I started learning Italian at 44 because I needed proof that my brain could still want something new. The hardest part wasn't the conjugation tables. The hard part was admitting I'd spent years not wanting anything for myself.

The first Italian word I learned was voglio. It means I want.

I sat at my desk in our apartment in Singapore with a secondhand textbook and a notebook I'd bought specifically for this purpose — not a recycled one, not the back pages of a business planner — and I wrote it out carefully. Voglio. I want.

And then I stared at it for a long time because I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd used that phrase about anything that wasn't a business objective or a project deadline.

I was forty-four. I'd been running digital businesses for nearly two decades. My company Ideapod was humming along. My partner and I had built a life in Singapore that was — by every external measure — successful. Productive. Optimized.

And I was terrified.

Not of failure or financial ruin or professional irrelevance, though those fears had their own permanent seats at my table. I was terrified because I'd realized, somewhere in the fog of building companies and publishing content and constantly producing — that I didn't want anything. Not in the peaceful, Buddhist way. In the hollow way. The kind of not-wanting that comes from years of training yourself out of desire because desire got replaced by obligation, strategy, and the relentless forward motion of an entrepreneurial career.

The real reason I opened that textbook

People assumed I started learning Italian because I wanted to travel. Or because I was optimizing my brain — and sure, I'd read those articles. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology shows that bilingual learning can strengthen executive function and improve cognitive flexibility. I filed that information away the way I file away all useful things — as justification for something I actually wanted to do for reasons I couldn't yet articulate.

The truth was simpler and uglier. I needed proof.

Proof that my brain could still reach toward something unfamiliar. Proof that I was still a person who could sit with difficulty — not the difficulty of scaling a business or managing teams or meeting content deadlines, which I'd had plenty of practice with — but the difficulty of choosing to be bad at something on purpose, with no audience and no KPI and no revenue model depending on the outcome.

I'd spent nearly twenty years building media companies. I knew how to create content. I knew how to analyze audience behavior and craft headlines and stand in front of a camera and make ideas about psychology and philosophy feel accessible. But all of that knowing was in service of something. It was my work. My role. My identity — Justin, the digital media guy, the Ideapod founder — and somewhere around forty, I discovered something We've written about before: midlife doesn't strip away what you do. It strips away who you thought you were.

Italian was my attempt to find out who was left.

The wanting problem

I grew up in Australia. Middle-class family. Good people, practical people. We didn't really have the language of wanting in our house — not for impractical things, anyway. You could want a career. You could want stability. You could want to do well. But wanting something purely for the joy of it, something with no clear payoff? That felt indulgent. Suspicious, even.

That training doesn't leave you. It burrows in.

By the time I was deep into building businesses — working insane hours, moving to Singapore, pouring everything into Ideapod and the publications that grew around it — wanting things for myself wasn't just impractical. It felt dangerous. A luxury I couldn't afford, not financially but psychologically. Because if I started wanting things — really wanting — I'd have to feel the gap between the life I was living and the life I might have chosen if I hadn't automatically equated my identity with my output.

So I stopped. Not all at once. Not dramatically. I just let wanting atrophy, the way a muscle does when you stop using it. I wanted things for the business. I wanted things from my relationships. I wanted to be a good partner, a reliable founder, a person who delivered. But wanting something purely for myself — something with no utility, no audience, no justification beyond pleasure? That circuit went dark sometime in my mid-thirties and I didn't notice until my forties.

Research by psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Tim Kasser found that pursuing goals aligned with intrinsic motivation — things chosen freely, for personal meaning rather than external pressure — is significantly more predictive of well-being than pursuing goals out of obligation or social expectation. When I read that, I thought: of course. I write about this stuff. I publish articles about this stuff. But knowing it intellectually and doing something about it are two entirely different acts of courage.

What conjugation tables can't teach you

The mechanics of Italian are genuinely hard. The verb endings shift by person, tense, and mood. The subjunctive alone could fill a semester. I used an app on my phone that made me feel like a slow child — the cheerful ding of correct answers coming less often than I wanted, the patient repetition of words I'd already forgotten.

But the conjugation tables weren't the hard part. Not even close.

The hard part was sitting down at that desk every morning and admitting, through the act of sitting down, that I had spent years not wanting anything for myself. That I had confused productivity with purpose. That I had built a life — a good life, a life I'm not ungrateful for — on the quiet erasure of my own desires.

