What happens when the paperwork for your son's college applications cracks open something you thought you'd buried 35 years ago?

Lucas Smith is a Colorado-native-turned-Seattleite, a software engineer of 15+ years working at the intersection of AI and tech, a multi-instrumentalist, an avid cyclist, a master of the smoker (the grill kind), and the host of the Not Retired Yet podcast. And in about a month, he and his wife are driving their only son six hours south and dropping him off at college.

What was supposed to be college paperwork became something else entirely. Somewhere between forms and financial aid, Lucas started losing sleep, getting angry at nothing, and couldn't figure out why. Until he traced it back to being 18 himself — the year his parents split, the family disintegrated, and a version of him was left to raise himself on his friend Dave's floor. This is an episode about handing your kid every single thing you never got. About Gen X and the eye of the hurricane between launching kids and aging parents. About unreliable memory, the sandwich generation, marriages that survive the empty nest (and the ones that don't), and Lucas's very honest admission that it was never part of the plan to live this long.

Also: a 1984 drum machine, why our brains don't remember the diapers, and what a "pack horse" does when he finally has to plan.

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🎧 Not Retired Yet — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/not-retired-yet/id1823048074

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