontiac than the plot.

That part of me belonged in the rebuild.

The parts worth keeping

When your life comes apart, the parts that need immediate repair can be obvious. Your health and your bank account might need work. A habit you’ve been leaning on and defending may need to end.

Those repairs still leave another decision.

Make two lists: what has to change and what is worth keeping.

My drinking and a generic car belonged to the first list. Movies, motorcycles, and writing belonged to the second.

Your second list might include an old friend you stopped calling. It might also be the work or a hobby you abandoned because it looked impractical.

The warning in Ecclesiastes helps me keep nostalgia from doing the thinking for me. The parts worth carrying forward are the ones that still make you recognizable to the people who love you.

Rebuild everything underneath, and make sure the man who pulls out of the garage still looks like you.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

I learned what decisiveness looks like from a starship captain.

In an earlier essay, I wrote that every man needs at least one thing in his life that makes him grin like an idiot when he sees it.

One of mine is a 34-inch die-cast model of the refit Enterprise from the movies on a table in front of my TV. It lights up like it does in the movies, and you can see the arboretum and the shuttle bay inside it.

Recently Star Trek had its 60th(!) anniversary. I didn’t watch when it originally aired on NBC. I found it in reruns in the early 70s, after NBC had canceled it and before anyone knew it would become one of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world.

The show was expensive to produce by the standards of its time. The attention to detail and budget showed on the bridge of the Enterprise. The room really looked like a place from which people could operate a starship. Everyone had a station, and all information flowed to the man in the center chair.

The ship itself was one of the coolest ships ever seen on the screen. I still say that the refit Enterprise from the first film is the most beautiful spaceship ever to appear on a movie or TV screen.

The future it promised

The equipment was only part of what made Star Trek different.

The show’s writers and designers tried to imagine how people might communicate, navigate, diagnose illness, and travel across enormous distances. The technology followed rules, even when those rules were fictional.

The larger promise was about humanity. Star Trek imagined a future in which people from different nations and races worked together, exploration mattered more than conquest, and our oldest divisions no longer controlled us.

The people in that future were still people. They encountered danger, made mistakes, lost their tempers, and disagreed about what to do next. Better technology hadn’t removed the need for judgment.

That was where Captain Kirk came in.

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The man in the chair

Kirk was a man of action, decisive and willing to fight for what he thought was right. His intelligence mattered as much as his nerve. He listened to the people around him and was willing to change course when the facts changed.

Spock gave him logic, probabilities, and the coldest reading of the situation. McCoy reminded him that logic couldn’t account for every human cost. Kirk listened to both of them, but the final decision always belonged to him.

In the episode “Balance of Terror,” chasing a Romulan ship that has destroyed Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone, he admits what the bridge crew can’t see:

“I look around that bridge and I see the men waiting for me to make the next move. And Bones, what if I’m wrong?”

McCoy can’t make the decision for him. Kirk returns to the bridge and continues the pursuit.

That scene matters because Kirk’s decisiveness doesn’t come from certainty. He doesn’t have certainty. He has information, competing advice, limited time, and responsibility for whatever follows.

Seeking counsel is part of command. Using counsel to avoid making the decision, isn’t.

Star Trek: The Next Generation made a different choice. There, Picard had a ship’s counselor on the bridge, sitting right next to him. Even watching back then, I found that to be ridiculous.

Picard called his senior officers together constantly, and he wouldn’t make a decision until he’d heard every one of their takes on a situation.

Both captains asked for input. The difference was what the asking was for.

In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the Enterprise is trapped by an alien ship and given a countdown to destruction. Kirk asks for options. One officer already voted to attack, and Spock says there aren’t any:

“sometimes, as in chess, when one is outmatched, the game is over.”

Kirk takes neither option. Instead:

“Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker.”

He tells Balok the ship is rigged with a non-existent “corbomite” device that destroys anything that attacks it. No one advised Kirk to bluff. It came from his own judgment, and it worked.

Picard went the other way. He’d often bring everyone in and come to a decision after he’d heard them all. It usually felt like a group decision instead of his.

I’m not saying Picard was weak. He made hard calls no one else would take. But watching the two of them back to back really highlights the difference: one man looks like he’s making a decision and the other looks like he’s waiting for permission.

Kirk could be impulsive, arrogant, and wrong. The captain’s chair made him responsible even when his judgment failed. He couldn’t hide behind a committee or blame the people who had advised him. Everyone on the bridge had a voice, but only Kirk could give the order.

The original show understood that strength and reflection could occupy the same chair.

None of us is likely to command a starship. But plenty of us will sit in rooms where other people are waiting for our decision.

When the chair was mine

A few months out from my divorce I was renting a place in the same city. I felt I couldn’t restart my life in the same place that I’d lived my old one. After some research, I decided to move to Puerto Rico.

My Utah friends thought I was crazy: I didn’t speak Spanish fluently, I didn’t know anyone there (other than one online friend), and the hurricanes.

On the other side, a couple of my friends I knew mainly online and had met just a few times in person said being a “digital nomad” was the way to go, and that I wouldn’t have to pay taxes on my capital gains. The weather was great, and it would be an adventure.

I made the decision pretty quickly, and set the wheels in motion.

Two months later I was in an apartment in San Juan.

It felt like the right move. I spoke some Spanish, found a tutor to teach me weekly for two months, and I thought Puerto Rico's Act 22 decree would pay off, since I was holding a good amount of Bitcoin.

It turned out I couldn’t understand 90% of what was spoken there. Puerto Ricans speak very rapidly with a dialect I couldn’t pick up, especially with my hearing loss. Crypto ended up going the opposite direction I’d hoped for, and in the end the move cost me thousands in taxes instead of benefiting me.

It turned out to be a temporary move, but I’m glad I did it. It shook things loose for me and looking back I’m glad it’s added an interesting page to my life history.

The stakes were different, but the decision was still mine. I listened to everyone whose opinion I trusted, but didn’t ask any of them to make the decision for me.

The final decision

It happens in business, marriage, fatherhood, and friendship. You gather the information available. You listen to people whose judgment you trust. None of them can remove the uncertainty.

Then you decide.

Good advice improves your odds, but it can’t carry your responsibility. Spock could give Kirk the numbers, and McCoy could tell him what the numbers left out, but it was still up to Kirk to choose.

My friends could tell me whether I should move to Puerto Rico, but I was the one who had to live there.

This is what I write about every Sunday for men who took the hit and still have to decide what's next.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

Twenty-five years ago I was standing in my bedroom in San Diego with my ex-wife. This was before flat-screen TVs, so we had a cathode-ray TV on a stand in the closet. It was early morning for us and she’d gotten up before I had. She heard on the radio about the first plane, we turned on the TV, and we stood there in shock, feeling terrible for the people in the North Tower.

The posts I’ve seen about 9/11 on social media this week have focused almost entirely on the Twin Towers in New York City.

But there was a lot more to it than is being remembered.

It wasn't just a single gut punch. It was like being in the ring with Mike Tyson, getting hit again while still reeling from the last punch.

For 102 minutes, every time we thought we understood what was happening, something else happened.

All times Eastern. In San Diego, it was 5:46 AM when the first plane hit.

8:46 AM: The first plane hit the North Tower. We thought it was an accident. Some sort of airplane part failure, a technical issue.

9:03 AM: The second plane hit the South Tower while millions of us were watching the first tower burn. Televisions had been turned on in offices and classrooms on the East Coast. And that is when we said "Oh my God, this is a terrorist attack!" We were glued to our televisions, watching it unfold in real time, listening for additional news and information.