The hard part was mentioning it casually to a friend — "Yeah, I've started learning Italian" — and hearing him say, "Oh cool, for a trip?" and realizing he had no framework for understanding that me doing something with absolutely no strategic purpose was not casual. It was radical. It might have been the first time in years.

The hard part was sitting with fellow entrepreneurs over dinner and saying, "I started learning Italian," and watching them immediately try to turn it into a productivity hack — "That's great for neuroplasticity, mate" — and knowing that most of them were also living without desire for so long they'd mistaken optimization for contentment.

What this has to do with conscious living — and everything else

When I shifted toward a more plant-based diet a few years ago — slowly, deliberately, after spending months reading about the psychology of food choices and the environmental data I couldn't ignore — people treated it like a phase. A biohacking experiment. Something I'd drop once the novelty wore off.

But it wasn't a phase. It was the same muscle as the Italian. It was me, for the first time in years, saying voglio — I want — and meaning it about something that had no function beyond aligning my life with my actual values.

We've written before about the particular friction of changing your diet as a man in your forties — the way every shared meal becomes a negotiation, the way your values suddenly have a social cost that is tallied at every barbecue and business dinner. What I haven't said before is that the discomfort of changing how you eat and the discomfort of learning Italian at forty-four come from the same place.

They both require you to announce — to your colleagues, your friends, and most painfully to yourself — that you are still becoming someone. That you are not finished. That the version of you everyone got comfortable with was never the whole story.

And people don't like that. Not because they're cruel, but because your changing destabilizes the roles they've built around your staying the same.

A study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people often react negatively to self-improvement in others when it implicitly highlights their own stagnation — a phenomenon researchers describe as threatened self-evaluation. I didn't need a study to tell me that. I saw it in my friend's quick pivot to productivity framing. In my colleague's gentle, "That's cool, man." In the silence that followed both.

The permission no one gives you

I'm not fluent in Italian. I can order a meal. I can ask for directions. I can read a simple article with a dictionary nearby and feel something close to joy when I understand a paragraph without looking anything up. My accent is terrible. My grammar is shaky. I would embarrass myself in Rome.

I don't care.

What I care about is the twenty minutes every morning when I sit at my desk with my notebook — the one I bought specifically for this, the one that serves no business purpose, the one that exists for no one but me — and I practice. I conjugate. I repeat. I get things wrong. And I keep going.

That practice taught me something that nearly two decades of entrepreneurship, building Ideapod, writing about psychology, therapy, and the relentless self-examination of midlife could not: that the loneliest version of yourself is the one everyone else is comfortable with.

And that the cure for that loneliness isn't finding someone who sees you. It's seeing yourself — the self who wants, who reaches, who sits with difficulty not because he has to but because he chose to.

I've started hosting dinners at our place in Singapore where I cook plant-based meals and sometimes — much to my partner's amusement — I label the dishes in Italian. My guests humor me. A friend's kid tries to repeat the words and gets them gloriously wrong and doesn't care, and I think: that. That is the thing I lost. That willingness to want something and be bad at it and not apologize.

I didn't learn that from any business book. I'm learning it from a notebook and a secondhand Italian textbook and the strange, quiet courage of sitting with voglio every morning.

What I'd say to anyone who recognizes this

If you're reading this and you realize — the way I realized, abruptly, at a desk in a country far from where you started — that you can't remember the last time you wanted something just for yourself, I won't tell you it's never too late. I hate that phrase. It's not about late or early. It's about now — and the fact that now still matters.

Start with the word. Whatever language you choose — Italian, Mandarin, or just the honest English you've been avoiding — start with I want.

Write it down. Say it out loud in your kitchen where no one can hear you. Notice how strange it feels in your mouth. Notice how your first instinct is to follow it with something practical, something justifiable, something that benefits someone else or advances some goal.

Then don't. Just let it sit there. I want. No object. No explanation. No apology. No ROI.

That's the conjugation table no one gives you. The hardest verb in any language is the first person singular of to want — not because the grammar is difficult, but because somewhere along the way most of us were taught that conjugating it was selfish. Or unproductive. Or indulgent.

And we believed that. And we stopped.

Voglio. I want.

I'm still learning what comes after.