♣️WELCOME TO THE CLUB♣️

As some of you know, in the past couple of years I lit up the Life Stressors Index. As a divorced empty nester about to turn fifty, I needed to rejoin the world somehow. My strategy: social clubs.

Like many Gen Xers, I wasn’t “a joiner.” But inspired by calls for civic engagement like the documentary Join or Die!, I wound up checking out dozens of clubs over the past year—everything from the DAR to ACA to Mahjong to Death Cafés. The result is Welcome to the Club. It’s sort of Why We Can’t Sleep plus Bowling Alone—in reverse.

This is by far the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book, and it’s changed my life in profound—and, I hope, permanent—ways. I’m looking forward to conversations about midlife reinvention, cures for the loneliness epidemic, and the necessity (and joy) of finding community in third places beyond work or home.

Coming from Viking in 2027.