mental-health – Find Joy in the Middle

There is no final edit: what 70 Up reminded me about finding joy in the middle

September 23, 2026 jameshempsall

I watched the final episode of 70 Up last night and found it difficult to shake off. I found it poignant, sad, uplifting and, perhaps most of all, confusing. That last word matters because I don’t think this extraordinary series left me with a neat conclusion about life, and perhaps that is precisely its achievement. For more than six decades we have watched the same people grow from seven-year-old children into adults and now into their seventies.

We have seen ambitions expressed with the beautiful certainty of childhood encounter the much less predictable reality of actually living. Careers have happened, relationships have flourished and failed, families have grown, people have experienced loss, health has changed, expectations have been revised and life has repeatedly refused to follow the script. Watching the final instalment, I found myself thinking again and again about Find Joy in the Middle, because if there was ever a demonstration that the richness of life happens between beginnings and endings, surely this was it.

The original 7 Up was interested in a compelling question: how much of the adult can already be seen in the child? It looked particularly at the effects of class, background and opportunity. Yet, watching those lives from the vantage point of 70, I was struck by how inadequate any simple idea of prediction eventually becomes. Certainly, our beginnings matter. Where we come from, the opportunities available to us and the expectations placed upon us all shape what follows. But they do not tell the whole story. Life intervenes. People surprise us and we surprise ourselves. Things we desperately want do not happen, while other things we could never have imagined become enormously important. Doors close and unexpected ones open. We adapt, compromise, recover, change our minds and sometimes discover that something we once regarded as a disappointment looks very different when viewed from further down the road.

That is one of the things I have tried to explore through Find Joy in the Middle. We are very attracted to beginnings. New jobs, new relationships, new projects, new homes and new years all come beautifully uncluttered by what follows. At the beginning, possibility is everywhere and disappointment has not yet had time to interfere. We are equally fascinated by endings, because endings allow us to construct a story about what happened. Retirement speeches, obituaries, anniversaries and biographies take the untidiness of decades and arrange it into something that appears coherent. What we talk about much less is the enormous space between the two, where most of life actually happens. The middle is where plans meet reality, where certainty becomes doubt, where achievements coexist with disappointments and where we discover that life is much harder to classify as successful or unsuccessful than we once imagined.

There was something almost unnerving about seeing the participants confronted by their younger selves. Most of us are spared the experience of watching our seven, 14, 21 or 28-year-old selves describing confidently what we expect from the future. Yet those earlier versions of us still exist somewhere. I can certainly look backwards and remember times when I thought I knew where my own life was going. There were ambitions I thought would matter enormously, worries that occupied far too much space and assumptions about the future that turned out to be completely wrong. There are also people, experiences and opportunities that became hugely important to me which I could never have predicted. Perhaps one of the gifts of getting older is slowly becoming more forgiving of the person we used to be. They were making choices without knowing what we know now. What looks obvious in retrospect was rarely obvious at the time.

And that was where the sadness of 70 Up sat for me alongside something unexpectedly uplifting. Time is impossible to ignore in the programme. We see what six decades do. People who were once present are no longer there, possibilities have disappeared, relationships have changed and some chapters are definitively over. There is genuine loss in that. Yet the lives we are watching stubbornly refuse to become simple stories of triumph or failure. A life can contain achievement and regret, contentment and disappointment, love and loss without one cancelling out the other. Someone can arrive somewhere very different from where their seven-year-old self expected and still have lived a life of enormous value. There is something wonderfully liberating about that.

Perhaps we spend too much of our lives waiting for the moment when everything will finally make sense. We tell ourselves that things will settle down when this busy period is over, when the project is finished, when work becomes easier, when we have enough money, when the family is sorted, when we achieve the thing we have been working towards. Somewhere ahead of us exists an imaginary point at which the pieces will fall into place and we will finally understand what it has all been about. Then, presumably, we can relax and enjoy ourselves. Yet watching people at 70 reflecting upon lives we have witnessed in fragments since childhood made me wonder whether that moment ever really arrives. Perhaps life remains unfinished and contradictory for as long as we are living it.

