Something shifts around 40. This is what I did with it.

You're somewhere around 40. Things look fine on paper. But something doesn't line up anymore. RebornAt40 is a weekly letter about that gap — and what to do with it. One letter a week. Free. Subscribe if any of this sounds familiar.

Life is short. You’re somewhere around halfway already. A kind of time anxiety — not dramatic, just quietly there in the background.

Your life is different to the one you expected — and you can feel it, even if you can’t explain it.

And slowly, almost without noticing, you drift into maintenance. Life becomes about keeping things together rather than building something new.

That’s where I found myself.

I was 40. On paper, things were going well — I’d just been promoted to Head of Precious Metals Trading, working with people I respect.

But outside of that, my life had shifted. My family is far away. My parents are ageing. My relationship fell apart.

And my son became the centre of everything.

He’s six and neurodiverse. He only recently started speaking.

And I realised something very simple: I am his anchor. His reference point. His example.

That changed everything.

He made me want to be better. I wanted him to see his father building — not just maintaining.

So I went looking for answers. And what I found was thin.

The internet is full of “what to” articles rather than “how to” guides. Advice on what you should think, feel, or do — be confident, believe in yourself, start now, love yourself. But they rarely tell you how.

Even the more thoughtful pieces stay at the conceptual level. Nothing that would actually take you through what is happening in your mind. Nothing you could apply to your real life.

Most of it feels shallow and dry — like generic life-coach material. And it quietly reinforces the belief that life plateaus from here.

But what if it doesn’t have to be that way?

I decided to press reset.

To give up smoking. To get healthier. To change the trajectory.

I broke my life down into its smallest parts and started improving them one by one. I asked myself a simple question:

What’s the smallest improvement I can make today that will make my 40s better?

And I started writing it down. Every day.

RebornAt40 is that journal — taken online.

It’s my attempt to understand what is actually happening in midlife — and how to work with it. To move from maintenance back into building.

Not motivation. Not surface-level advice. Just one person figuring it out in public, one week at a time.

Hi, I’m Jacek (Jack) Iciek

I live in London, work in precious metals trading, and I’m a father. From the outside, my life looked solid — and I’m genuinely grateful for that.

But day to day, something was narrowing. Work, commute, recover, repeat. Nothing was broken. But nothing was really moving forward either.

Around the time I turned 40, I made a simple decision: not to treat this decade as maintenance — but as a return to building.

I’m still in it. Still figuring it out.

But I’m no longer drifting

One letter a week. Usually under five minutes. Always about something real. If you’re at a similar point — subscribe. It’s free.