Add Silicon Canals to your Google News feed. 
About two years ago, I started doing something that apparently alarmed everyone in my life. I began going to the gym six days a week — not the casual, headphones-in-elliptical-for-twenty-minutes kind, but real strength training, late morning, sometimes for ninety minutes. I started cooking actual meals. Not heating things up, not ordering from the Thai place on South Lamar for the fourth time that week. I mean buying groceries, chopping vegetables, standing over a stove. And I started spending a lot of time alone. Deliberately. Not isolating — choosing.
My girlfriend asked if I was okay. A friend from my old startup days texted me out of nowhere: “Hey man, you good? You’ve been kind of quiet.” My brother called and, in that roundabout way men have when they’re worried about each other, asked if I was “going through something.”
Here’s the thing: I was going through something. Just not what they thought.
The “midlife crisis” narrative is lazy — and it’s wrong
We have this cultural script that says when a man in his 40s suddenly changes his behavior, something must be falling apart. He’s running from his marriage. He’s buying a sports car. He’s having an existential meltdown and compensating with bicep curls.
And sure, that happens sometimes. I’ve been the guy who bought $400 sneakers while sitting on $47,000 in debt after my second startup cratered. I know what compensatory behavior looks like from the inside. It feels frantic. It feels performative. You’re doing things at people — signaling something to the world because you can’t sit with what’s happening internally.
But the gym-cooking-solitude pattern? That’s almost always the opposite. That’s not a man falling apart. That’s a man finally putting himself back together — often for the first time in his adult life.
Psychologists have studied this. Research published in Developmental Psychology by Oliver Robinson and colleagues found that what we casually dismiss as “midlife crisis” is more accurately described as a process of developmental restructuring — a period where adults reassess their priorities and realign their behavior with a more authentic sense of self. The study found that these transitions are rarely crises at all. They’re corrections.
Think about that for a second. Not a breakdown. A correction.
Why the behavior change triggers alarm
Here’s what I’ve come to understand after about fifteen years of therapy and a few years in a men’s group: when a man starts quietly changing his habits, the people around him get uncomfortable — not because the changes are concerning, but because the changes disrupt a system everyone else had gotten used to.
If you were the guy who always said yes to the extra drink, the late night, the weekend plan — and now you’re not — people notice. They don’t necessarily articulate it this way, but what they feel is: If you’re changing the rules, what does that mean about me?
It’s not malicious. It’s human. A study on self-regulation and social dynamics published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass found that when one person in a social group begins exercising more self-control — eating better, drinking less, establishing firmer boundaries — it can create discomfort in others because it implicitly highlights their own behavioral patterns. The researchers describe this as a kind of “goal contagion in reverse” — where someone else’s discipline feels like an unspoken judgment.
So when your buddy starts going to the gym every morning instead of staying out late on Thursdays, and he’s suddenly meal-prepping on Sundays, and he’s not available for every group text chain — the easiest story to tell yourself isn’t “he’s growing.” It’s “he’s going through something weird.”
Sound familiar? Yeah, me too. From both sides.
What’s actually happening under the surface
Let me tell you what was actually going on when I started restructuring my days.
I was tired. Not sleepy-tired. Structurally tired. Tired of living reactively — responding to everyone else’s needs, expectations, and timelines while my own body slowly deteriorated and my own inner life stayed on the shelf like that unfinished novel sitting on my hard drive.
The gym wasn’t about vanity. It was the first time in years I was doing something purely for myself that had no external audience, no metric, no client, no deliverable. Just me and a barbell and the slow, honest process of showing up for my own body. I’ve written before about the confidence that comes from doing things alone, and the gym was where I first experienced it — this strange, quiet authority that builds when you stop needing an audience for your own growth.
The cooking was similar. After my second startup failed, I spent years ordering delivery like a man who couldn’t be bothered to take care of himself. Because honestly? I couldn’t. Cooking a meal requires a level of present-moment attention that I wasn’t capable of when I was running on cortisol and shame. Starting to cook again wasn’t about health trends or macros. It was evidence that I could finally slow down enough to feed myself like an adult.
