It was October of 1979. My father had passed away just a few
weeks before and, for the first time in a month, I stepped
on the scales and discovered I'd gained ten pounds. Ten pounds
in thirty days, I was stunned. I was 34 and already discovering
that getting rid of an extra couple pounds was harder than
it had been just a few years before. Now I had ten extra pounds
to get rid of and the thought was very depressing.
I realized that I was showing the first signs of middle age,
something I had never worried about before. It wasn't just
bodyweight, it was everything. I couldn't just glide along
any more. If I kept "gliding", it was going to be downhill
and that was not the future I had envisioned when I was young.
I wanted to do something about it, but I first had to understand
what was happening. Thus began an informal, but intense, 28-year
study of the aging process and, in particular, this thing
we call "middle age".
I set up MiddleAge.org as a "personal" website in 1998. It
was just a few essays describing some of the things I had
learned over the prior two decades. It never occurred to me
that many people would be interested in reading personal essays,
so I ignored the site and left it unpromoted. On the Internet,
if you don't promote a site, it just sits in darkness. No
one knows it's there. But the occasional visitor did come
and the site's traffic slowly increased. Much to my surprise,
more people have found this site useful than I had imagined
possible. I've had more than 700,000 visitors since the site was
launched, something I never would have imagined possible. Those who write me range in age from 20 to 80 and
come from over 100 nations, from the US, Malaysia, Canada, Israel,
the UK, Brazil and dozens of others. Every one of them is welcome.
I'll finish with a promise to you. There will be no commercial advertising on this site,
no flashing banner ads, that detract from its purpose. The purpose is simply to
help each of us treat the middle of our lives as far more
than the end of our lives.
I hope you enjoy your visit. I hope you'll mention MiddleAge.org to your friends who might find it useful.
Bob Adams