That thought could sound bleak, but I find it strangely hopeful. What if we do not have to wait for resolution before we allow ourselves joy? What if something does not have to turn out as we hoped for it to have been worthwhile? What if we do not yet have to decide whether a particular period of our life was a success or failure? We might simply acknowledge that it happened, that it changed us, and that we carried on. Finding joy in the middle has never meant pretending that difficult things are wonderful or encouraging a relentless positivity that refuses to acknowledge disappointment. For me, it is almost the opposite. It is about recognising that joy can exist alongside uncertainty, sadness, frustration and regret. We do not have to eliminate one before we are entitled to experience the other.

That may be why 70 Up left me feeling so many apparently contradictory things at once. It was poignant because we knew we were saying goodbye. It was sad because time, ageing and loss were impossible to avoid. It was uplifting because people keep finding meaning, relationships, interests, humour and reasons to look forward. And it was confusing because there was no great answer waiting at the end. Nobody stepped forward to explain what makes a successful life or reveal the secret of happiness. There was simply the accumulated evidence of people having lived, with all the glorious mess that involves.

Perhaps that is the lesson I am taking from it. There is no final edit while we are living. We do not get to tidy the story before experiencing it. We are always somewhere between what has happened and what might happen next, carrying previous versions of ourselves while becoming somebody slightly different. That middle can sometimes feel frustrating because we want to know how the story turns out. Increasingly, though, I think there is a freedom in accepting that we don’t need to know.

Finding joy in the middle is not about reaching a point where everything has worked out. It is about looking around while the story is still unfinished and noticing what is already here. It is forgiving ourselves for choices made without the benefit of hindsight, accepting that some questions may remain unanswered, valuing the people who are travelling alongside us and staying curious about what might still happen. 70 Up reminded me that a life does not need to have followed the plan to have been a good one. Perhaps the real challenge, whatever our age, is to resist waiting for the final chapter before deciding that the story we are living now is worthy of our attention.

Because we are not waiting for life to happen. We are already in the middle of it.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

The loneliness challenge and the lost art of Finding Joy in the Middle

September 17, 2026 jameshempsall

A recent study has found that people living in areas with weaker local news networks and fewer community connections experience higher levels of loneliness and isolation. Researchers suggest that when the institutions that help us feel part of a community disappear, many people lose not only information but also a sense of belonging and connection.

Yet while headlines increasingly focus on loneliness as a growing social challenge, perhaps the deeper question is this: What do we do when we find ourselves in the middle of it?

Not at the end of the difficult season. Not after life has been fixed. Not once the right relationship, role, opportunity or outcome arrives. But right in the middle.

For many of us, loneliness is not simply the absence of company. It is the feeling that life is somehow suspended. We are waiting for something to change. Waiting for certainty. Waiting for the next chapter. Waiting to feel like ourselves again.

We can be surrounded by people and still feel disconnected. We can be successful and still feel unseen. We can be busy and still feel empty. Modern culture is remarkably good at celebrating arrivals. We celebrate promotions, graduations, engagements, retirements and achievements. We tell stories about destinations. We admire people who have reached the summit. What we rarely talk about is the climb.

We spend a significant proportion of our lives in what I call “the middle”. The middle of a career transition. The middle of grief. The middle of recovery. The middle of parenting. The middle of uncertainty about the future. The middle of a challenge that seems to have no obvious resolution.

The middle is uncomfortable and confusing to many because it has not yet revealed its ending. And yet it is in these very places that joy often does its most important work.

Many people assume joy is the reward that follows difficult circumstances. We tell ourselves that we will be joyful when the problem is solved, when the diagnosis improves, when the relationship heals, when the finances recover or when life becomes what we expected it to be. But joy does not work that way.

Happiness is often dependent on circumstances. Joy is deeper. Joy can coexist with uncertainty. It can live alongside disappointment. It can emerge in places where we least expect to find it. That distinction matters.

