Zero Target

It is a deeply human instinct to try and pinpoint exactly where things end or begin. For me, the boundary line was turning 40.

I am 43 today, and the landscape of my life is unrecognizable. I lost my job. For nearly two decades, my identity was entirely wrapped up in that world my successes, my reputation, my trajectory. But if I am being completely honest with myself, the fulfillment had drained out of it a long time ago. I have always believed that you guide your destiny toward whatever you give your headspace and effort to. For a long time, I was giving it to a corporate machine that didn't have a soul.

The pivot started on a gray, dull day at the end of November 2022.

I had just turned 40. We were living "upstate" in the Connecticut woods our absolute boonies. It was our Covid shelter, a place we had bought to feel safe while the world outside went entirely mad. After dropping our oldest daughter off at daycare, my husband, Greg, and I went for a hike, carrying our three-month-old daughter, Effie, warm and cozy against my chest.

On the drive there and back, watching the bare November trees pass by, Greg and I started talking about what it actually meant to be forty. What is supposed to happen between 40 and 50?

Our imaginations didn't go very deep. In fact, we came up with almost nothing.

It felt, quite frankly, like it was going to be a boring decade. Our twenties and thirties had been loud, fast, and full of boxes to check. In our 20s, it was about university, traveling, and partying with little money. In our 30s, it was more of the same, but with actual adult money. We built our careers, pushed for higher titles, and celebrated weddings all over the world, including our own. We bought the Covid house. We had our first baby. It sounds silly to say it out loud, but sitting in that car, it felt like we had already done it all.

We had both managed to climb into executive roles in Corporate America, and neither of us wanted to climb any higher. With two small children, we knew our lives would be more constrained over the next few years. So, 40 to 50 looked like a standstill. Just living.

But a standstill has never really been us.

We are not rigid planners. At no point in my career could I have ever given a corporate recruiter a real answer to the question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" We just followed our instincts, paired with a few broad ideas, and somehow it worked. Greg is from the UK; I am German. We met at the same company, and when he made up his mind to move to New York, I did too.

We showed up in Manhattan and fit right in. We lived by a very simple motto: We like it, we do it. We had no safety nets or family obligations in the States our relatives were all back in Europe. It was just us, making sure we experienced as much as we possibly could. We weren't reckless, but we were entirely free.

Because we wanted to keep that freedom, we both agreed early on that we wanted to harvest enough money and security so we wouldn't be forced to work until we were 70. We quietly found the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and adopted its baseline rules: high savings, zero waste, and a complete refusal to fall into the trap of consumerism or status symbols. We don't take it to extremes, but as Europeans, we appreciate an intellectual framework we can follow, test, and discuss over a glass of wine.

Yet, driving through that bleak November afternoon in 2022, the framework offered no answers for the next ten years. The checklist was entirely empty.

We did it all, we thought. Now what?

At 43, I still don't have the answer to that question. The "now what" remains entirely unmapped. But with my sudden exit from Corporate America, the gears have finally started to move. The turn has begun, and the only way to find out what lies on the other side of the checklist is to start walking into the blank space.