John Mayer's seeing a "new light" lately.
The Sob Rock musician hosted a Q+A on his Instagram account Tuesday, Aug. 31 and revealed why he no longer feels as if he's a "recovering ego addict."
"Your 20s and 30s are like the hours between 8pm and 11 pm on a weekend night," he explained. "You're kind of frantically hoping for the most validating plans to come through."
But now that he's 43 years old, John said: "Your 40s are like 11:30 pm where you're like 'hey, I would have been home anyway even if I had gone out.' The pressure is off."
John also referenced a 2015 Today interview, in which he said, "I'm a recovered ego addict, and the only way that I can be sure that I don't relapse is to admit that I constantly have this ego addiction, every day," he said. "So I do the Grammys and I go home because if I stay, I get high again."
At the time, he also reflected on his previous statement about his intimate relationship with Jessica Simpson.
"I went, 'All right, dude, you did a couple interviews where you were out of touch and you were being a ham—and you were basically break dancing into a nitroglycerin plant, right?'"
He was referencing a 2010 interview with Playboy in which he publicly described his relationship with Jessica as "sexual napalm." Ten years later, Jessica spoke about their dynamic in her memoir Open Book: "I constantly worried that I wasn't smart enough for him," she admitted. "He was so clever and treated conversation like a friendly competition that he had to win."
John subsequently appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and said that he "heard about" her book and "heard some bits."
Jessica told Tamron Hall a year later in March 2021 that she isn't looking for anything from him now.
"No, I definitely don't feel that I am owed a public apology," she said. "I mean, you can't take it back. And I'm a very forgiving person but I'm also honest. So, in the memoir, if I'm gonna talk about stuff that caused me pain, I'm going to be honest about it. And that was a time in my life that I was very manipulated and also in love, or seemingly."