🚨 Welcome to this week’s issue of Generation Xcellent. I’m Stephen Perrine, New York Times bestselling author and former top editor at Men’s Health and Maxim. And like you, I’m doing all I can to survive the moshpit of midlife. Thanks for joining me on the journey! If you like what you see, send me an email—and share this newsletter with another guy who could use our help.

📩 Thanks for joining the conversation!

- FITNESS -

Sly Stallone’s Rules for Lifelong Muscle & Fitness

Enduring lessons from world’s fittest philosopher

By Jeff Stevenson

Sly Rule #3: “Winners get rid of their problems before their problems get rid of them.”

In the end, this quote from Stallone is really about resilience—the importance of reading the headwinds and steering into them. Here are some rules to keep in mind in the face of a challenge:

Accept the baseline. That means, come to accept where you are right now, not where you want to be.
Always be ready to adjust. You’d think that sticking to one position would be easy, but in reality, it takes a lot of effort to remain rigid in the face of change. Being willing to change will help you escape burnout.
Shut your mouth before you complain. When you feel the need to grumble, take a moment first to think about whether you’ve explored every possible solution.
Set realistic expectations. It’s fine to be wildly optimistic, but make sure you have a series of measurable, attainable goals that will lead to your eventual world domination.

—Jeff Stevenson has written for Maxim, Men’s Health, and other classic men’s magazines.

- GEN X CULTURE -

9 Things That Were Just Plain Better When We Were Kids

Scrambled porn, singing rodents, and natural DDs: Life was more authentic back in the latchkey days.

By Bob Larkin

>Last month, a Citrix software engineer shared a post on LinkedIn about how modern AI—specifically ChatGPT—got absolutely wrecked in a chess match with an Atari 2600—a console released in 1977, powered by what was basically a sentient garage door opener, and designed for kids with Kool-Aid stains on their Underoos.

The real takeaway isn’t that artificial intelligence fumbled a pawn. It’s that not everything from our childhood needs an upgrade. Here are some things that were just plain better before everything got “optimized.”

1 Boobs. They were real, mysterious, and thrilling. You’d catch a glimpse at the beach or on a VHS you weren’t supposed to rent, and it felt like discovering buried treasure. We used to watch scrambled cable for hours hoping the static would bless us with half a frame of a breast. Today, you see a busty woman walk by and you're not admiring—you're calculating: Are they real? Or are they Mammorex? 

Related:  15 Gen X Facts that Will Freak You Out

2 Bikes. In our childhood, bikes were freedom machines—banana seats, high handlebars, and maybe an orange safety flag flapping like a rebel banner. No gears, no spandex, no apps. You just hopped on and rode until the streetlights came on. Today’s bikes? Fifty gears, carbon fiber frames, and the soul of a spreadsheet.

3 Saturday morning cartoons. With a bowl of cereal the size of your head, you planted yourself in front of the TV and mainlined Bugs Bunny, He-Man, and The Smurfs until noon. No algorithm, no pause button, no parents checking screen time. And when it was over? Tough luck. Go play outside or stay and watch Soul Train.

4 Summer. As kids, summer was three straight months of no school, no shoes, no idea what day it was. Just bikes, popsicles, and staying out till the streetlights came on. Now? It’s 93 degrees before breakfast, you still have to work, but now you also have to manage the thermostat like it’s a stock portfolio. The kids are home, and even though they can stream cartoons at any time day or night, they’re somehow still bored and eating $400 worth of groceries in an afternoon.

5 MTV. It used to stand for Music Television, with wall-to-wall videos, coked-up VJs, and the occasional animated freakout (Aeon Flux, anyone?). We’d sit there for hours just waiting to see if “Take On Me” would come on again. MTV is bringing back music videos, but only for one week. In September. It’s like getting a birthday hummer from your wife. Thanks, honey, but what about the other 364 days?

6 Catalogs. Remember the Sears Wish Book? It was basically kid porn: GI Joes, Power Wheels, entire furniture sets. It came in the mail and turned your brain into Christmas mush. Later, Victoria’s Secret catalogs bearing supermodels in lingerie showed up in the mailbox weekly. Now? Amazon. Efficient? Sure. But you don’t daydream over a dropdown menu. You just add to cart and stare into the void.

