Jeff Hamaoui, 53: Exploring Our Second Adulthood

Jeff Hamaoui is one of the three powerhouse founding partners of MEA, the wildly impactful first-of-its-kind Midlife Wisdom School. Along with Chip Conley and Christine Sperber, he has created a place of 360-degree regeneration — of not only how people view their future, but land and community. 

Why would a San Francisco man, who is doing just fine, run to a dusty town in Baja with his family to become part of what was then a highly unlikely endeavor to inspire people to re-imagine their life possibilities? It was aligned with his lifelong passion for teaching, learning, sustainability. And then there was the voice, that inner intuition we all have, and that voice is rarely wrong. He went for it and has never looked back. 

MEA is more than a destination, more than a school; it is an audacious movement to change the way we think of the second half of our adult lives. And it works; just ask any of their thousands of alumni. There are 3 simple reasons for this, and they are named Jeff, Christine, and Chip, who shared a vision of what could be, and then made it happen

News: For all of you future planners out there, the wonderful Rebecca Rusch and I will be hosting an MEA week May 26-31 2025. More on that soon. 

What is your age?
53.

Where are you from?
I grew up around the world, the product of adventure (my parents met and married young in Italy) and misadventure (my parents divorced in Venezuela). There were a bunch of countries in between until I finally ended up in the UK. The UK was, back then, not an easy place to be foreign and brownish so I quickly learned to ‘present English.’ I was jolly good at it.  

“My mantra is: ‘Good teachers teach; great teachers learn with you’ ”

One of your first jobs was teaching in English, Spanish, and French literature. What attracted you to teaching?
Teaching was a way to travel and work in international schools and still make a living. It was a ‘real’ profession and, as a student of philosophy and literature, the recruiters weren’t lining up at my door. As I got into teaching I realized I loved sharing ideas with people. I was always curious and inquisitive and my lessons as a young man and as an older man have always been about exploring as a teacher, together with my students. My mantra is: “Good teachers teach; great teachers learn with you.”  

Being a teacher is a great way to learn.

You were seemingly plucked from obscurity by a Swiss billionaire to work on a green investment project. Crazy. What was that about?
It was pure luck. I had been working on an environmental campaign for an in-flight entertainment company in London (another long story) and the project I was working on got noticed by this mysterious Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny. I got swept up into his world of sustainability and green investment by thinker, journalist, and author, my now friend and mentor Lloyd Timberlake. Between Lloyd and Stephan they started me on a career of exploring sustainability and the possibility of changing the world with an idea.  It was a crazy time. I was a young and slightly disreputable looking kid so I was an unlikely candidate for the job.  I have always had a curious intelligence (in every sense curious) and I think for them having someone on the team who was a beginner unencumbered by knowledge of any kind made some kind of sense. As I say, I was lucky.

“Everything we invent as a species and as individuals can be uninvented. Things can be reimagined”

You have been at the forefront of sustainability since its early days, doing a couple of decades involved in that work in California. What energizes you about that work?
I was never a green crusader but I have always had two driving belief systems that animated my work.  

The first is that life could be better if we just reimagined the way things currently work. So much of the environmental catastrophe is down to poor design and a rigidity in the way we think about what is and what could be.  We need to believe in the things and the systems we invent as human beings for them to function (think money and interest rates, or property ownership without belief). But simultaneously, everything we invent as a species and as individuals can be uninvented. Things can be reimagined.  

This sounds obvious, but we are so often deeply locked in our invented realities of markets and profits that we feel powerless before them. We see them as immutable, like ‘real things.’

I love it when people hit that moment of realization: We can change this thing. It isn’t real. We can make life better if we do it. We are not stuck in what is.

The second animator or through line for my work (and life) is community.  If we come together we can reimagine the future. Whether this is in sustainability or, like MEA, in wellness. Community is the engine that lies at the heart of transforming what is into what could be.  

Culturally in the US we have exported a very powerful set of hero mythologies and memes. This person did that. That person did this. Transformation of any given system cannot be an individual task even though individuals have a role.Change happens in community.  

“Community is the engine that lies at the heart of transforming what is into what could be”

What caused you to leave and, with your family, head to Baja, Mexico?
I had hit that magic age: the low point of the u-curve of happiness. I was 47 years old, working hard, chasing hard. My wife and I had two young children and our little family system was beyond stressed out. There are moments when you wake up to the dream of your life and think: “What the hell am I doing?” (Talking Heads are likely playing in the background). Baja was a choice for our family health, sanity, and an exploration of what our lives could be like outside the madcap pace of the Bay Area. It was an intuitive leap into a transformational chapter in my life.

Why did you join MEA as a co-founder?
It was one of those forks in the road where you ‘choose to go straight’. MEA made no sense at all to the trajectory of my career and my life or my expected life choices. I think what made MEA sticky for me was the partners I was joining. Chip Conley, who has the brain and the energy of a live circus, and Christine Sperber, who makes everything she gets involved in more fun, more meaningful, more human. A powerful combination. I wanted to be around these two people. They inspired me. 