9:37 AM: We were still trying to process what had just happened, and 34 minutes later came news that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. This wasn’t limited to NYC. Where might the next plane crash?

9:42 AM: Five minutes after the Pentagon was hit, the FAA ordered every aircraft in U.S. airspace to land at the nearest airport. That had never happened before.

9:59 AM: Seventeen minutes later, as the country watched, the South Tower collapsed. We watched in horror as it vanished before our eyes.

10:03 AM: Just four minutes later, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. We thought “Will there be more? Where will it hit next?” We had no idea how many planes might be involved or where they’d hit.

10:28 AM: The North Tower, the tallest building in NYC, collapsed as we watched.

It felt like we were in the middle of a nightmare with no end in sight. Uncertainty, horror, and fear all at the same time. It took a few hours with no new crashes before our adrenaline finally dropped and it seemed like it was finally over.

Then, the aftermath: 2,977 people died that day. Hundreds of firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and volunteers have died since, from inhaling pulverized concrete, glass fibers, and other toxic dust at Ground Zero.

TSA at airports. Removing shoes and belts to get through security. Scans and pat-downs. Loved ones no longer able to meet you at the gate when you arrived from a flight.

If you’re reading this you’re probably old enough to remember what happened on September 11, 2001. But if you weren’t born yet, or were just a child at the time, it’s difficult to comprehend the depth of trauma the country experienced on that day.

Twenty-five years later, I still remember standing in my bedroom, waiting to hear whether the last attack was the last.

I had no idea what was coming that morning. I had no idea what was coming in my own life over the next 25 years, either.

I didn’t think I’d end up in Tennessee, married to Mai. Stronger at 65 than I was at 45.

Ordinary life can disappear in 102 minutes. I rebuilt one that looked like it was finished. I try not to take an ordinary, peaceful day for granted anymore.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

Within hours of being told that my home page was depressing, I had retitled several articles, replaced two header images, and changed how I would structure future articles.

Here is one of the changes that I made (these are both the same article):

Before:

After:

I’d recently had a call with someone who’s mentoring me in my writing and online presence. He had reviewed the home page of The Redeemed Second Half, and he said that the vibe was depressing and gloomy, which didn’t match my personality or my brand.

The Redeemed Second Half promises redemption. The titles and images showed a new reader what he might be suffering from. He’d see the dark starting point, not the rebuilt side, which only appeared after he opened the essay and kept reading.

I could have answered: “Well, I’ve gotten pretty good engagement on these articles.” I took a step back and decided that he was right. The article titles and images needed to point to the solution. I write to point men toward wisdom and redemption, and to hand them the practical steps that make them better husbands, fathers, and men.

I immediately retitled some of the posts and changed a couple of header images, and I had to admit that the overall impact of the page was now much improved.

The other correction

I was dating someone, and for two years, close friends had been telling me it was a bad deal and that I should end it. It wasn’t good for me, and I should get out of it. I argued with them at every turn, gave them my counterarguments, rationalized, and refused to listen.

“When it’s good, it’s great.”

“I feel a sense of responsibility.”

By the end, we’d broken up and gotten back together many times, and the highs weren’t very high and the lows were very, very low. Anxiety and anger on both sides.

It went on for over two years until I finally ended it for good. I held some of the responsibility for the drama. She assumed we were exclusive. I let her assume that even when it wasn’t my intention and my behavior didn’t reflect it.

I’d paid my mentor to find what I couldn’t see. I’d already granted him permission to tell me where I was wrong. He’d made millions online and I knew I could learn from him. It had been many years since I’d written regularly for Screen Rant, and my writing and social media skills were extremely rusty.

My friends were my friends, and I’d never given them that permission. I put their authority on trial because I didn’t agree with some of their views, and I stayed.

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My own pattern

I’m writing about this because at church last Sunday, the pastor was discussing Ecclesiastes. He referenced Proverbs and talked about the three types of behavior:

• Wisdom

• Foolishness

• Evil

It struck me because I’ve had all three responses at different points in my life.

My pastor said that those three categories don’t necessarily define a person. But what can put them in one category over another is the pattern of their behavior. We tend to look at others to determine where they land, but he asked us to look at ourselves instead. Over time, repeatedly, how do I react to correction?

Wisdom receives correction. A wise person remains open to what another person sees, even when hearing it is uncomfortable. That’s how I responded to my mentor.

Foolishness doesn’t want to hear correction. During that relationship, my friends could have gone blue in the face trying to convince me that I was wrong. Nothing they said could move me from the position I’d chosen to defend.

Then there’s evil, and while I do believe that there are evil people, I know that all of us have chosen an evil response in a given moment or thought evil thoughts at one time or another.

Evil retaliates against the person bringing the correction. Online, a comment we believe is vile or egregiously wrong can lead us to dark thoughts or a reply intended to hurt that person.

Proverbs 9:7–9 describes this well:

Before you reply

I’ve found this passage helpful when scrolling X or Facebook. If I see a comment that makes me feel like I want to correct the person, I click over to their profile first. Based on what I see, I decide whether it is worth engaging with them, or if I should just shake my head and move on.

I’m pretty sure most of us don’t run into the sort of conflicts on a daily basis that we see online, but the same rule applies. It can be obvious from one or two brief (potentially heated) exchanges whether you’re dealing with a scoffer or a wise man in that moment.

We can forgive people who we see as evil, but forgiveness doesn’t require giving them unlimited access to our lives. You can forgive someone and pray for them while taking steps to protect yourself. Setting boundaries is not abandonment.

Where I land now

I still falter more often than I’d like to admit, but I catch myself sooner now. As I get older, I like to think I spend much more time in the “wisdom” column than in the other two. That recent correction changed my home page within hours. The previous one took more than two years and repeated warnings from people who cared about me.

I own both responses.

The older I get, the more I realize how little time I have left. Ecclesiastes reminds us repeatedly that our lives are brief. I didn’t waste those two years — I learned about self-respect and the importance of being an honorable man. That’s made me a better husband to my wife.

These days, I realize I may not always be right. My initial reaction might be foolish or defensive, but then I think: “Does he have a valid point? Why am I being defensive?”

The next time a friend gives you hard-to-hear feedback about your behavior or choices, be wise. Don’t play the fool.

I just spent a thousand words on who gets permission to tell me I’m wrong. If I missed something here, tell me in the comments. I read them and I reply.

I write The Redeemed Second Half every Sunday morning for men rebuilding in the second half. Subscribing is free.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

For over two decades, I was the provider and the head of the household. I had a role. I had a reason to get up in the morning that didn’t require any thought at all.

Then the marriage ended, and it all evaporated. Without the role, I didn't know who I was.

Six years later I’m remarried and I cook the best steak you’ve ever eaten. Everything nobody warns you about sits between those two facts.

When my 24-year marriage ended, I was 59 years old and I couldn’t cook a meal. Not “I wasn’t a great cook.” I could make scrambled eggs. That was it. I stood in Target staring at spatulas not knowing which one to buy, because I’d never needed to know. My ex-wife handled the kitchen. I handled the income and expenses. That arrangement worked great… until it didn’t.

Suddenly I was a grown man who didn’t own a can opener.

I rented a furnished apartment that looked like a safehouse. Four walls, a couch, a bed. No art, no warmth, nothing that said a human being with a life lived here. If the police had raided it, they’d have assumed I was about to flee the country.

