Our Third Act - Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society - Andy Calitz

Andy reflects from Tirana, Albania, while approaching his hundredth country visited. Drawing on Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel , he explores why travel becomes especially meaningful later in life. Travel sharpens attention, deepens observation, challenges fantasy, and creates space for reflection and conversation. From cycling trips and solitary flights to Rome, Jerusalem, Tibet, and the Cami...

Andy reflects on Milan Kundera’s idea that “we all need someone to look at us.” Beginning with a conversation about the Slavic word Soběslav — glory for oneself — he explores humanity’s deep need for recognition, admiration, and visibility. Why do we seek applause, titles, followers, fame, or status? How does recognition drive ambition, achievement, and even human progress? And when does healthy a...

Andy reflects on a deeply unsettling fact: none of us chose to be born. From this starting point, he explores existence, parenthood, responsibility, suffering, gratitude, and what he calls the “gratitude paradox” — being expected to feel grateful for a life created through decisions made by others. The episode considers how parents shape children without owning them, and how meaning emerges after...

Family fractures are common, yet they remain one of the most painful and confusing parts of human life. In this episode, Andy reflects on the tensions that can arise between siblings, parents, and children as families spread across countries, cultures, and generations. Drawing from personal experience, he explores why misunderstandings accumulate, why memories differ, and why the desire to be “rig...

Drawing on a moment from his thirties in Madrid, Andy reflects on a question that returns later in life: if work ends, what does it mean to keep living fully? Retirement often removes the structure that shaped our days, our sense of contribution, and our identity. But life itself does not retire. Andy explores a broader view of purpose — serving society, improving nature, and building human capabi...

Andy reflects on growing up in a world that felt deeply enchanted — filled with ghosts, miracles, spirits, and unseen forces. Across many cultures and countries, he still sees people living within similar supernatural frameworks today. Yet his own understanding of reality has changed. Without rejecting meaning, beauty, or depth, he now lives with clarity rather than enchantment. The stories of the...

In this episode, Andy reflects on a quiet but unsettling thought: we will not be present at our own celebration of life . So why does it matter who might come? Through personal stories — including a remark from his ninety-eight-year-old father-in-law and reflections on his parents’ memorials — he explores what this question really reveals. It is less about death than about connection while we are...

In this episode of Our Third Act — Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society, Andy explores a tension at the heart of modern life. We are taught that all people are equal in dignity and worth. Yet everywhere around us society is organised into ladders — in work, education, sport, politics, and influence. Why do hierarchies emerge so naturally, and why do they motivate both ambition and anxiety? Andy...

What does it really mean to leave the Earth a better place than we found it? In this episode of Our Third Act — Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society , Andy examines that familiar moral aspiration more closely. Instead of asking whether we tried to do good, he asks a harder question: would the world be worse if we had never been born? To answer it honestly, he proposes three dimensions in which e...

In this episode, Andy reflects on what a grandparent can give that matters most. Beyond gifts, money, advice, and attention, he explores the idea of giving a grandchild the story of their life: not just a biography beginning at birth, but a much longer story stretching from the universe, to life on Earth, to humanity, family, and society. That wider frame offers perspective, connection, and respon...

In this episode we reflect on war as a recurring reality of human history and memory. Most of us first encounter war not through battlefields but through the stories our nations tell — stories of heroism, sacrifice, enemies, and victory. As we grow older, we begin to examine those stories more critically. Why do humans go to war at all? Is war increasing or decreasing in history? Are there such th...

In later life, a quiet but important question often appears: what should we do with the resources we have accumulated? In this episode, Andy reflects on four directions money can take — giving to children and family, donating to causes, contributing through taxes to the society we live in, and spending on our own remaining years. Each choice carries different emotions, responsibilities, and conseq...

In this episode, Andy explores what it means to make private truth public. Drawing on personal experiences — from learning about religious and political dissent at school, to his brother coming out as gay, to publishing Life beyond the gods — he reflects on the tension between belonging and integrity. The episode distinguishes between freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the courage required...

In this episode of Our Third Act — Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society , Andy explores a confronting idea: what if responsibility should come before hope? In later life, hope shows up everywhere — about health, children, democracy, finances, dignity. But is hope strengthening us, or quietly replacing action? Drawing from cultural sayings, secular reflection, and the realities of ageing, Andy as...

In this episode of Our Third Act — Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society, I reflect on what it really means to let our children go. Children arrive under many circumstances, but they do not choose to be born. That fact carries responsibility — not only to love and protect them, but to raise adults capable of agency, character, and contribution. As roles shift during our third act, the challenge i...

What does it mean to be relevant in the later chapters of life—when roles shift, visibility fades, and the world keeps accelerating? In this episode of Our Third Act , Andy begins with a friend’s line: “To stay relevant today is a daily challenge.” It takes him to two scenes: The Unbearable Lightness of Being , where living in the eyes of others becomes a private prison, and the Nobel Prize Museum...

Welcome to Our Third Act — Facing Life: Mind, Meaning and Society . I’m Andy. This series is for the later chapters of adulthood—when time feels sharper, relationships matter more, and the big questions stop being theoretical. It’s not self-help, and it’s not advice. It’s calm, honest reflection—so you can think more clearly, live more deliberately, and stay more human. Each episode explores one l...

Life Inside Today’s Polycrisis explores what it feels like to live under multiple, overlapping pressures—wars that won’t resolve, political volatility, climate risk, economic strain, technological acceleration, and an always-on news stream. Andy starts from real conversations with friends across countries and notices a shared inner effect: not constant panic, but a persistent strain—tightness, wea...

Returning to Creativity, Feeling Alive is an episode about reclaiming the part of you that makes, shapes, and plays—without needing permission or applause. Andy begins with a childhood moment of embarrassment that quietly shut a door on “being creative,” and follows the long path back: through music, through work, and finally through writing. The episode explores why creativity often hides inside...

In this episode, How am I today, frankly , a simple greeting turns into something much bigger. When a friend undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer texts, “Andy, how are you today?”, I freeze—because the question isn’t small. It reaches into mood, energy, health, relationships, and the wider world, and it asks for a single sentence. We look at why “Fine, thanks” so often feels false, why mi...