Ultimately, I joined MEA for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I let go of some big career opportunities to go live in a dusty beach town in Baja and work on subjects I didn’t really feel intellectually all that passionate about: reframing adult life. Personally, I was following that bone-level “yes” you sometimes get in life when something important is happening. I recognized the vibe from my early work in sustainability: “Wake up. Do this. It is the start of something meaningful.”

After almost 7 years doing the work of MEA I am also beginning to suspect I had some lessons to learn that a single wellness workshop was never going to be able to get me through. I somehow needed to do the damn MEA course at least 100 times before I started to get it. I wish this was a joke.

What is the mission of MEA?
MEA is the world’s first Midlife Wisdom School. These are words you don’t often get to see stacked together. The idea is actually pretty simple. We are living a whole lot longer now than we did one hundred years ago. In 1900, being fifty was kind of getting towards the last lap of your race.  Fast forward a quick century and a couple of revolutions and extinctions later and we can expect to live to around 80. That means we have doubled adulthood in the last 100 years.  

No one seems to be aware of this titanic cultural, social and biological shift we have made as a species.  

“If 20-50 was the first adulthood that humanity had access to, 50-80 is the second adulthood that modern life has gifted us”

If 20-50 was the first adulthood that humanity had access to, 50-80 is the second adulthood that modern life has gifted us. And here is the thing: most of us have no idea how to spend that second adulthood. We found the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ extended human life, and we are using all this precious new time to do things like watch 47 hours of TV a week (data on American retirees). It doesn’t help that we are under a barrage of messages that tell us that aging is bad, that we need to stay young.

So a school that helps people re-understand the true length of their lives, a school that teaches you how to reframe and reimagine what you have in front of you and then tune in and connect to what you actually want to do next seems to be a vital thing. Vital personally. Vital for vitality. Life changes us.   Keeping doing the same things, being the same things, and trying the same things is how we as humans stagnate. 

MEA was set up to help people reimagine their lives and help them decide who they want to be in their second adulthood. The MEA Method also throws off community, lifelong friendships, and joy like nothing else I have ever done.  

So, without realizing it, the animating themes of my life and work mysteriously come together at MEA. Getting people to see that their reality isn’t ‘real’ and that there are unexplored possibilities. Getting people into community to transform themselves and their future.

“MEA was set up to help people reimagine their lives and help them decide who they want to be in their second adulthood”

What does regeneration mean to you, at all levels: human, environmental, organizational?
I love Paul Hawken’s definition of regeneration as reconnecting parts of a system to itself. For me, regeneration is what it says on the box: bringing something back. I started in sustainability, which is also what it says on the box. Regeneration as a theme is a kind of depressing reflection on the fact that we are no longer sustaining what we have; we are having to work out how to bring it back.

The amazing aha for me at MEA was that this in so many ways reflected our experience of modern life. People arrived at our workshops burned out, busy, exhausted. We are not even interested in sustaining ourselves, our lives. We are interested in regenerating ourselves. Reconnecting to essential parts of ourselves as humans. Being in community. Having purposes that are meaningful to us. Being well.

Regeneration in farming is often focused on what happens underground.  Beneath the surface. Look after your soil and you can grow almost anything.  A dead soil needs external inputs to grow anything at all. So too with us as individuals and organizations. We often riff on our sessions on the idea of the soil and the soul. What is underground feeds us for our growth.

Maybe it is time to soil yourself? *Contractually I am allowed one terrible dad joke in every article I write.

Rising Circle Ranch, Santa Fe

Now you have an additional 3,000 acres in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What are you up to?
It is time to take our model we spent years refining in Baja out into the world.  Santa Fe is the perfect place for people from across the states and the world to come and experience what we do. Big skies. An environment that forces you to pause, and reflect. To think about yourself.  

The Rising Circle ranch at Santa Fe is a dream. Four square miles of solitude and beauty that we have spent the last two years regenerating with horses.  We built two whole MEAs on the site and are running workshops there right now. We are asking big questions of the market.  Are people willing to invest in transforming their lives by shaking up their idea of what it is to age in the modern world? From what we have seen of people in transitions, seeking a more aligned purpose, there are people — lots of them. It feels like an untapped vein that desperately needs mining.

What does the word ‘old’ mean to you?
It doesn’t mean much to me. I have never really felt old. Tired, yes. Old, no.  I have friends who were, for whatever reasons, old in their twenties. I recognize the luck that my body and life so far allow this to be true. I have friends who in their seventies are more limber, strong, and embodied than I ever have been.

“We have to actively choose to not be the stereotype as we age”

Let’s take a moment to lay out some of the stereotypes about aging, and why they are incorrect.

