Morning, Greg here!

Welcome to Midlife Male, the fastest-growing, #1 newsletter and lifestyle brand for men 40+. In this issue Jon and I are sharing our favorite Viewpoint and Manologue columns from 2025. We both took different approaches to how we assembled our lists, and if you’ve been reading us for a long time, as many of you have, you’ll notice these are very “us”. Excited to hear your thoughts on these.

If a fellow MLM reader shared this with you, subscribe here:

By Greg Scheinman

Doing a “Best Of” list about your own work forces you to slow down.

You look back at the year, the highlights, the photos, the recommendations, the articles, and you ask a simple question: what actually landed? Not what got the most clicks. Not what went viral. But what stuck. 

The pieces that rose to the top for me usually have one thing in common. They’re the ones where something connected inside me while I wrote. An idea shifted. A belief got challenged. My perspective changed. Sometimes it was a single line. Sometimes it was a moment I couldn’t stop thinking about days later. Other times, it was something that immediately made me look at my own life and say, “Yeah, I need more of that,” or “I need to stop doing this.”

I’ve learned that the real value isn’t in trying to capture everything. It’s in pulling one or two ideas that actually matter and carrying them forward. Something you can use. Something that makes you a little sharper, a little more intentional, a little more grounded.

When I went back through everything I published this year, these twelve columns stood out because they held up. They still feel relevant and worth your time. They weren’t written to chase trends or feed an algorithm. They were written to start better conversations and ask better questions about how we live, work, lead, and show up in midlife.

That’s why these made the cut:

By Jon Finkel

I spent most of my twenties writing for magazines like GQ, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness and more. Every year we’d do a wrap-up issue with the “Best Of” this and the “Best Of” that. I’m a sucker for these lists. Everyone is, actually. We, as humans, cannot resist a list that’s the best of something: The 5 Best Cheeseburgers in Miami, The 10 Beaches You Must Visit Before You Die, The 7 Best Ice Cream Sundaes in New York City, The 4 Best Gyms in Chicago for Serious Lifters, and on and on.

I’d click on all of these. You would too. In fact, before I visit a city I actively search for stuff like “Best Pizza in Boston” or wherever I’m going (I grew up in Boston and the answer to this one is easy: Regina Pizzeria in the North End).

But when it comes to using “Best Of” to curate your own writing, it’s tough because I can’t be modest. If I publish it I think it’s great. Maybe not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but at least “so awesome I know our Midlife Male readers will love it”, which means I want everything I wrote to be on my “Best Of” list and that defeats the entire purpose.

Instead, I like the word “memorable” for lists. 

What were the most memorable pieces I wrote this year? Memorable works because it’s got a vague definition in terms of degrees. We all remember some stuff way more than others. But Most Memorable means you really, really remembered something. And for me, these twelve columns stick out not even because I wrote them, but because of the way you responded to them.

I don’t so much remember the exact feel of writing them, but I remember the conversations they started, the jokes you all wrote in my DMs, the email responses like, “dude, yes, you nailed it!”. And that, in short, is my goal for writing the Manologue column.

Keeping this in mind, here are the 12 most “Dude, You Nailed It” columns from 2025 based on the responses you, the glorious Midlife Male readers sent me:

MLM Founder: Greg Scheinman / Follow Greg on Instagram & LinkedIn

Love Greg’s Viewpoint column? Visit the full How I See It Vault HERE where he shares his personal insights, experiences and perspectives on everything affecting midlife.

MLM Editor-in-Chief: Jon Finkel / Follow Jon on Twitter/X and Instagram

Love Jon’s Manologue column? Check out the full Manologue Archive HERE where he writes about pop culture, parenthood, sports, nostalgia & everything in between.