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Simon opens with news: a colleague complimented his secondhand trousers, though he fails to mention he'd just sat through an important meeting with the fly jammed open. A digression via Sort Your Life Out – a decluttering show that leaves him reaching for the language of the divine – opens into a conversation about whether the body ever forgets its training, sparked by Lee's account of a Vera Montero solo and Bob's observation that ballet doesn't fully let you go. By the end they're in the territory of the Ozempic Economy: a Korean philosopher's framework for understanding why, in late capitalism, the self becomes the last thing left to optimise.

Mentioned

- Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon and Dilla Carter (TV show) – decluttering and makeover series; Simon finds it compulsive and a little triggering; the guests' reaction of "Oh my God" to their transformed homes becomes a prompt for a riff on secular transcendence
- Hockey Smut – Lee's project around queer identity in sport; a local ice hockey team discovered it, prompting mixed reactions from players
- Trio A (1966, Yvonne Rainer) – postmodern dance work; cited as the famous example of pedestrian movement that paradoxically becomes virtuosic through its refusal to emphasise anything
- Vera Montero – Portuguese choreographer and performer; Lee saw her in a solo supported by four violinists; her flexed feet and facial effort unsettled him in ways he needed Bob to help him process; discussed as an example of earlier ballet training leaving a residue that resists being shed
- London Marathon – Simon ran it; used as an example of attending carefully to running form, then watching it dissolve as faster runners in every conceivable style streamed past
- Thomas Chan – Instagram creator; introduced Byung-Chul Han's ideas in relation to current culture and the Ozempic Economy
- Byung-Chul Han – Korean philosopher; author of The Burnout Society and The Transparency Society; his framework used as a lens on what GLP-1 drugs say about late capitalism
- Ozempic / GLP-1 drugs – weight-loss injections (Wegovy, Mounjaro, Ozempic named); discussed as emblematic of a pharmacological capitalism that promises frictionlessness by removing the "wrong" body from view
- Looks Maxing – online subculture rooted in red-pill ideology; involves extreme physical self-optimisation including mewing and leg-lengthening surgery; introduced via Clavicular, a figure in the newspapers
- Mewing – tongue-positioning technique associated with Looks Maxing, claimed to reshape the jawline
- Red pill / The Matrix – the ideological frame behind Looks Maxing; discussed briefly and dismissed

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)