If we wait for perfect conditions before allowing ourselves to experience joy, we may spend years postponing it. We become focused on the destination and blind to what is available along the journey.

The growing loneliness described by researchers is a reminder that human beings need more than productivity, consumption and achievement. We need connection. We need meaning. We need community. We need to know that our lives are part of something bigger than ourselves. Perhaps that starts with paying attention.

Joy is often quieter than we expect. It may be found in an unexpected conversation. A walk on an autumn morning. A moment of laughter in the midst of stress. A message from an old friend. A chance to help someone else. A reminder that even difficult seasons contain gifts if we are willing to notice them. These moments rarely make headlines.

But they are often the moments that sustain us. The irony is that the middle places of life can become some of our greatest teachers. They reveal what truly matters. They strip away illusions of control. They invite us to slow down. They encourage us to invest in relationships rather than simply achievements. And they teach us that joy is not something we discover after the storm has passed. It is something we learn to recognise while the rain is still falling.

As society wrestles with rising loneliness and disconnection, perhaps the answer is not only better systems, stronger communities and renewed local institutions, important as those things undoubtedly are. Perhaps the answer also lies in recovering an ancient truth: that life is not lived solely in the destinations. It is lived in the spaces between them.

Most of us are not standing at the beginning of our story or at the end. We are somewhere in the middle. The invitation is not to wait until circumstances become ideal. The invitation is to look more carefully at today. To notice the people around us. To rediscover gratitude. To embrace connection. And to remember that joy is not reserved for those who have arrived.

Sometimes it is found precisely where we least expect it: in the middle.

When violence becomes the language of childhood.

August 18, 2026 jameshempsall

I was travelling on a train recently when I found myself sitting close to a young boy, perhaps five years old. For about 30 minutes he talked almost continuously, not about school, friends, football, dinosaurs, superheroes or adventuring in the woods, but about destroying things.

He described blowing things up, exploding buildings, wrecking vehicles, smashing and killing. There was no context, no story, no apparent game, just a stream of imagined destruction that seemed to fascinate him. His parents barely responded and other passengers hardly noticed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Today, the Children’s Commissioner has published a report examining children referred to the Prevent programme. One of its most striking findings is that around seven in 10 children referred do not fit traditional definitions of extremist ideology. Instead, many display a worrying fixation with violence, weapons, mass casualty attacks and harmful online content. The report argues that our systems struggle to respond to these children because they do not fit neatly into existing categories of radicalisation.

As I read the report, my mind returned to that little boy on the train, not because I believe he was a clear and present danger, he was five years old, but because I found myself wondering when it was that violence became such a normal language of childhood.

Of course, this is not entirely new. I grew up watching cowboys and Indians films. We played war games. Toy guns appeared every Christmas. Many of us pointed plastic revolvers at our friends before we were old enough to understand what a real gun could do.

It would be easy, and wrong, to pretend that previous generations were somehow innocent. Children have always explored power, risk and conflict through play. Stories have always contained villains. Boys in particular have often been encouraged to test boundaries through rough-and-tumble play, competition and confrontation.

Yet something feels different. The violence of my childhood was usually embedded within a story. However simplistic and problematic those narratives may have been, there was at least a framework.

Today’s children inhabit a digital world where violence is often detached from meaning. Online platforms can serve up an endless stream of fights, humiliation, cruelty, real-world killings, extreme pornography and videos designed purely to shock. The Children’s Commissioner describes children becoming “fixated on violence” after exposure to harmful online content. Violence is no longer a scene in a film; it is content, and content never ends. That should force us to ask difficult questions about the messages children receive.

Too often, boys are still encouraged to destroy while girls are encouraged to create. A boy knocking down a tower of bricks is laughed at; a girl building one is praised. Boys are given weapons while girls are given crafts. Boys are expected to conquer while girls are expected to nurture. These are caricatures, of course, and modern parenting and education is more nuanced than this. Yet the underlying messages remain surprisingly powerful. We continue to socialise boys towards domination, aggression and risk, even as we express concern about male violence later in life.