I didn’t know what temperature to wash clothes. First load: red t-shirt, white towels. I became the proud owner of several pink towels.

Funny stories. Easy to laugh at now. Underneath them was something I didn’t find funny: two decades of marriage had let me outsource half of being a functioning adult. I never noticed, because my role never required me to.

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Maybe you did this too

If you spent decades in a marriage, you have your own version of this. Your role let you skip half of the work. You handled your lane, she handled hers. Over 20 or 30 years, that split stopped being a chore chart and became who you are.

You lost a wife. You also lost the thing that told you who you were every morning without your having to think about it.

That’s why starting over feels like more than grief. It feels like erasure.

At 35 you knew exactly who you were: husband, provider, father, the guy with the answers. At 55 or 60 you’re standing in a grocery store not knowing the difference between a shallot and a small onion. The shallot is beside the point. You built your identity on a foundation someone else could walk away from.

The roles you hid behind

The role was convenient. It was also a place to hide.

When you’re the provider, you don’t have to figure out who you are beyond the paycheck. When you’re the husband, you never have to ask whether you like your own company. The title answers “who are you” before anyone asks, including you.

I hid behind all of it. I was the guy who built and sold major websites. The Navy veteran. The breadwinner. Impressive-sounding labels. But when they got stripped away, I realized they were descriptions of what I did, not who I was.

My closet told the story. Most of it was a decade old. I was dressing like a man who peaked in 2009 and decided to ride it out. Cargo shorts, oversized t-shirts, white socks with sneakers. A uniform for a man who’d stopped thinking about who he wanted to be.

Recovery is the wrong goal

The instinct after divorce is to recover. Get back to normal. Get the old life back.

That’s backwards. The old life only worked because she was in it. Getting it back would just rebuild the dependency with the next woman. What helps is the terrifying part: starting from nothing.

I learned to cook at 59. I didn’t want to become a chef. Feeding myself was the most basic self-sufficiency I’d never built, so I found a YouTube channel, watched some videos, bought a sheet pan, and started. Today I cook a great steak. I decided a skill gap was unacceptable and I closed it.

I rebuilt my wardrobe from zero. Found my own style. Not my ex-wife’s taste. Mine. That was one of the first outward signs my rebuild was real.

I learned to be alone. That one took longer than any of it. The first six months of sitting in a quiet apartment on a Saturday night when you used to have a house full of noise. That rewires something in your brain. I moved from Utah to San Juan, made friends, built a social circle around a cigar bar and a standing invitation. Then the group faded, and I was left facing what I’d been masking: a deep loneliness I didn’t know what to do with.

I turned 60 with no party, no plans, no one organizing anything. Birthdays in a marriage just happen. When you’re single and new to a city, turning 60 means sitting in a sparse apartment wondering what you’re doing with your evening.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. When the marriage ended, nearly every friendship and standing plan I had ended with it, because all of them ran through the marriage. The married friends who stayed ran on a different clock:

Them: “Let me check my calendar and see if the wife has any plans.”

Me: “OK.”

Them: “How about two weeks from Thursday?”

I didn’t blame them. That was me, not long before.

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The man on the other side

I ended up in Nashville with a roommate. After having built and sold two major websites, serving in the Navy, and being married for 24 years, I was 60 years old, splitting rent.

Eventually I stopped trying to find someone to fill the gap. I stopped dating and stopped looking. Something shifted. I settled into being okay with myself, and this time it wasn’t a performance.

At first I ate dinner alone at restaurants and pretended to be fine with it. Eventually, I stopped pretending. I really was fine with it.

A couple months later, I met the woman who became my wife.

That verse hangs on a wall in our home. It was the theme of our wedding. I didn’t find it. It found me, somewhere between the pink towels and learning to be okay at a table for one. God was doing the new thing. I still had to learn how to live in it.

The role is gone. Now what?

If you’re reading this and your old life just collapsed, I won’t tell you it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be humbling. You’ll be a beginner at things teenagers do without thinking. You’ll feel ridiculous, sitting in a quiet room with no idea what to do with yourself when no role is telling you who you are.

Good.

Because the man who comes out the other side of that (the one who learned to cook, dress himself, be alone, and sit at a table for one without flinching) chose who he is. Nobody handed it to him.

The first half, someone else helped define you. The second half, that’s on you.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

At 65, my name is on every word I publish. For sixteen years I did the opposite.

I built Screen Rant and Game Rant to run without me. That was the whole design. The sites had my fingerprints all over them, but I wanted standalone businesses, not extensions of my personality. I didn’t want to be the brand.

My business mentor at the time seriously disagreed. I said to him: “How many people know the name of the CEO of General Electric?” Very few, and meanwhile he’s earning a ton every year. I wanted money, not fame. Even in the early days, I had an exit in mind.

Writers produced the articles, editors ran the day-to-day, and I watched the traffic, looked for trends, tracked revenue and expenses. The product had to work without a reader ever knowing who owned it.

It worked. When I sold, the buyer took over the movie site on day one. No transition period, because the operation didn’t need me in it. I called that proof I’d built the asset right. I still do.

What I gave away

The part I missed showed up after the sale. The movie site had roughly 12 million unique readers a month near the end of my ownership, and I kept none of them. No email list. Nothing. Their relationship was with the site, not with me. Twelve million people I left behind. In retrospect that was a massive, MASSIVE lost opportunity.

After my gaming site sold, I tried to build an automotive site. I put a few months in, watched how much the internet had changed in favor of huge corporate sites over small independent ones, and killed it. That failure got under my skin more than it should have. I’d built two successful sites, and part of me needed to know I could do it a third time. Maybe I wasn’t a one-trick pony. Maybe just a two-trick pony.

The businesses were gone, the audiences were gone, and I was still trying to measure myself by whether I could build another one.

My money went the same way. My divorce cut my net worth in half. I own my part in that. My anger did damage, and I didn’t lead my household with the strength I should have. Then crypto brought me back to where I’d been, I got greedy, and I held on all the way back down to where I started.

I wasn’t ruined, and I wasn’t dying. I’d learned I could lose everything I built and still be standing there the next morning, but no longer sure who I was without it.

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The book he had refused to write

Ulysses S. Grant lived a harder version of that.

By the summer of 1885 he’d commanded every Union army, taken Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and served two terms as president. He was also broke and dying of throat cancer. A young Wall Street operator named Ferdinand Ward had run the investment firm Grant joined as a Ponzi scheme, and when it collapsed in 1884 Grant’s fortune went with it. The sore throat he’d been ignoring turned out to be inoperable.

Friends had spent years telling him to write his memoir. He kept refusing. Other men had already written about the war, and he didn’t think of himself as a writer. Financial ruin ended the argument. He wouldn’t live long enough to rebuild, and he needed to leave his wife something to live on.

So he wrote, five to seven hours a day. When speaking became difficult he dictated what he could and wrote the rest in pencil, his son and a few assistants checking facts as the cancer got worse. Mark Twain caught him about to sign a weak publishing deal and replaced it with a better one.

Grant finished the manuscript within days of his death in July 1885. The two volumes sold hundreds of thousands of sets and gave his family the security he’d been trying to provide. The book is still in print, almost a century and a half later.

The one thing Grant had left worth anything was the story he’d spent years refusing to tell.

The work with my name on it

At 65, I’m doing the opposite of what made those websites worth buying.

The Redeemed Second Half has my name on every article. Its value comes from the parts of my life I’d have skipped if I could: the divorce, the anger, the physical limits, the money mistakes, the years I spent confusing success with purpose. Another writer can cover a movie. Another editor can run a website. Nobody else can testify to my life.

