The midlife reboot

The first use of the popular term midlife crisis is generally credited to a Toronto-born psychoanalyst from the 20th century named Elliot Jaques. He was interested in the effects of confronting mortality and the limits of time.

Jaques might have found Andrew Bowins an interesting subject. When a serious health scare brought him up close and personal with his own mortality, Bowins doubled down on something he had already begun working towards – a midlife reboot.

“There wasn’t a button I pushed to start the reboot,” says Bowins, 59, originally from Lindsay. “Life just started taking away some of the things I had used to define myself. The heart scare did not start my reboot. It put a clock on it.”

And Bowins isn’t the only person starting to reimagine their midlife chapter. In her 25 years as a massage therapist, Sandra Silva of Fenelon Falls has noticed a change in client attitudes. So she understands the health scare Bowins speaks of, as wellness is a big factor in her clients’ lives.

“When I started, most people were interested in getting rid of pain. Over the last decade, I have seen a real shift from ‘what can you do for me?’ to ‘what can I do for myself?’”

Silva teaches pain free movement classes for floor and chair. Feedback from the classes indicate that the participants find the classes beneficial in releasing tension, increasing mobility as well as improved posture.

“Overall people are interested in keeping up with their favourite activities well into their older years and any way to prevent injuries is high on their radar,” says Silva.

Bowins explains that his shift to looking at what he could do for himself was never one big event. After almost a decade of slowly reconsidering what matters, he found himself returning to some things he had instinctively understood as a kid growing up in Lindsay.

“We got bored and invented things to do. We got lost and found our way. We made mistakes that mercifully did not become searchable content. We experienced things without always needing to document them,” says Bowins. And these are lessons he believes are worth bringing forward in life.

Bowins recalls how he couldn’t wait to get out of Lindsay. He saw moving out of his hometown as the first mountain in his life. He wanted to see the world, build a career, make money, provide for his family and see how far he could climb. While his career was giving him experiences he could never have imagined in Lindsay, he was becoming good at measuring the things ambition gave him – such as salary, promotions, and titles.

Beginning his professional adventures in Toronto, Bowins spent 10 years there working for various agencies including Fleischmann Hillard, the GCI group, and as a partner in a firm called Maverick Public Relations. It was his client work in Canada that led to the opportunity to be recruited by Dell and eventually move to Austin Texas in 2004. His resume includes high level positions with such notable companies as Samsung Electronics, Mastercard and Nokia.

“I attribute the experiences as a bartender in my hometown of Lindsay as the foundation for this career,” says Bowins.

Bowins recalls how he couldn’t wait to get out of Lindsay. He saw moving out of his hometown as the fi rst mountain in his life. He wanted to see the world, build a career, make money, provide for his family and see how far he could climb.

He didn’t realize it consciously, but Andy Bowins was slowly becoming Andrew – a professional persona. Andrew liked control, worried about appearances and was used to thinking three steps ahead, an exhausting guy who thrived on ambition. Andrew wasn’t fake – he was armour, he says in retrospect, and his purpose was to protect the Lindsay kid underneath who was afraid of not belonging.

In contrast, Andy was willing to laugh, play, listen and risk being vulnerable and affectionate. He was even willing to look ridiculous, on occasion.

“When you spend decades being defined by work, it is unsettling when work stops cooperating with the story you have written about yourself,” Bowins explains. He considers the eventual unravelling of his career to be one of the more useful disruptions in his life because it forced him to separate who he is from what he does.

The scary part, explains Bowins, wasn’t changing careers; it was finally looking at himself. It was facing changing friendships, anxiety and questions about who he was without the structure of the career he had spent decades building. He resisted it all, at first, because Andrew liked a plan.

Raluca Myshrall of Bobcaygeon had a plan when she moved from Romania to Canada in 2006. While her career didn’t unravel the way Bowins had, her ‘okay’ career with unknown job security wasn’t the professional story she wanted to write about herself. For Myshrall, midlife became opportunity in place of crisis when fate saw her receiving a job offer she didn’t expect.

