David Phillips knows every crack in his own foundation. What he cannot see, he says, are the cracks in anyone else’s. “When I look at my neighbors, all I see is manicured landscape and pretty curtains in the windows.” It is a simple observation, and it explains one of the loneliest experiences of adult life: arriving somewhere around midlife with the career, the family, the house, and the trophies on the shelf, and feeling as though you are quietly imploding on the inside while everyone across the street appears to have it figured out. Almost no one says it out loud, which is exactly why so many people believe they are the only one feeling it.
Phillips is a writer, speaker, and coach who has spent more than a decade working alongside people moving through major seasons of change, and he is the author of Surfing The Invisible Wave, a book that wraps a practical framework for building a meaningful life inside the story of a man who leaves everything behind to find himself. He did not write it from a distance. About ten years ago, after leaving his corporate career to homeschool his son and then stepping into his then-wife’s coaching practice, he entered what he describes as a three-year season marked by anxiety-fueled depression, wrestling with questions of purpose and meaning while still trying to show up for the people he cared about. What he learned on the way out became the framework he now teaches.
Why Midlife Is When the Old Scripts Stop Working
According to Phillips, the emptiness that surfaces at midlife has a recognizable structure. By this stage, many people begin to realize that the scripts handed down by the previous generation simply do not fit, either for their generation or for them as individuals. “There’s no cookie-cutter script that’s gonna fit everybody,” he says. You did the things you were told to do, and the reward you were promised never quite arrived.
Layered on top of that is the gap between the romantic vision of a profession and its daily reality. Phillips knew from the age of nine that he wanted to be an architect. He went to architecture school, which he describes as almost a romantic experience full of history and design, and then discovered that the practice of architecture is mostly administration, permits, and bureaucracy. He suspects the same is true of law, medicine, and most careers people fall in love with from the outside. Add a marriage that turns out to require work, teenagers or an approaching empty nest, and aging parents, and the question shifts from how to make life enjoyable to how to make it bearable.
Phillips also points to something researchers call the happiness curve. People tend to be happiest when they are young, dip through the middle decades, and rise again as they get older. The bottom of that curve is where the midlife question lives. Knowing that the dip is common, and that it is a stage rather than a verdict, is the first thing that changes how a person experiences it.
The Comparison Trap Has a Simple Fix
The reason everyone else seems to be thriving is not that they are. Phillips explains that we compare what we know to be true about our own lives against what we can see of other people’s lives, and what we can see is landscaping and curtains. Even in close friend groups, it takes deeper conversations before the truth comes out that everyone is contending with something. “They’re just dealing with it differently,” he says.
Where people genuinely differ, in his experience, is whether the work they are doing means something to them personally. Hard work in service of something that matters produces a completely different felt experience than hard work that does not. “It might still be suffering,” Phillips says, “but it’s meaningful suffering.” That turns out to be the difference maker, and it is the thread that runs through everything else he teaches.
The Emptiness Is an Invitation, Not a Failure
Phillips reframes the midlife crisis as something closer to an invitation. Life, as he puts it, is saying there is more for you. A great deal of the pain people feel comes from resisting the possibility of a new chapter and insisting that the old way is the right way. “It’s not the right way,” he says. “It’s just the familiar way.”
He borrows a line from John Maxwell to make the point: change is inevitable, growth is optional. Aging, circumstances, and loss arrive whether we choose them or not. What we do in response determines both the trajectory of our lives and how we feel inside them day to day. If what you secretly hope for is that everything stays the same and simply starts to feel good again, Phillips says that hope will be a hard one to hold, because life demands continued growth. The practical shift is to stop clenching against the change and start asking what it might be making room for.
Learning to Surf the Invisible Wave
The central metaphor of Phillips’s work came from an interview he heard with Chip Conley, author of Emotional Equations, who took up surfing at 55. Conley described surfing as an attune sport rather than an attain sport. You are not trying to reach a fixed goal; you are constantly adjusting to a wave that is changing and unfolding beneath you. Phillips found that a near-perfect picture of life itself, and he pairs it with a line from Jon Kabat-Zinn that appears on the back of his book: you cannot stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
“The invisible wave is the current of your life that is either pulling you under or propelling you forward, depending on how you approach it.”