Grant’s memoir mattered because he’d been there. He remembered the men who didn’t come home and what the decisions had cost. Only he could give that account.

You have one of those too.

Everything I built to be inherited got moths, rust, and a buyer. The audiences, the money, the sites, all of it was the kind of thing that changes hands. What I learned in the losing of it doesn’t transfer that way. Only I can pass it on.

Here’s what took me too long to see: the account of your life experiences is the one thing you own that can’t be taken from you. A buyer can’t acquire it. A market can’t zero it out. A divorce can’t cut it in half. Nobody lays you off from it, and an industry can’t make it obsolete. Every other thing I owned did one of those to me. This is the only asset I’ve built that’s worth more to me every year instead of less.

And you don’t have to die for it to pay off. When the company sells and the title’s gone and you’re standing there the next morning not sure who you are, this is the part that remains. It’s how I found my way back to myself.

You may never write a memoir. You already own that asset, right now, whether you’ve looked at it or not.

Your family can inherit the house. They can divide the money and decide what to keep. None of it will tell them what the win cost you, which mistake you kept repeating, or why you lived the way you did.

Tell them.

Tell your children something about your life they’d never know from the things you leave behind. Tell them what you got wrong. What it cost you. What took you forty years to understand.

Write it down, if that’s how you do it. Grant did, in pencil, days from dying.

Just don’t take the one asset only you can give them with you.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

I sat in church a couple of Sundays ago, 65 years old, a believer by any test you’d care to run, and I could not tell you the date it happened to me. There isn’t one. There’s a stretch of years, and somewhere inside that stretch I crossed over.

The only religious moment in my life I can put on a calendar is the day I walked out.

There’s a question that comes up early in Christian circles. “What’s your testimony?” What people mean is the day the switch flipped, the before and the after with a date sitting between them. I never had an answer to give. For a long time I took that as evidence that nothing had happened to me.

Sunday and Monday

I was raised Catholic in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Church wasn’t a daily thing in our house, but we went every Sunday, my entire family. First Communion. Confirmation. I did all of it on schedule.

And I sat there as a kid doing math nobody asked me to do. We’d go to Mass on Sunday, and by Monday morning the only subject in the house was money. “Our friends cheat on their taxes. Why don’t we cheat on our taxes.”

I remember thinking, this doesn’t make any sense. That’s the first thing I learned to look for, before I understood it: the distance between the Sunday version of a person and the Monday version.

Then, somewhere between age 9 and 11, a kid I can’t even name backed me up against a low fence railing outside church, right after Mass. The railing hit me mid-back. He had both hands around my throat.

A crowd of adults formed around us. Standing in the middle of that crowd was the priest who had just said Mass. I looked right at him and pleaded with my eyes for him to do something, to get this kid off me.

Every one of them watched, and did nothing. I got so enraged it was like the Hulk, and I found enough adrenaline-fueled strength to throw him off and run ten blocks home.

My mother still took me to church after that. I went, and the whole time I was thinking, really, this is church? I’m done with this.

I was gone for the next two decades.

I never went full atheist. I’ve always thought atheism was the height of hubris, believing you know everything there is to be known. Like people believing manned flight was impossible in the 19th century, right up until it wasn’t.

So I parked in agnostic and stayed there through my twenties and thirties, and my posture toward dramatic testimony was an eye-roll I didn’t bother hiding. Men who opened sentences with “God told me” made me check for my wallet. I assumed faith arrived like weather: sudden and unmistakable, a lightning bolt. And no bolt of lightning ever arrived for me.

I came back around during my first marriage. She was new to the faith, I started going to church with her, and I began calling myself a Christian again. One of my old pastors had a name for what I was: a casual Christian. I’d take those pastors out for coffee and ask them the hard questions, the ones that don’t have clean answers, and I never got an answer that satisfied me.

I don’t believe I was saved then. I had the label, I had the attendance, and I had nothing underneath either one. When the testimony question came around, I had nothing for that either.

The audit

What finally moved me was slower and much harder to dismiss. A wife whose faith I could audit up close, and I’m a man who audits everything. I spent my career looking at spreadsheets every day, and I’ve logged every meal in Lose It since 2010. I trust data over feelings.

I wrote once that my wife Mai showed me what faith looks like lived out, and the operative word is lived. What I was watching for was the gap. The same thing I was looking for at the kitchen table as a boy: the distance between who somebody is at church and who they are on Monday when it costs them something. I’ve found it in nearly everyone I’ve ever checked, including me.

I never found hers.

That didn’t convert me on its own. It retired my best argument, which was that the whole thing was theater.

Prayer came after that, and I’d call those first attempts experiments more than prayers. Then reading. Then a community group we still sit with every couple of weeks. None of it felt like lightning. All of it, run long enough, changed the readings on every gauge I know how to check: my temper, and how long I could hold a grudge before I got bored of holding it.

I want to be clear about the pace, because the pace is the point. This wasn’t a season. It was years, with plateaus, with long stretches where I’d have told you flatly that nothing was happening. Anyone who has trained a body past 50 knows that curve. The gains came anyway.

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The whisper on the mountain

There’s a scene in 1 Kings I didn’t understand until I’d lived a version of it. Elijah, fresh off the biggest public win of his career, collapses into a burnout that reads like a midlife crisis. He runs, hides in a cave, and asks God to take his life: I have had enough, Lord. God tells him to go stand on the mountain. A wind tears the rocks apart, but God isn’t in the wind. Then an earthquake, and God isn’t in the earthquake. Then a fire, and God isn’t in the fire either.

The man who most needed to hear from God got him at the lowest possible volume. That’s the one every testimony leaves out. I’d add one observation of my own here: a whisper requires you to stop making noise, and a man mid-collapse generates a lot of it. My drinking was loud. The achievements I kept piling up to prove I was fine were louder than the drinking ever got.

Waiting for the lightning bolt

Maybe you’ve been waiting for lightning, too. Waiting to feel something before you’ll take any of this seriously, because starting without the feeling seems dishonest, and the men you’ve heard testify all seem to have been struck by something that never came for you.

I’d offer you my experience instead, since it’s the only one I can vouch for. Read one of the Gospels the way you’d read anything else, skeptically and all the way through. Say one honest sentence out loud, even if it opens with “I’m not sure you’re there.” Then give it real time, which is the ingredient every lightning story skips.

And if the slowness bothers you, if some voice tells you a real conversion would have hit harder, look at how everything else durable in your life arrived. The strength you built. The job you know cold. Nothing you count on came in a flash, and I’d stopped trusting flashes long before God declined to send me one.

I never squared the priest. Sixty-five years old and I still haven’t, and what brought me back had nothing to do with settling it. I still have questions. I just don’t worry so much about the answers now.

I can date the day I left. The day I came back has no date at all. I still don’t have a testimony anyone would recognize. What I have is a before and an after that everyone around me can see, and years of readings that all moved the same direction.

Start without the feeling. Give it a year, then read your own gauges.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

In September 2014 I bought a PS4. I was 53, and the last video game I’d taken seriously was Galaga in an arcade.

I owned a video game website called Game Rant at the time. I’d had it for five years. Some of the writers from my movie news site Screen Rant were gamers and thought it would be cool to have a gaming site, so I registered the domain, designed it, configured it, ran the analytics, paid the bills, and handed the day-to-day to an editor who knew what he was doing.