And the solitude — look, this is the one that scared people the most. But it was also the most important piece.
Solitude isn’t isolation
There’s a critical distinction that most people miss. Isolation is withdrawal driven by pain. You pull away because you can’t cope, because interaction costs more than you can afford. I know that feeling. I lived in it for months after my startup collapsed and I lost a girlfriend because I couldn’t be present for a single conversation that wasn’t about runway or burn rate.
Solitude is different. Solitude is chosen. It’s what happens when you’ve done enough internal work that being alone doesn’t feel like punishment — it feels like oxygen.
Research by Thuy-vy Nguyen and colleagues at the University of Rochester found that people who actively choose solitude — rather than having it imposed on them — report increased feelings of autonomy, creativity, and emotional regulation. The key variable wasn’t how much time someone spent alone. It was whether the aloneness was self-determined.
When I started spending weekend mornings alone — reading, walking, sometimes just sitting on my porch doing nothing — I wasn’t depressed. I was recovering. Recovering from decades of filling every silence with noise, every gap with obligation, every quiet moment with someone else’s needs.
The real crisis is what comes before the change
Here’s what I wish more people understood: the crisis isn’t the gym membership. The crisis is the ten years before it.
The crisis is the decade of saying yes when you mean no. The years of neglecting your body because you’re “too busy.” The slow, almost imperceptible erosion of your inner life because you convinced yourself that being a good provider, a good employee, a good friend meant abandoning every single thing that was yours alone.
I think about my father’s generation and how they expressed everything through providing — through working, through showing up, through grinding it out for thirty years without ever once asking themselves whether they were okay. My dad is 67 now. He ran the same small business for three decades. And I love him for it. But I also see what it cost him — the hobbies he never had, the friendships that withered, the quiet way he sometimes sits in his car in the driveway for ten minutes before coming inside, and I understand now that those minutes in the driveway are the only ones that belong entirely to him.
I don’t want that to be my story. And the gym, the cooking, the solitude — that’s me writing a different one.
What it looks like when a man is actually rebuilding
If you know a man in his 40s who’s doing this — who’s suddenly gotten serious about his health, started carving out time alone, simplified his social life, maybe started doing things in relationships that seem strange to surface-level people — here’s what I’d ask you to consider before you stage an intervention.
He’s not pulling away from you. He’s pulling toward himself. And those might feel the same from the outside, but they’re fundamentally different movements.
The routine isn’t compensatory — it’s corrective. When I was in my compensatory spending phase in San Francisco, buying designer items I couldn’t afford, everything was outward-facing. The gym is inward-facing. The cooking is inward-facing. The solitude is the most inward-facing thing there is. There’s no audience for a man eating a meal he made himself at his own kitchen table on a Tuesday night.
The quiet isn’t emptiness — it’s capacity. After years of noise, developing a tolerance for silence is one of the hardest things a man in midlife can do. It means he’s stopped running. That should be celebrated, not pathologized.
The part no one talks about
And honestly? The hardest thing about this whole process isn’t the discipline of the gym or the patience of learning to cook or even the discomfort of sitting with yourself in silence. The hardest thing is doing all of it while the people you love look at you with concern.
Because their concern, however well-meaning, carries an implicit message: the old version of you was easier for us.
The old version — the one who was always available, always accommodating, always running on empty but never saying so — that version was convenient. Predictable. And yeah, slowly dying inside, but at least he showed up to brunch.
Research from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on self-concept change has shown that people who undergo significant positive identity shifts often experience temporary social friction precisely because their growth disrupts established relational patterns. The friction isn’t evidence that something is wrong. It’s evidence that something is finally right.
I’m still in the middle of this. I still work out five or six days a week. I still cook most of my meals. I still protect my solitude like it’s the most valuable thing I own — because right now, it might be.
And I’m still figuring it out. I don’t have this nailed. I’m in my 40s and I’m still learning how to take care of myself without apologizing for it.
But I can tell you this much: it’s not a crisis. It’s what comes after you finally stop having one.
