Why So Many Pastors Are Surrounded By People and Still Profoundly Alone In 1938, Harvard started a study that has never stopped running. It has followed individual lives for almost a century, asking one question across generations: what actually makes a human life go well? The answer, captured in the book The Good Life, is...Read More

Why Your Pastor Is Probably Not Okay (And What That Means For You) Forty percent of pastors have seriously considered leaving their congregation since 2020. The Axios headline puts it bluntly: America’s pastor pipeline is collapsing. The role has become low-paid, higher-risk, and less trusted than it has been in a generation. Behind those numbers...Read More

The Admission Most People Will Not Make We are all quietly looking for the secret. The one habit, the one supplement, the one system that overrides everything else and finally makes life work. In this short reflection from The Vitality Journey Podcast, Gary Mayes admits he looks for it too. He wants the hack as...Read More

A Question Worth Asking Out Loud Most men can name their college roommate, a couple of work friends, and a brother-in-law they tolerate. Far fewer can name three men who know the messiness of their lives and have stayed close for decades. In this segment of The Vitality Journey Podcast, Dave Rodriguez and Dimitri Snowden...Read More

Four Friends, Thirty Five Years, and a Question Most People Avoid When they started golfing together, they would play two rounds a day for three straight days. Thirty five years later, they get together once a year and plan to golf twice. The drop is not a story about golf. It is a story about...Read More

The Game Designer Who Detoxed From His Own Industry Joel Bergman has ADHD. He runs an indie game studio in Indianapolis called Grizzhoot. He designs the loops that pull you in and make it hard to put the controller down. And he just walked us through how he ran a 30-day digital detox using Cal...Read More

When the Game Designer Tells You to Put the Phone Down Joel Bergman makes video games for a living. He runs an indie game studio in Indianapolis called Grizzhoot. He has spent his entire adult life designing the very loops that pull people in, keep them engaged, and make it harder to put the controller...Read More

How a Wellness Coach Finds the Time and Motivation You Swear You Don’t Have Most people who walk into a wellness conversation start the same way. I want to feel better. I want to lose the weight. I want to have energy again. Then almost immediately the second sentence: but I do not have time....Read More

Most People Are Treating the Wrong Problem We medicate depression. We talk about anxiety. We scroll through articles about mental health at midnight while doing absolutely nothing to address what is actually wrong. Psychologist Dr. Dan Franz, who joined Dave Rodriguez and Dimitri Snowden on The Vitality Journey Podcast after 30 years of clinical practice,...Read More

There Is a Statistic That Should Stop Every Man Reading This Primary care physicians, the first line of defense in this country’s healthcare system, miss the diagnosis of depression in men upward of 70% of the time. Not because they’re bad doctors. Because men are conditioned to show up at a doctor’s office with physical...Read More