About Us

Forty Fifty started with a friendship. Ali and her childhood friend met as awkward multiracial middle-school kids growing up in New York City. They connected because they came from complicated family structures and were looking to escape life at home. Back then, they created a support system for themselves through friendship.

Years later, many of us spend our lives building, collecting, creating and consuming. For us, there was a moment when “it” didn’t feel like “it” anymore. We believed there must be something else. The more we allowed those thoughts into our lives, a value shift began, and we started to ask questions we didn’t have the space or awareness to ask before. What do we want our life to look like? What if we want a life outside our former definition, or other people’s definition of us? Where do we even start? What is happening to our bodies?

We found that asking questions and talking about what was going on had a transformative effect. So we opened the conversation beyond ourselves, and found many wanted to be a part of it: sharing critical information, like which doctors to go to and why, and how to approach our time with them. Sharing our own stories, and the stories of others. Personal storytelling is empowering. It helps others feel connected and informed.

Our generation wasn’t taught to be open and vulnerable with each other. We were taught to muscle through, and when things got hard, elders told us to keep it to ourselves. We were told we could have it all, balance a million things, and make it all look easy. We are here to acknowledge it’s not easy. A lot needs undoing, and the generations after ours are cracking it open.

We hear about radical honesty, radical empathy, radical everything. What if we just got radically real with each other? What if, instead of filling this space with more shame, we filled it with kindness and information?

Now that’s interesting.

What you’ll find here

• Stories: 200+ essays and shared stories from women in midlife on Substack
• Research: The State of Midlife report, on what women actually need
• Guides: free Doctor Guides and Movement Guides on Substack
• Community: more than 50,000 people follow along on Instagram and Substack

Who’s behind it

Ali Rand (She/Her) · Systems thinker · Latina · New Yorker · Co-founder, Forty Fifty

Leaning on her love of systems and service, Ali has worked with companies such as Huge, Hot Studio (acquired by Facebook), frog and SAP, and is the author of Sentido: Finding Sense and Purpose in Design Leadership (MIT Press, 2025). alisonrand.com