Then we seem surprised when some boys become fascinated by power expressed through destruction. The uncomfortable truth is that violence is not a fringe interest in our culture; it sits at the centre of much of our entertainment, media and public discourse. We celebrate military victories. We cheer cinematic revenge. We consume true-crime documentaries at extraordinary rates. We replay footage of attacks and atrocities across rolling news channels. We talk constantly about conflict, threat and enemies. The blame does not solely lie at the feet of social media.

Children are not separate from this culture; they absorb it. The Children’s Commissioner’s report should not simply prompt a discussion about Prevent. It should prompt a discussion about childhood itself.

What stories are children hearing? What images are they seeing? What behaviours are being rewarded? What alternatives are we offering? Because if we want children to create, collaborate, empathise and care, we have to build a culture that values those things as highly as it values competition, conquest and destruction.

The little boy on the train was not the problem. He may simply have been reflecting the world around him. That is what children do. They absorb our values, our anxieties, our obsessions and our dreams. They hold a mirror up to the culture we have created.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable question raised by today’s report: not simply what is happening to children, but what are children are learning from us?

Can we please stop saying “we work in silos”?

June 3, 2026June 3, 2026 jameshempsall

There’s a moment in almost every meeting about children’s services where someone leans forward and says, with a kind of weary authority, “the problem is, we all work in silos.” Everyone nods. It sounds right. It feels truthful. And then, more often than not, we move on.

I’ve heard it so many times now that I find myself getting impatient with it. Not because it’s completely wrong, but because it’s become a stopping point rather than a starting point. It’s the sort of phrase that sounds like insight but often functions as an excuse. It’s a cop out.

Of course, services can feel fragmented. Of course, people are under pressure, operating in different ecosystems, with different targets, languages, acronyms, and accountabilities. None of that is in dispute. But “silos” has become a convenient shorthand that appears to let all of us off the hook. It wraps up a complicated set of choices and behaviours into something that feels structural, inevitable and therefore nobody’s particular responsibility. We work in silos, it is someone else’s fault, and we can’t do anything about it.

The truth is, silos don’t just exist out there somewhere, imposed on us by fate or organisational charts. They are created, and recreated, in small, everyday ways. They show up when we don’t pick up the phone because things are busy. When we stick closely to our remit because it feels risky not to. When we attend a meeting, agree broadly that things should be more joined up, and then go back to doing things exactly as we did before.

None of that is malicious. Most of the time it’s understandable. People are stretched, and systems are complicated. But it does mean that when we say “we work in silos,” what we’re often describing is something we are also participating in. Something we are reinforcing.

There’s something else that bothers me about the phrase, too. It’s completely detached from how children, young people, and families experience their lives. A child doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking about which part of their life belongs to which service. They don’t separate out their mental health from their education, or their safety from their relationships, or their housing from their wellbeing. It all comes as one whole, complicated, human experience.

Yet we design support in neat compartments and then act surprised when it doesn’t join up properly. Calling that silos almost disguises the deeper issue, which is that we’ve built systems around organisations rather than around people. What’s more frustrating is that the phrase carries a kind of shrug with it. It can sound like we’re saying, “this is just how it is.” And if that’s the case, then it’s hard to see where the energy for change comes from. You can’t shift something that feels inevitable.

I’d rather we were a bit more direct with ourselves. Instead of saying we work in silos, we might admit that we don’t always prioritise working together in the way we should. That we sometimes make information too hard to share. That our processes get in the way. That we haven’t invested enough time in building relationships across teams and organisations.

Those are more uncomfortable things to say, but they have an advantage: they point to things we can actually do something about.

Because for all the talk of structures and systems, collaboration is still, at heart, about people. It’s about whether we know each other, trust each other, and feel able to pick up the phone without worrying about whether this is “our bit” or “their bit.” It’s about whether leaders model that behaviour or simply talk about it. It’s about whether we measure success in terms of shared outcomes, or retreat back into what we can individually control. None of that is fixed. None of it is beyond our influence.