My site, my name on every invoice - and I had never played a modern (Playstation or Xbox) video game in my life.

There was a new game called Destiny (so different from Galaga) which was the big release that fall, so I bought it along with the console. I liked it a lot. Then I came up against a boss I couldn’t get past, tried maybe half a dozen times, and quit trying.

I went to my own website and searched for how to beat him. Nothing.

I ran the same search on Google. Thousands of results.

That’s the picture I want to leave with you. The owner of a video game site, sitting in his own basement office, searching his own site for what he assumed was a very common type of question in gaming, and coming up empty.

What I had delegated

When I launched Game Rant in 2009 I gave the man running it one instruction: follow the same content rules used on Screen Rant, precisely. Same rules, just a different topic. I was strict about quality there. One of the rules was a 500-word minimum on any article. Minimum, not target.

He’d been one of my editors for years and he was good at his job, so I trusted that I’d been heard and I went back to work on the site that was paying for everything.

In February 2011 Google shipped an algorithm update called Panda that went after “thin” content. Posts and articles that were very short: 150 to 250 words or so.

I wasn’t worried.

But then Game Rant’s traffic and rankings fell off a cliff within days of the update.

I was confused, because as far as I knew we were clean. I found a WordPress plugin that displayed each article’s word count in the post list, installed it, and found around a thousand articles under 250 words. A large share of those were under 150. My instruction had been a 500-word minimum. What was actually on my site was a thousand Substack Notes with headlines on them.

Days, not weeks, to find it. Two years to climb back out. Eventually I let him go, and I don’t enjoy telling you that, because the failure was mine before it was ever his.

I could have found those articles in any month of the previous two years by looking at my own website. The plugin took a minute to install. I gave instructions in 2009 and never once verified them, and I want to be clear about why I thought I was paying attention: I read the traffic and the revenue reports every single morning and everything looked fine, until it didn’t. But I was reading what the site produced. I never read the site itself. Those are two different jobs. The one I was doing couldn’t have caught it no matter how carefully I did it.

Guides, guides, guides

The PS4 did in a weekend what two years of analytics hadn’t. Once I was the guy stuck on a boss fight, the whole business came into focus. My writers were hardcore gamers writing for hardcore gamers, which meant we were ignoring what I’d guess was 80% of the audience: casual players with 40 minutes after work who don’t want to spend three nights beating one boss.

I called my new editor and told him what we were doing from that point forward. Still cover games in development, still run reviews, and starting now: guides. The most popular games, the hardest fights, write the guide. Traffic started climbing and didn’t stop. When I sold that site five years later it had about 5 million visits a month, and it earned 3X the revenue per visit that my movie site had.

None of that came out of the data I’d been staring at every morning. It came out of being stuck.

This was written for men whose entire wealth walked around on four legs and could go lame while they weren’t looking. The verse doesn’t ask whether you own the animals. It asks whether you’ve walked out and looked at them lately.

Look beyond the surface

A man in his second half can own a short list of things and inspect almost none of them.

Start with your body. That’s the one where I’ve done the most damage and the most repair. You own it. Years ago you handed it over to whatever habits happened to be running when you stopped paying attention, and your daily inspection is probably just a glance in the mirror on your way past.

Get the numbers. I’ve got 34,000-plus food entries and years of workout data. Every real correction I’ve made to my body in fifteen years started with a number I hadn’t been looking at. Get on a scale. Log the food you eat, at the meal, not from memory at bedtime. Get your blood work done.

I knew my numbers. I didn't know what was behind them. That's what a traffic report is. It might tell you something is wrong, but it won't tell you what.

Getting stuck tells you what. Mine was the bench press. My detached supraspinatus didn’t show up in a food log or a sleep score. It showed up in the middle of a lift.

Your marriage might be the same way. You made a decision about the kind of husband you’d be somewhere back in your thirties, and you’ve been running on those instructions without verifying them since. You’re reading what the marriage produces. She’s still there. Nobody’s fighting. The traffic looks fine.

Your faith, if you have any, might be running on a decision older than either of those, and you’ve had no reason to look at it since you made it.

So here’s a test, and it took me two years to learn it: go looking in your own life for the thing you’re not paying attention to that might be in trouble. If your wife has something hard to tell you tonight, ask her when she last tried, and what you did with it. If a bad number comes back from a doctor’s visit in March, pull your last blood panel today and find out what shape you’d be starting from. If your son asks you at dinner tonight why you believe in God, find out whether you can answer in your own words instead of somebody else’s.

I came up empty, sitting in my own basement, searching my own website.

You gave yourself those instructions years ago. Go find out if you’ve been following them.

Thirteen surgeries have left a map on my body. I can trace most of my scars without looking: my shoulder, three times. My chest. Spine. Knees.

Every one of them closed. Skin does its work and moves on. It doesn’t reopen once a year to check whether the injury is still there.

Your body knows how to do this. But we have wounds of a different kind that stay open.

The wounds I was responsible for are another story. The failures with my fingerprints on them: the marriage I helped thin out, the years I justified myself instead of repairing anything, the seasons the people around me got the worst version and assumed that was just Vic.

I’ve repented of (most of) those things. Named them, owned them, made what repairs could still be made, turned and tried to walk a different path.

There are people who keep going back – for years. Replaying their worst chapters like there was going to be a quiz.

I have a line I stand behind:

Repentance and acceptance close wounds

Repentance is a completed action. It has stages and an end: you name the thing and you don’t make excuses for it. You own your half without footnotes about hers or theirs or the circumstances, you repair what can still be repaired, and you turn. It costs pride and the kind of conversation you might rehearse in your head before you say it out loud. Anyone who tells you repentance is cheap has never done it.

You know it's finished when there's nothing left to confess, nothing left to repair, and the man you're becoming wouldn't choose it again.

Acceptance of a wrong done to us is the flip side, but similar. Name the thing, and recognize that another person's actions say more about their character than your worth. Usually this conversation happens only in your head, though it may help to share it with someone you trust. If for no other reason, to help you not slip back into victimhood over it.

Here’s their signature, though: they finish. The wound closes, and the scar left behind is the proof of the healing. The tissue is different there, stronger in some ways, and it may ache in cold weather. But it’s still closed.

Rumination reopens

Picking at a scab is different. The 2 AM session where you replay a conversation from 2011. The anniversary you keep for your worst mistake. You reach for the old failure whenever life gets good, like a man touching a stove he knows is still hot.

There’s a quieter version of picking that deserves its own mention: the man who won’t let anything be good because of what he did. He gets the promotion, the new marriage, the grandchild on his knee, picks that exact moment to remember who he used to be, and he finds a way to mess up the moment. “Enjoying this, are we? Well, we’ll have to do something about THAT.” He makes sure no scar is ever allowed to fade into ordinary skin. I’ve done it. Sometimes I still do.

Every time you pick, the wound starts over. Repentance ends in something: an apology sent, a behavior changed. Forgiveness gives peace. Rumination ends in fresh pain, and the pain feels like virtue. I spent years believing the replaying was accountability, proof I wasn’t letting myself off easy. It was unbelief wearing a humble face. God had already forgiven those sins. I kept going back because some part of me trusted my own verdict over his.

The fire on the beach

There’s a scene at the end of John’s Gospel that settles this. Peter has denied Jesus three times, the worst failure of his life, and both of them know it. The risen Jesus builds a fire on the beach and asks him three questions, one for each denial: do you love me. Peter says yes three times.

Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” (John 21:17)

Look at what’s missing. Jesus never brings up the denials. Three wounds, three questions, and then a job. Restoration, in the hands of the one who invented it, ends with an assignment, and the assignment is the proof that it’s finished.

Trace them and move

Here’s the test I’d hand you for whatever you keep revisiting: ask what the visit produces. If it’s producing repair, an apology you still owe, a pattern you still haven’t changed, that’s repentance finishing its work. Go finish it. If the visit produces nothing but pain, if you’ve repaired what can be repaired and you’re going back anyway to bleed on schedule, that’s picking, and picking is the one thing guaranteed to keep a wound from doing what wounds want to do.

Remembering is different. You should know your own history. Your scar is supposed to be visible, and telling its story honestly is half of why what I have to say is worth anything to you. The line sits between remembering and re-litigating: one recounts a closed case, the other petitions to reopen it.

The wound is trying to close. Let it.

A few months ago I sat down with a woman who has spent decades teaching the Schroth method: exercises, stretches, and breathing that reduce the effects of scoliosis.

Part of the initial appointment was to bring her an X-ray of my spine, which she fed into software that reconstructed it in 3D. I hadn’t looked at an X-ray of my spine in years, and it was quite jarring to see the degree of curvature, and the long screws inserted at the base from a fusion I had 20 years ago.

One thing she pointed out that I had never thought about was that I didn’t just have lateral curvature. Scoliosis also rotates the spine in an unnatural way.

It was then that I decided to retire the deadlift.

What the lift was holding up

It was hard to give up the deadlift. Not because of health reasons, but because of what it meant to me as a man. It felt like surrender, one more thing that I couldn’t do as the years piled on. It hurt my ego to think that I could no longer pull heavy. The deadlift told a story. I was still the kind of man who could lift heavy things off the floor.

But as you get older, you’re supposed to get wiser, and just one year prior, trying to “lift heavy, bro,” I had torn my rotator cuff in my right shoulder, and this time the tear was permanent and irreparable. So the reasonable part of me was going to win this argument. For the same reason, barbell squats went the same week, and barbell calf raises as well.

My ego had a strong opinion about all of it. I read every subtraction as surrender. Quitting anything was a loss, regardless of what the benefit might be. It didn’t care about cost or consequences.

The substitution

Here’s what giving up those exercises looks like in practice, because this is where the ego’s argument falls apart. Hip thrusts took over for the heavy pulls. The seated leg press took over for squats, and my numbers on it kept climbing after I switched over.

At 64 I was stronger on several machines than I’d ever been, with a spine that’s fused at the bottom and curved in the middle.

Eventually, the story lost its power. I kept every ounce of the training effect. The criterion, once I quit negotiating, was simple: every movement is replaceable, and the joint isn’t. A lift is a tool for loading muscle, and when a tool starts costing more than the job pays, a mechanic swaps the tool.

I’m not saying the replacements are biomechanically identical – they’re not. But they’re close enough, and they’re a lot better than quitting entirely. The muscle does not know what the movement is called.

There’s a reason beneath this. The body I train isn’t mine to wreck in order to feed my ego:

Stewarding the body God entrusted to me is the whole point. No single lift is worth more than that.

Every Sunday I write for men who are done pretending the first-half approach still fits. Subscribe if that's you:

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Your deadlift

Maybe yours isn’t a deadlift.

It’s the full-court pickup game at 55. The rec-league slide into second. The ladder to your home’s roof with nobody home. The 10K you keep entering because the man you were at 38 ran it. Somewhere in your week there’s a movement or a load that’s serving your memory more than your body.

Take an inventory: what hurts more than it should after you’ve done it? What has your doctor warned you about? Be honest with yourself about it. Try to remove your ego from the equation.

The test I’d hand you is the one my X-ray handed me: ask whether the thing serves the man you are or memorializes the man you were. The barbell doesn’t miss me, and my back hurts a fraction of what it did before.

And notice what subtraction is not costing you. I train as hard as I ever have. I push hard on every working set; I just do it on different equipment now. The men who confuse the movement with the mission end up in rehab instead of training, and rehab is where the second half stalls, one torn tendon and one bad year at a time. I’ve spent enough seasons in slings to know how that works out.

You can subtract a movement and still train. Find a workaround for the one you gave up. It can still be the most advanced set you ever perform, even if nobody applauds. It will buy you years of fitness you’d otherwise spend in recovery.

Retire the lift. Keep the man.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

In January of 2023, my tumultuous three-year relationship ended, and I sat in my Nashville apartment thinking about what a man does at 61 with two failed relationships in four years. I was divorced at 59 after 24 years. A relationship after that which consumed three more years and ended anyway. I kept returning to the same answer:

This is just how it is for you now.

I want you to look hard at that sentence, because I’d bet money you’ve said some version of it to yourself: this is just how it is for you now. It sounds like being a realist, but it can be a verdict. And I handed it to myself, without thinking there might be something more to it.

I call it “Cave thinking.”

In my book The Last 10 Pounds I wrote about the difference between a cave and a tunnel:

“You feel like you’ve walked into a dark cave and there’s no way out. The truth is that if you keep walking, you’ll see a light at the other end. You weren’t in a cave. You were in a tunnel. Everything passes.”

Cave thinking has a tell: you start arranging your life around the idea that the dark is permanent. You create routines that assume nobody else is coming. The plans cancelled with no announcement, because men like you don’t deserve the good version. The opinions that harden around your solitude like a cast. Listen to your own vocabulary for the tell, too. Cave sentences lean on “always” and “never”:

“I’ll always be alone.”

“This never works out for me.”

A man who has stopped trying talks in life sentences. I did it twice, once in Puerto Rico and once in Nashville. Different situations, the same cave. Or so I’d decided.

What I couldn’t see from inside

Here’s the part I couldn’t have known that January, and it’s the reason I’m telling you this: in March of 2023, two months after that end, I met Mai. We were married in October of 2024. The woman who rebuilt my understanding of what a marriage could feel like was eight weeks away while I was handing down a life sentence of being alone to myself.

I can’t promise you a Mai. Nobody can. What I can tell you from my own life is this: every dark season I have ever been in ended, and from the inside, every single one of them looked permanent. The dark makes the temporary feel permanent. It’s one thing it always does. I’ve watched this from both sides now:

• At 47 I was so broke I considered suicide so my wife and daughter could collect on my life insurance policy.

• At 59 I was certain the rented duplex was how the story ended.

• At 61 I was sure the Nashville apartment was the sequel that proved it.

I was wrong twice in four years, and the second time I was eight weeks from the best thing that ever happened to me.

If you're doing the walking in the dark right now, you don't have to do it without another man who's been through it. I send out an essay every Sunday.

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The walking

A tunnel only pays off if you walk. For me the walking had nothing to do with scanning for exits. It was the unglamorous work I’d already started and kept doing in the dark: my belief work, my training, my food log, the faith I was still slowly growing in. None of it made the dark brighter that January. All of it was moving me through, which is a thing you cannot measure from inside.

The moves to Puerto Rico and Nashville had taught me the difference the hard way: changing your scenery is not walking. The work is in the walking. Progress in a tunnel often isn’t obvious, and expecting it to be can reinforce your feeling that nothing is changing. You bank the work on trust that you are moving through it.

David wrote that on the far side of the night he was describing. During the night, I’m sure it must have seemed like wishful thinking. But that doesn’t make it less true.