David Phillips, writer, speaker, coach, and author of Surfing The Invisible Wave
Phillips sees many people in his own age group adrift in their lives, not because life is too hard but because they are moving at the whim of currents they never chose and lack the tools to work with them. The wave is not the enemy. Learning to read it and respond to it is the skill, and the rest of his framework is a description of how to build that skill.
Meaning Comes First, and Passion Follows
The most counterintuitive idea in Phillips’s work concerns the order of things. In his book, the character Seeker chases meaning through big passionate experiences, a motorcycle trip, learning to surf giant waves, hoping that a thrill large enough will fill his life with significance. His mentor, Sage, tells him it is not wrong, just backwards. “The meaning comes first,” Phillips explains, “and because your life is meaningful, that produces the passion. Passion is an after effect.”
He grounds this in what Chip Conley calls emotional equations. Suffering minus meaning equals despair. Suffering plus meaning equals passion. The variable is meaning, and life will include suffering either way. That is why Phillips’s framework starts with foundations before it gets anywhere near goals. He cites Jim Carrey’s observation that depression is real and legitimate, but that without good food, proper sleep, sunlight, and good people around you, you are not giving yourself a chance. Phillips calls that chapter of his work the basics, and he is blunt that they have to be in place first.
From there, the framework moves in a specific order. Understand your unique design, your talents, and how to shape them into strengths. Clarify what you believe, because beliefs do not just act as moral guardrails; they filter what your brain pays attention to and therefore shape your perception of your own experience. Clarify your values. From values, a vision emerges for the future you want to live into. From vision come goals at several levels, including the impossible ones that matter less for their attainment than for who you become pursuing them. Then come actions, daily practices, and habits that carry you toward that future.
Where to Start When Everything Is Changing at Once
Phillips offers a set of questions for anyone feeling stuck: What do I need to start doing? What do I need to stop doing? What do I want more of? What do I want less of? He says that sitting with those four questions on paper for any length of time will begin to clarify what actually matters. He adds a few deeper ones that he uses in coaching, including “Who would you be in the absence of your concerns?” and, for people in relationship strain, who would you be if you did not have to conform to someone else’s expectations.
He is a strong advocate for writing the answers by hand. “I think something magical happens when you actually write it down,” he says, because you have to make your thoughts make sense, and once they are on the page, you can hold them up and ask whether they are true. Before any of that, though, comes an honest assessment of where you are right now. Phillips uses the picture of a friend who wants driving directions to Disneyland and claims to be starting in Chicago when he is actually in Seattle. A route from the wrong starting point is useless. Admitting where your life really is can be painful, but until you do, no plan will hold.
Finally, he insists this is not work to do alone. Citing Jordan Peterson’s observation that people organize their brains through conversation, Phillips encourages inviting a friend or two into the process. Not everyone will come, and some will only want to hang out, but one or two may go the distance. And sharing the story itself matters. Drawing on Curt Thompson’s book The Soul of Shame, he describes healing shame by telling your story to trusted people who have earned the right to hold it. The first thing you discover is that you are not alone.
It Is Never Too Late to Become Who You Might Have Been
When Phillips is asked what he most wants to say to the person who did everything right and still feels hollow, he reaches for a line he attributes to Eliot: it is never too late to become who you might have been. His own parents, now in their eighties, are working through his book a page a day, remaining open to the possibility that the process might change them. He has watched a friend of ten years, someone who never reads personal development books, finish the book in six and a half hours and, within weeks, make decisions about his health and marriage that left him looking, in Phillips’s words, ten years younger.
The lesson underneath all of it is that the restlessness you are afraid of is information, not indictment. It is pointing at a life more closely aligned with who you actually are and what you actually value, and the way toward it is intentional rather than accidental: nail the basics, get honest about where you are, ask the four questions, write the answers down, and bring someone with you.
Life will be hard regardless. But as David Phillips learned in his own dark season, and has seen in the lives of the people he coaches, when you live in alignment with who you are, it does not matter that it is hard.
