Sunday 12 March 2023

Life Reimagined: Midlife, Non-Alcoholic Cafes, Cows, and Goals vs. Shoulds

March 12, 2023 | Read Online

Midlife, Non-Alcoholic Cafes, Cows, and Goals vs. Shoulds

The truth about getting older

Calvin Rosser
March 12, 2023

Hello friends and welcome back to Life Reimagined, a free weekly elixir designed to make you feel good and live better.

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👴 I. Midlife

I really enjoyed Brene Brown's 2018 article, The Midlife Unraveling. In it, she discusses the difficulties of midlife, the unnerving phase of life in which we confront internal crises and the untold stories of our lives.

☕️ II. A New Type of Cafe?

Yesterday, I walked through Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and stumbled across Ocean Beach Cafe after a stroll along the beach. It was seven in the evening, so I was surprised to see that the cafe was still open. But then I saw they had alcohol and assumed it was a hangout spot for an evening drink.

I walked over to a fridge full of beer, and as I looked at the 30 different options, I realized that all of them were non-alcoholic beers. The bottles of wine on the wall were also all non-alcoholic. Odd.

I ended up sitting down and chatting with Josh, the owner of the cafe. He's a former bartender who quit booze three years ago and opened the cafe to serve the growing group of people who want to enjoy a nice ambiance, great food, and the taste of a good drink without the repercussions of alcohol.

He ended up giving me a sample of their non-alcoholic red wine and one of their Mezcal-like non-alcoholic cocktails. Both were surprisingly good, especially the cocktail. I would have been surprised to learn they didn't have alcohol if I tried them without any context.

The conversation with Josh and my experience of tasting these drinks made me think that we'll see a lot more cafes and other spaces that serve high-quality non-alcoholic options that are nearly indistinguishable from "the real stuff."

😁 III. A Reprieve from Negativity

The internet is full of doomsday content that makes you feel bad about a world filled with endless beauty. If you want a break from the negativity, check out this wholesome clip of a guy playing the saxophone for some cows.

Erin Herrmann @erinmherrmann

my parents are such goofs they drove out to the backroads so my dad could play the cows the songs he's been learning on the saxophone pt.1 https://t.co/IHzgxtvo0N

Jun 26, 2019

754K Likes 230K Retweets 6.33K Replies

🧠 IV. Something I'm Thinking About

"Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests."

Meg Jay in The Defining Decade. Resurfaced using Readwise.

That's all for now. See you next Sunday.

— Cal

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