If you’ve started arranging

You know whether you’ve done it. The verdicts you’ve handed down to yourself about how it is for you now. The camp chair you’ve set up in what you’ve decided is a cave. I’d ask you to treat every one of those verdicts as what it is: a guess, made in the dark, by the least qualified judge available, a man who can’t see ten feet ahead.

You don’t get to see the exit before you’ve earned it. Nobody does. The work you do in the dark is not wasted; it’s the walking, and the walking is the whole difference between a man who lives in a cave and a man who comes out the other end of a tunnel.

Keep walking. It’s a tunnel, not a cave.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

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Every Wednesday morning now I sit in a cigar lounge with a bunch of Christian men having a smoke and coffee. It’s an hour talking about how to live as Christ did, how to be actual disciples, and not just “Sunday Christians.” Afterwards we get to know new guys, make new friends.

It occurred to me that not one person in that room has met the man I was just 10 years ago.

They’ve never seen him. The man who could recite talk radio grievances by heart, whose marriage was thinning into surface-level politeness while he poured himself into work and called it drive. The people in that room only know the current model, and they treat me accordingly. It’s taken me a while to understand how much that’s doing for me.

The old script

For most of my first half I sat in rooms with people who’d known me a decade at a time. Family rooms, Comic-con conventions, monthly CEO group conference rooms, the same faces year after year. There’s real comfort in being known that long. There’s also a cost nobody names: a room that knows the old you keeps handing you his script.

You try on a new way of being and somebody tilts their head. “Since when do you pray?” “Since when do you turn down a third drink?” It isn’t malice. Their data on you is old, and people trust their data. So you shrink back into the man they remember, because staying consistent is easier than being new in front of witnesses.

And I ran the same play on other people, holding old friends to versions of themselves they’d outgrown, because my old read on them was easier than paying fresh attention. Old rooms do it in both directions.

Four rooms of strangers

Then the divorce at 59 took the decision out of my hands. Four moves in four years, and every room I walked into held people who had no read on me at all:

• A friend’s cigar bar in San Juan, where I was just the guy who liked an Old Fashioned at six.

• A salsa class in Nashville where nobody knew I’d ever run a company.

• A two-bedroom apartment I split with a friend, a Boston transplant who took me exactly as he found me.

And now a cigar lounge full of men who assume I’ve always been this steady, which is funny if they knew the old me.

I want to be careful here, because I tried to use new rooms the wrong way first. I wrote once that there’s no geographic answer to a spiritual problem. Moving to Puerto Rico with the old man still inside me changed nothing but the humidity. A fresh room cannot create a new man. You can show up in a new city and play-act at being a completely different man, but if you haven’t changed internally, that’s what you’re doing: acting. The old rooms pull against who you’re trying to become. Having said that, a fresh room does extend you the grace of no expectations, and grace is a better climate for growth than a room that keeps score.

What Nazareth knew

Jesus ran into this. He went home to Nazareth, taught in the synagogue, and the locals couldn’t get past their preconceptions. This is the carpenter, Mary’s boy. We watched him grow up.

Mark adds that he could do almost no miraculous work there. The hometown effect was strong enough to constrain the Son of God in Nazareth. You and I are not exempt from it in the rooms that have known us longest.

Your one room

So here’s where you come in. You’ve been doing work on yourself. Maybe you’re eating like an adult for the first time in a decade, or you’ve finally cracked a Bible. And you keep noticing that around the old crowd, you snap back into the old shape within an hour.

Keep your old rooms if they’re good ones. This is addition, and it costs less than you think. A class. A men’s group. A gym at an hour when nobody knows your name. One room where the only version of you anyone has ever met is the one you’re building. Sit in it every week and let it treat the new man as a plain fact, until he becomes one. You won’t be performing there; you’ll be practicing. The difference is that practice doesn’t need applause, just repetitions. Give it three months before you judge it. The first few visits feel like wearing clothes that don’t fit yet. Keep going. Fit comes from wear.

I built Screen Rant and Game Rant surrounded by people who’d known me for years. I rebuilt myself in rooms full of strangers.

The old rooms vote for the old you. Find one that doesn’t, and keep showing up as the man it thinks you’ve always been.

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By Vic Holtreman

For men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who lost the life they built and refuse to let that be the end.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

America was founded by men your age.

The average man who signed the Declaration of Independence was 44 years old. The youngest was 26. The oldest, Benjamin Franklin, was 70, with gout he’d had for years and a walk across Philadelphia in July heat that cost him something. He signed anyway.

We tell the story of the founding like it belonged to the young. It didn’t. The whole span of a man’s life sat in that room, and the defining work got done mostly by men who were middle-aged and up, at an age our own culture writes off.

I just turned 65. According to the world, I’m supposed to be coasting. Managing the decline. Shopping for a recliner.

Franklin didn’t get that memo

At 70 he wasn’t wrapping anything up. He was starting the biggest assignment of his life. He’d already been a printer, a writer, a scientist, a postmaster. He ran away from his brother’s Boston print shop as a teenager with barely two years of schooling and rebuilt himself in Philadelphia from nothing. Then he did it again, and again. By 70 he was on his fourth or fifth act, and the one that put him in every history book came last.

Eleven years after the Declaration, they carried him into the Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair. He was 81, still in the room and still working.

Washington was 44 when he took command of an army that had no business winning. Middle-aged by any measure, old for a soldier. He spent the next several years losing more battles than he won and refusing to quit, which turned out to be the entire job.

I know something about starting over late

I’ve done it more than once, and not always well. I was 59, divorced, my money cut in half, learning to cook off YouTube because I’d never had to. That was no triumph. That was a man at the bottom wondering if the best part of his life was already behind him.

Here’s what I couldn’t see from down there: the idea that your defining work belongs to your twenties and thirties is a modern invention, and a lazy one. Every man who signed had already lived a full life by 1776, stacked with failures and dead ends and a reputation he’d now have to risk. The signing came in the second half of their story.

Every one of them had a name and money and a family that would suffer if it went wrong. They signed anyway.

Give me this mountain

There’s an old man in the book of Joshua named Caleb. Forty-five years earlier he’d been one of two scouts who came back and said the land could be taken. Everyone else was scared, so they wandered another forty years. When they finally arrive, Caleb is 85. He doesn’t ask for a quiet plot to retire on. Instead he points at the worst ground, the hill country still full of the giants that scared everyone off the first time, and says, “Give me this mountain.”

Eighty-five years old, and he asks for the mountain.

What did you already decide was finished

You’ve probably filed some part of your life under “closed.” The job you’re sure you’re too old to change. Your body, the one you let go because starting over now feels ridiculous. Your marriage, your faith, the friendships you’ve decided are set the way they are. Too late, you called it.

I write this every Sunday for the man who just felt that paragraph land. Free. Stick around.

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Too late is a story you tell yourself, and it’s more recent than you think. Franklin would have laughed at it. He was writing and inventing and arguing a nation into being at the age when you’re getting sold a scooter and a cabinet full of supplements to hang onto what’s left.

You don’t have to found a country. You have to stop treating 50 or 60 or 65 as the epilogue. The work in front of you now can be the work you’re remembered for, if you’ll pick up the pen while the oldest man in the room is still writing. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I built two companies from a folding table in a warehouse, teaching myself code over cold coffee. ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com. I sold them, lost my marriage, and rebuilt my body and my faith on the far side of 59. I’m prouder of what I’m doing now than anything I did in the half where I was supposed to peak.

The country turned 250 this weekend. It was declared by men mostly past 40, carried through the fire by a man of 44, anchored by a man of 70. If they’d believed their best work was behind them, there’d be no fireworks to watch this weekend.

