A Message From Our Founder

Meet Trevor O'Hara

Founder and CEO, The Interlude Café

In 2020, when the pandemic brought much of the world to a standstill, my own pace changed too.

I'd spent the last two decades running an international venture development practice, often with little time to stop. So when the global pandemic hit and the lockdowns followed, the sudden stillness created space to think.

Questions I had been able to outrun the last few years had become harder to ignore: about work, about what came next, and about whether the old script still made sense.

When I went looking for a place that treated those questions seriously — not as a midlife crisis to be solved, a pending retirement problem to be planned around, a longevity trend, or a reinvention story to be inspired by — I couldn't find one.

What I didn't know at the time was that the search itself became the beginning of The Interlude Café.

For more than three decades, I had lived in 12 countries and worked across 40 more, first in the airport and transportation industry. I'd spent years watching capable teams and serious projects struggle with the same problem: they were still applying assumptions built for a world that had already changed.

At first, I saw that pattern in business.

Over time, I began to see it more broadly in life.

People were not simply getting older, working longer, retiring differently, or reinventing themselves. Something wider was happening. The old script — study, work, progress, accumulate, step back, retire — was losing its explanatory power.

It still surrounded people. It still shaped institutions, expectations, financial planning, career paths, health systems, family life, and public language. But it no longer explained the lives that many people were actually living.

Perhaps including yours.

That is what The Interlude Café exists to explore.

The early essays are an attempt to name that shift from different angles: what happens when the career ladder no longer explains work; when doing everything right no longer produces the expected result; when experience remains valuable but stops telling you where to go; when the old rules still surround you but no longer fit the life ahead.

Much of the public conversation still begins inside familiar boxes: midlife, retirement, ageing, longevity, reinvention.

While each of those words captures something real, none of them is large enough on its own to explain the whole pattern.

The Interlude Café starts with the wider mismatch: longer, less linear lives meeting stories, institutions, and expectations still built around the outdated life sequence of education-career-retirement.

That means we do not treat work, money, health, identity, place, relationships, learning, and culture as separate problems. We look at how they are all interconnected. Because your daily challenges are rarely just one thing. They're what happens when several parts of life stop fitting together at once.

The Interlude Café is at the beginning of something larger. It will grow over time into a richer publication, learning system, and intelligence layer around this shift.

But the purpose is already clear.

To take seriously the moment when the old script stops working.

To give you better language for what you are experiencing.

And to help build a clearer picture of the life ahead.

If something in your life feels harder to explain than it should, you are not the only one noticing it.

That is why The Interlude Café exists.