“You need to look at more than money. You need to look at the environment and how it can affect you,” says Myshrall, who works in the field of accounting.

Myshrall let go of the professional image that wasn’t serving her and found herself in a challenging new learning environment. “I never had this kind of open-door communication before, and I love it,” she says.

While Myshrall remains in the same general field of accounting, she now finds herself being offered training opportunities and is encouraged to ask questions at her new ‘midlife job reboot.’ Her new position allows her to expand her knowledge through positive interactions with coworkers, her supervisor and her boss.

Jennifer Mabee, a financial advisor for 29 years, doesn’t believe it’s time to retire the concept of the midlife crisis just yet. “It’s (just) a different type of crisis than it used to be.”

The Lindsay-based financial expert says she sees clients facing extra emotional and financial stressors that weren’t there before. “Kids need to lean on their parents more, parents need more prolonged care, and family isn’t as close by as they used to be.”

Mabee, a senior wealth advisor at IG Wealth & Associates in Lindsay, says that clients want to travel more because they say older generations wait too long, but they are being pulled in different directions. She explains that as the crisis of the sandwich generation.

Being pulled in multiple directions was something happening to Bowins, too. Personal stressors had already disrupted his life, bringing their own set of revelations. And that was before career changes arrived on the scene.

“Divorce taught me, you can be a good person, love people deeply, and still get important things wrong. I do not want to spend the second half of my life prosecuting the first.”

Bowins explains that it was easy to look outward for explanations but much harder to ask what parts were under his control. Some of the answers he found were not flattering.

Once he became less interested in putting himself on trial, he found that judgement slowly started to become curiosity. He says that curiosity has become a pretty important part of his reboot.

Now, Bowins is more than willing to drive seven hours to get back to Lindsay. “I thought those places were just places. Now I think they were the infrastructure of friendship. Small town life teaches you things quietly. People know your family. Somebody notices when you are struggling. Friends show up. You belong to a community because you participate in it. And enough people know embarrassing stories about you to keep your ego under reasonable control.”

In 2025, Bowins launched RestlessUrban, a lifestyle media brand for adults over 50. He jokes that it is the most expensive therapy he has ever had. According to Bowins, the online magazine currently reaches roughly seven million people and Bowins considers it a real privilege to hear how different people navigate life after 50.

“Nobody has a monopoly on the answers,” explains Bowins. “I am not standing in front of this community telling people how to live. I am sitting among them, asking questions. In many ways RestlessUrban is not the result of my reboot. It is part of it.”

And perhaps that is the heart of what Bowins means when he says that we belong to a community because we participate in it.

Bowins learned to measure what ambition can take along with what it can give, and sums up his midlife lessons in a few simple but powerful statements. “Relationships matter. Health matters. Laughter matters. Purpose matters. Money matters, but it is not everything. Time matters because it is not unlimited. And community does not simply happen … you show up.”

Andy and Andrew still want to build things, have influence, make money and win, but they’re much more careful these days about the cost. Bowins readily admits that he hasn’t found all the answers. He doesn’t think of himself as having become enlightened. He’s paying attention.

“I thought those places were just places. Now I think they were the infrastructure of friendship. Small town life teaches you things quietly. People know your family. Somebody notices when you are struggling.”

Visits home remind Bowins where his roots live. He continues to explore lakefront property in Kawartha Lakes with the goal of having a home here for five months out of the year to be close to friends. He still plans to spend the remainder of the year in the United States with his daughter.

Sixty years after Jaques first used the phrase in his paper ‘Death and the Midlife Crisis,” Bowins’ journey brings him to a different understanding of mortality and limited time – not as a measure of our failings, but as fuel for our successes.

“Maybe the reboot isn’t about becoming somebody new. Maybe it’s not about trying to recreate the past. Maybe it’s just about deciding what is worth bringing forward and finding my way back to Andy. Turns out he never really left."