Point at the mountain. You’re not too old. You’re just getting to the part that counts.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

There’s a photo of me from this past April. I’m 64. Five foot nine, about 158 pounds, around 10-11 percent body fat. If you saw it cold, you’d file it under good genes or too much free time, and you’d scroll on.

I want to walk you around to the other side of that frame. The book that does it is out today.

What got cropped out

Outside the edges of that photo is a spine fused at the bottom and curved enough that I lost almost two inches of height getting here. Lungs that run at about two-thirds of what a man my size should have. A shoulder muscle torn past the point where surgery does any good. Thirteen surgeries since childhood, eleven of them as an adult, behind me. A motor scooter I rode on the wrong day, and the ER I woke up in. A 59-year-old version of me sitting alone in a rented duplex with a divorce finalized and his money cut in half, every reason in the world to let it all go soft.

None of that is in the photo. That’s the problem with photos.

The man in that April photo isn’t a man who got lucky with his body. He’s a man who got a bad draw and kept showing up to the table anyway, for over 20 years, through the kind of run that hands a man a permanent excuse.

I’m not the proof you think I am

Here’s the thing I most want you to take from it.

I’m not standing here as evidence that you need good genes and a clean life to end up lean in the second half. I’m evidence of the opposite. Nothing in my medical file or my history made me a likely candidate for that photo, and I got there anyway. If it worked on a body and a life like mine, the “I’m too far gone” thing you’ve been running on yourself doesn’t hold.

Earlier this month I walked you through the rest of it. The 34,000 food log entries. The 14 photos going back two decades. The stretches where the data went dark and you could match the dates to the worst years of my life. The October at 64 that turned out cleaner than the spring at 41.

This photo is the visible end of all that. The receipt sitting on top of the pile. The record underneath it has the worst years of my life baked in.

I kept the ugly parts in

The book lays three records on one timeline. What I ate, across 34,000 entries. What my body went through, surgery by surgery. And what my life was doing to me while both of those ran. Where my memory and the data disagreed, I let the data win and left the gap showing.

That’s a different thing than a transformation story. A transformation story shows you two photos and skips the 15 years. A stress test shows you the years, including the stretches I’d rather you scrolled past, because the bad stretches are the proof. A clean before-and-after proves a man can string together a good eight weeks. A documented record proves the boring fundamentals hold up against a fused spine and two-thirds of the lung capacity I should have, through the worst run of years I’d had.

Not a transformation story. A 15-year stress test. That’s the whole pitch, and I can back every word of it with a date stamp.

Where to get it

The book is The Last 10 Pounds: What 15 Years of Data and 13 Surgeries Proved About Discipline in the Second Half. The print edition went live this morning, Tuesday June 30th. Three records on one timeline, the April photo on the cover, the ugly parts left in.

Three ways to get it right now:

• Kindle, live now on Amazon: Amazon.com.

• Hardcover here.

• Paperback here.

• Or the PDF version, straight from Gumroad.

I’ll create an Audible version soon.

The first chapter’s still free at Last10Pounds.com if you want to try it before you buy anything.

I built and sold two companies, Screen Rant and Game Rant. Neither one fought me the way my own body did. But I kept showing up for it.

I can’t hand you my spine or my lungs. I can hand you the record of what I did with them anyway.

Go build yours.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

By the end of the weekend I said it out loud, laughing: “OK, stop. I can’t stand being loved this much.”

There was another cake in front of me, candles lit, people singing, a stack of handmade cards on the table. The third cake in four days, and I’d run out of ways to act surprised.

I turned 65 this month. A week out, I figured it would be a non-event.

You know how it goes. You tell everyone you don’t care about the day, and somewhere underneath you’re hoping somebody is planning something. A few months back I’d recruited some friends and thrown a surprise party for my wife’s birthday. She was floored. Great night. With my own milestone coming up (a milestone I’m not even a fan of), I was hoping someone might be cooking something up for me.

What was on the calendar was a camping trip. Our closest friends were taking their RV out the weekend of my birthday. We don’t have an RV, so my wife and I rented a cabin nearby to be in on it all weekend. I’d been hoping for a party. I told myself, okay, this will be something.

Cake after cake

It turned out I shared a birthday weekend with a young lady who was on the trip too. The second evening, they brought out two cakes. I didn’t see it coming. It put a big smile on my face, and I thought, well, that was nice. Figured that was the celebration.

The next night it happened again. More cakes, more candles, each of us leaning in to blow them out.

We drove home on the actual day, and my wife had our living room laid out with a plethora of gift bags and boxes for me to open. She’d baked me a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I picked dinner and a movie, and my wife, who does not love science fiction, sat through the original Stargate without one complaint.

Then Monday came. We had a potluck with our church community group, the one we meet with every couple of weeks. Toward the end of the night, out came another cake. Candles again. Happy Birthday sung to me again. Handmade cards from my friends. A couple more gifts.

That’s when I laughed and told them to stop. I meant it as a joke. It wasn’t entirely a joke.

The house I grew up in

You have to understand where I’m starting from. From the day I was born to the day I left home at 24, I never once heard the words “I love you” from my parents. Not once. I spent most of my adult life pretty shut down emotionally, because that’s what you learn to do when opening up gets you nothing. A long weekend of people loving me out loud, cake after cake, handmade cards in handwriting I recognized, is not a small thing for a man built the way I was built.

Sixty, at a bar

Here’s the part that matters, and it’s why I’m telling you any of this.

Five years ago I turned 60. I was living in Puerto Rico. I’d had some friends down there, we were tight for a while, but the friendships had started to fade by then. Nobody made any plans. I mentioned my birthday to one guy outside my usual circle, and he and his wife met me at a local bar for a drink. They did their best to make me feel celebrated, and I appreciated them for it. But I drove home that night feeling like I’d been handed a consolation prize.

I was low. Single in a new city, starting over at an age when you’re supposed to have it figured out. If you’d told me that night that five years later I’d be begging people to quit celebrating me, I’d have laughed in your face.

I was the man at that bar. I write an essay every Sunday for the man who's there right now. Subscribe and the next one will find you.

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Still me, with less armor

I believe God brought me Mai (my wife) and brought me this circle of friends. I believe the work I did on my faith is what changed the man they ended up celebrating. For a long time that scared me. I liked being edgy, sarcastic Vic. I’d built a whole personality on the edge, and I remember thinking, “if I stop being that guy, who am I going to be?”

Turns out I’m still me. I still have an edge. I’m just not as nasty and mean-spirited as I used to be. Not as angry, either. Kinder and more patient than the man who sat at that bar on his 60th. Same guy. Less armor.

There’s a line in Joel where God speaks to a people who had watched life get stripped bare:

I used to read that as a nice sentiment. I don’t anymore. The locusts were real for me. The lost years were real. The restoration didn’t come because I prayed for a better party. It came on the far side of a lot of work I didn’t want to do, the repentance and the forgiving and the letting people get closer than felt safe. But it came.

If you’re in the thick of it

So here’s what I want you to take from a man five years past one of the loneliest birthdays of his life.

If you’re dreading your own quiet birthday right now, certain this is just how it is for you from now on, you don’t know that. You can’t see where you’ll be a year from now. Two years. Five. I sure couldn’t. We all walk through dark valleys, and none of us can see the far end of one while we’re standing in it.

You don’t know where you’ll be in five years. I didn’t. Do the work in front of you. Let God do what you can’t. And don’t mistake one bad season for the rest of your life.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.