Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

A few months ago, Launch Key subscriber/ author Steven Shorkey shared the enclosed WSJ article believing that it applied to many of us. He was right. And while I agree with the premise of mattering, I think we have much better odds by building something we truly care about.

After faith, family and friends – that might be a book, podcast, newsletter, consulting practice, YouTube channel, digital product or a host of other things that only you can produce. Along those lines I’m sharing a daily tech briefing (Free Knowledge) I built just to help me keep up with the pace of AI. Bookmark it if you like it.

Extend your mattering by building something.

Let's get into it.

The Wall Street Journal piece started with eight retirees at dinner in Sarasota.

Each had spent thirty or forty years building accomplishments worth pointing at — companies, departments, divisions, careers. They assumed the next chapter would be the easy one. Phone calls returned. Nonprofit boards happy for help. Younger people grateful for mentorship.

The Sarasota retirees had emailed nonprofits. Offered to teach. Volunteered to advise. The emails went unanswered. The doors stayed closed.

What they were mourning, Wallace argues, wasn't just lost opportunity. It was the loss of mattering — the human need to feel seen, useful, and depended on.

She's right about the diagnosis. She names a thing the retirement industry has been missing for decades.

She's wrong about what to do about it.

Around the same time her piece was making the rounds, a thread on r/retirement crossed 500 comments. The opening question was almost identical to the Sarasota dinner, just in a kitchen voice: "I retired a year ago. I'm learning to relax. Do I still care about my former career?"

482 upvotes. 501 replies.

The Sarasota dinner and the Reddit thread are the same person, twelve months apart, in different rooms, asking the same question:

Do I still matter without the title?

Wallace's framework is ok. She borrows a research acronym — SAID — for the four ingredients of mattering: feeling Significant, Appreciated, Invested in, and Depended on. Retirement, she points out, can vaporize all four at once.

The numbers back her up. Eleven thousand Americans turn 65 every day.

By 2030, one in five of us will be of retirement age. A 2020 meta-analysis found that nearly a third of retirees develop depressive symptoms — and the strongest predictors aren't financial. They're psychological. Feeling less valued. Less connected.

Then come the remedies. Say yes to coffee. Join a book club. Find a place to volunteer. Extend invitations. Be the kind of person other people invest in.

All decent advice. All missing the deeper trap.

Every one of those remedies is mattering by application. Mattering you have to ask for. The Sarasota retirees already did that part — they emailed the nonprofits and queued up for the volunteer slots. The doors stayed closed anyway.

Here's the harder truth: an institution-sized career was borrowed mattering.

For thirty years, you mattered because the org chart said you did. Promotions. Direct reports. The Monday meeting where seventeen people waited on what you'd say next. That was rented from a system that didn't actually care about you once your title fell off.

When you left or retired, the lease ended. So you went looking for a new one — a board seat, an adjunct gig, a foundation that might slot you back into a structure. Same shape, lower stakes.

And you're learning the same thing the Sarasota table learned: nobody is holding the door open for you.

The things I write about in Launch Key are the other answer.

Stop renting your mattering plan. Build one you own.

You don't need a board to vote you in. You need a thing that's yours that other people show up for. A newsletter people open on Tuesday morning. A small digital product that solves a problem you spent twenty years solving. An advisory practice with three clients you chose — not nine you inherited. A YouTube channel for the niche only you know cold.

These aren't hobbies. They're mattering engines. You own them. Nobody can vote you out. That audience doesn't have an HR department invite you back. That audience will leave if your material sucks.

I felt like I wasn’t quite finished when I started Launch Key. And there will be a time when I’m no longer relevant. But not yet.

More than 19,000 people have opted into a newsletter from a retired guy writing on a screen porch. No employer issued me a permit. No board approved the plan. The only credential anyone is checking is whether something useful shows up on Tuesday.

That isn't extraordinary. The tools are sitting right there. What's extraordinary is how few experienced operators have caught on.

The Sarasota dinner is the wrong scene to belong to. The right scene is the one where you stop refreshing your inbox for the nonprofit's reply and ship the first version of the thing.

Three things, ranked by what will still matter in the next few years:

1. Stop applying. Start owning. Pick one thing you can ship in the next 30 days without anyone's permission — a Substack, a Gumroad PDF, a paid Zoom workshop for three former colleagues, a LinkedIn series about the work you used to do. The revenue isn't the point yet. Removing the application step from your mattering plan is the point.

2. Treat your career as raw material, not a relic. Wallace tells the story of Nancy Schlossberg — an academic who didn't abandon her old identity, she adapted it. That's the right instinct. Your thirty years aren't something to memorialize. They're inventory. Somebody out there will pay for a slice of what you already know.

3. Pick one channel you own and feed it for a year. Not five channels. One. The fastest path back to feeling depended on is a small audience that genuinely depends on you. A board seat takes years to land and can be revoked. A hundred email subscribers can't.

Wallace named the disease the rest of the retirement industry has been ignoring. Give her that. But the cure she's writing about — the one delivered through book clubs and unanswered volunteer applications — is still mattering on someone else's terms.

You don't need someone else's terms.

Now go launch something 🚀

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With a clear road map and actionable takeaways, Wallace’s book reveals how to unlock this powerful force within ourselves and how to build cultures of mattering in our homes, workplaces, and communities – at any age.

It’s so difficult to keep up with the pace of AI, that I built my own Mac mini-powered daily briefing agent. But who needs another email? (see Eat Your Own Dog Food)

So I had Claude leverage design tools to create a high-end Futurist page delivered daily at 5am to Github. Markets, News, Crypto, a pull quote and a little daily commentary from a techno optimist (think, Marc Andreessen voice).

Its a simple aggregation play and sources (RSS, X, YouTube) are listed in the footer. I wholeheartedly ask for your opinions. Do you find this useful? What else should be included for insight? Comment below or email suggestions.

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