7 Marijuana. We used to buy dime bags from the smelly kid in gym class, smuggle our treasure home, and use the cover of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted to separate out the seeds and sticks. Now, we go to Trader Joe’s to buy a bag of hemp seeds and sprinkle it on our “ancient grains” cereal, which looks and tastes like sticks. The actual grass? That comes from a clean, tidy dispensary with all the dangerous allure of a dentist’s office.

8 Playground equipment. Today’s playgrounds look like a collaboration between IKEA and OSHA. But back then? They were death gauntlets. Rusty metal jungle gyms and slides that reached skin-scorching temperatures in July. See-saws designed to launch siblings into orbit. We didn’t need safety regulations—we had good reflexes and bad decision-making.

9 Chain pizza. Going out for pizza was like going to a show. You were serenaded by an animatronic rat band while surrounded by blinking arcade cabinets covered in soda syrup and kid grime. It was loud, gross, and magical. Today’s pizza chains feel like post-divorce sadness in a box. No singing animals, no tokens, no chaos. It’s not pizza night, it’s a court-ordered visitation with your childhood.

—Bob Larkin writes for Men’s Health, the New York Post, and other outlets.

- HEALTH -

A Gen X Dad’s Guide to Not Dying

A recent study found that men with children are more likely to develop heart disease later in life. Here’s how to foil your offspring’s evil plot—and live.

By Stephen Perrine

>My children are trying to kill me.

They’ve been at it a long time: the crib-based crying cacophonies, followed by the traumatic toddler tumbles, the adolescent antiauthoritarianism, the hush-hush high school house parties, the wallet-walloping college costs.

It's not so shocking then to learn that becoming a dad is now considered a risk factor for heart disease—the leading cause of death for GenX men. In a study of more than 2800 men between the ages of 45 and 84, those who had children also tended to have higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol and blood sugar levels, and thicker waistlines—all risk factors for cardiovascular disease. “The changes in heart health we found suggest that the added responsibility of childcare and the stress of transitioning to fatherhood may make it difficult for men to maintain a healthy lifestyle,” John James Parker, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University, commented.

But you can outsmart their evil plot and start repairing the damage, if you understand the various ways your kids are trying to kill you.

They’re keeping you out of the gym.

While dads are just as likely to play sports, they’re less likely to go the gym. That means the muscles that impressed her enough to give you children in the first place are starting to wane, and that’s bad news for your heart. In one study, men with the most muscle mass at age forty-five had an 81 percent lower risk of heart disease than those with the least muscle mass. In another study of men (average age forty-three), researchers found that higher levels of muscular strength were associated with a reduced risk of developing full-blown hypertension.

They’re making you eat shit.

When the voices in the backseat say “I’m hungry,” and you’ve still got an hour before you’re home, you know you’re going to hit a drive-thru. But while that’s okay for their resilient little bodies, it’s rough on yours. Men need at least 30 grams of protein at every meal, and plenty of produce, to prevent midlife muscle loss. Muscle-friendly food is so important to us that even the Journal of Cardiology is urging heart doctors to provide patients with advice on eating to build muscle at midlife.

They’re turning you into Willy Wonka.

Chances are, you don’t buy a lot of candy for yourself. But between hiding Easter baskets, stuffing stockings, celebrating birthdays and handing out treats while dressed as a Mario Brother, you’re practically a one-man chocolate factory all year round.

And that means a lot of extra sugar in your house, and in your belly. One study followed 2,735 men and women starting at age forty-nine. Over the ensuing thirteen years, those who ate the most sugary foods were 2.9 times more likely to die from inflammation-based diseases such as heart disease. If you can’t control the candy jar, do this one thing: Stop drinking sugary drinks. One study found just one sugary soft drink per day raises your risk of metabolic syndrome (a combination of obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar) by 44 percent.

They won’t let you party in Vagus.

Not the city, the nerve. The vagus nerve is the largest in the body, and it acts like a brake on our overall nervous system; the more activated it is, the calmer and more controlled we are. When the vagus nerve senses stress, however, heart and breathing rates increase, and digestive activity slows—a part of the “fight or flight” response. And all of that ups your risk for heart disease. The play: Eat more fiber. As the microbes in our guts munch on plant fibers, they produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), compounds that activate certain receptors on the vagus nerve, putting the brakes on stress.

—Adapted from The Full-Body Fat Fix, by Stephen Perrine (St. Martin’s Press).

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