Here is the problem with stereotypes: they are often correct. The thing with aging stereotypes is that they don’t have to be correct. You can be old and stuck in your ways, or not. Old and boring, or not; Old and stagnating, or not; Old and unable to learn something new, or not. You get the idea.

We have to actively choose to not be the stereotype as we age. Everyone is capable of so much more than we could possibly imagine as we age in our bodies, with our brilliant older minds, in our relationships that are spiced with self knowledge. We can still transform ourselves for the better at 80 years old.  I have seen it.  

Or not.

What role does taking care of physical health play in your life?
The older I get, the more I realize I want to care for the body that has to get me through this second adulthood. I eat pretty well when I focus on it.  I know from the research done by Dacher Keltner on Awe that this is a huge part of my own wellbeing, and so I exercise, I keep surfing, and get out into the world as much as I can.  

Sometimes. But sometimes I am a terrible slob. When I am tired and exhausted, I know I would feel better if I got out, and I don’t do it.  So I guess I am a work in progress. The trick with this wellness gig is giving yourself some grace when you fail. You will fail.

“The trick with this wellness gig is giving yourself some grace when you fail. You will fail”

How impactful is physicality when it comes to age and confidence?
If you have the choice to look after your body as you age, it helps. Obviously.  So much of our physicality is luck, a genetic inheritance, a lifelong lottery dodging the bullets of disease and misfortune. So many people have so little choice with their physicality. But if you do have a choice and don’t do the work, you also increase your likelihood of the unlucky accident, the slips and strains that come as our body falls out of condition.  

I recently took up dance classes with the amazing Annie Parr (her Shift program at El Campo in Baja and soon to be online is worth checking out).  Her take is that dance is all about confidence. So our physicality gives us confidence, but we also give our physicality confidence. It is a strange self-reinforcing loop.

You have seen thousands of people come through MEA at this point. If there is one lesson you could impart to people our age, what would it be?
Stay open to the possibility of transforming yourself until the day you die.

We spoke earlier about the need to embrace hard things and uncertainty. That can be a challenge as we age and “take our comfort.” How do you address that personally?
Adulting chases you down and pins you to the ground until you outgrow whatever is holding you.  

If you don’t outgrow it, you stay stuck. Period.  Uncertainty and discomfort are not a choice we make; they are a daily reality. For me, I have had to change my relationship with both and, as I have aged, I realize I am actually pretty good at uncertainty. I am pretty good at discomfort. Once I had that realization, I had to unpick how much they stress me out and reframe my relationship with them: “This will all be fine. I am good at it.” This perspective and ability to reflect on our experience is a gift aging gives us.

“Uncertainty and discomfort are not a choice we make; they are a daily reality”

If you want to know where you really need to grow, identify where you are uncomfortable. I’m not much of a dancer; the idea of dancing is uncomfortable to me. I take dance classes. It is still uncomfortable but it is getting better.  Ideas like moving towards what we find uncomfortable are easy to say and hard to do. I tend to pick the easy discomforts and avoid the elephants in my room. Dancing, sure; I can likely tackle that. My discomfort with spreadsheets; I will definitely get there. Actually, this summer. I will finally learn how to really use an Excel spreadsheet properly this summer.  Challenge issued.  

But more deeply, there are discomforts I won’t address or even share. Yet.

How do your wife and kids feel about Baja?
They love it, then they find it boring. They love it, then they find it boring. The usual kid stuff. Baja is like living in the 1990s. Tech is slow and clunky. Kids play outside a fair amount. There is still nature, whales in the ocean, birds in the fields. I don’t much mind how my kids find Baja. I find it a place where they can have a childhood that makes some kind of sense to me. A childhood that doesn’t center around technology and screens. I think they will thank me. But probably not.

What is currently your biggest challenge in life?
You catch me on an upswing. The last 24 months have been a bagful of the things: work stress, family stress, feeling disconnected and stretched out (the irony of this is not lost on me).  I would say my greatest challenge right now is finishing what is in front of me and not starting something new.  It is also the greatest privilege of my life right now.

How do you see your next 10 years unfolding?
I am working hard to make sure that I have no idea.  

Taking time, opening up for new things and learning and seeing who emerges next. In short, practicing what I teach. In the immediate future, I am finishing things. My community. Working less.  

After that? Let’s see. I love my partners at MEA and am excited to see the crazy shit we cook up together. Or not.  

What are the 3 non-negotiables in your life?
Oh, crap. Everything has been pretty negotiable. The only things that have stuck through everything are: Rachel (my wife) and Gray and Blue (my kids), music (that I collect obsessively), books, ideas and words (that I dork about all the time). 

I wish I could say surfing in that list.  It kind of was until COVID and is now far more of an optional thing. It will, I am sure, come back.

Connect with Jeff:
LinkedIn
Modern Elder Academy