Language matters more than we sometimes think. The words we reach for shape how we understand a problem, and what we believe is possible. Silos has become one of those words that closes things down rather than opens them up. It names the issue in a way that feels tidy, but leaves everything else untouched. So perhaps it’s time we retired it. I really don’t want to think that three years into delivering the Best Start in Life strategy that we will still be trolling out this hackneyed get-out. Do you?

Not because the underlying challenges aren’t real, they are, but because repeating the same phrase over and over again isn’t getting us any further forward. Children, young people, families and I must say our workforce don’t need us to keep describing the fragmentation of the system. They need us to behave differently within it. That might sound simple, but it’s not easy. It requires intention, curiosity and, at times, a willingness to step slightly outside of what feels safe or familiar. It asks more of us than a well-worn phrase ever will.

If we’re serious about improving how services work together, then that’s the work. Not naming the silos. Dismantling them, piece by piece, through what we choose to do next.

What type of year has it been for you? One year of Find Joy in the Middle.

June 1, 2026 jameshempsall

It’s been a year since my first book, Find Joy in the Middle hit the bookshelves. When I look back, I see a year that sat squarely in the middle, not just chronologically, but emotionally, socially, and culturally. It was a year that invited us to pause, to take stock, and to recognise the quiet power of being in‑between. In many ways, it felt like the world was catching up with what I’ve been saying for years: that the middle isn’t a place of stagnation, but a place of movement, momentum, and meaning.

For those of us in middle age, it was a year of reframing. I sensed a shift away from the tired old clichés of crisis and decline. Instead, people were beginning to see midlife as a pivot point, a moment to re-evaluate what matters, to shed what no longer fits, and to step into a more honest version of themselves. The conversations I encountered were full of people renegotiating their work, their relationships, their ambitions, and their wellbeing. It was as if the world had collectively exhaled and said, “right, what now?”

The middle class, too, found itself under the spotlight. Not always comfortably. There was a growing awareness of how squeezed and stretched this group had become, not wealthy enough to feel secure, not struggling enough to be prioritised. Yet this discomfort brought clarity. It forced a reckoning with what fairness means, what opportunity should look like, and how society depends on the very people it so often overlooks. The middle, once again, proved itself essential.

Even middle children, my favourite metaphor for the overlooked middle, found new resonance. Families were talking more openly about identity, birth order, and the subtle dynamics that shape us. I heard from many who felt seen for the first time, who recognised that their adaptability, diplomacy, and resilience weren’t accidents, but strengths forged in the in‑between. The middle child became a symbol of what I’ve always believed: that being neither first nor last can be a superpower.

Workplaces, too, were redefined by their middles. Middle managers, often dismissed or misunderstood, were the glue holding hybrid and flexible work together. They were the translators, the stabilisers, the human connectors in a year when organisations were still figuring out what ‘normal’ meant. I saw so many step into their roles with renewed confidence, realising that leadership from the middle is leadership in its most human form.

And then there was the middle ground, that fragile, precious space between extremes. I sensed a growing fatigue with polarisation. People were tired of shouting matches and binary choices. Others have been grasping onto their pre-extinction burst, fearful of change, angry with it and all perceived injustices, and they took to the streets to protest, or to create harm. Those in the middle ground were craving nuance, balance, and the courage to say, “It’s more complicated than that.” The middle ground, long dismissed as indecisive or dull, began to look like the only place where real progress could happen.

So yes, it has been a middle year. Not in the sense of being average or forgettable, but in the sense of being transitional, reflective, and quietly transformative. It was a year that reminded us that the middle is where life actually happens, where we grow, where we adapt, where we find our footing. And if we’re willing to embrace it, the middle can be the most joyful place of all.

I invite you to wonder how ‘middle’ your next year may be, and to think how you will be the architect of it.

www.findjoyinthemiddle.com

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