Being young at heart has nothing to do with skin cream or a gym membership. You’ve met older people who feel lighter and more alive than people twice their age, and it’s not because they’re beating the clock. They just kept something that most people are slowly giving up.
Looking young is not the main thing. Many of them have gray hair and creaky knees, and they don’t want to hide. Something still remained on inside them, a certain openness, a refusal to harden.
Here are eight habits you’ll notice in people who keep it.
1. They still get excited about the little things
Good peach. The first snow. The song they like to drive in the car. They respond to small pleasures as the small pleasures they are, out loud and unabashed.
Somewhere along the line, many people decide that it’s better to be inadequate. Enthusiasm begins to seem childish, so they lower it to a cold, bland nod to everything. The young at heart never got this memo.
You’ll notice that it makes them a little more fun. Their enthusiasm is contagious. When someone lights up over a dumb, wonderful little thing, it gives everyone else a chance to enjoy it – and you’ll notice the room does, more often than not.
2. Willingness to look stupid
They will dance at the wedding, wear a funny hat, join the game even if they lose. Looking a little silly doesn’t scare them.
Most people, as they age, become more concerned with self-preservation, more concerned with dignity, less willing to take chances with someone who looks stupid. The young at heart simply gave up this fear. They decided that there was more to entertainment than to be above it.
See them at a family gathering. It’s the grandparents lying on the floor playing with the kids, not the one watching from a good chair. The stiffness that keeps other adults at bay just never comes up. They’d rather be goofy and involved than quiet and detached.
3. Finding friends of any age
Their friends are not all from the same decade. They collect people, not peers.
It’s easy to end up only relating to your own age group, everyone comparing the same pains and reminiscing about the same decade. The young at heart don’t behave like that. They will make friends with a twenty-five-year-old at work, with a neighbor’s boy, with someone forty years younger than them, and that means.
There’s no talking, no “when I was your age” in it. Just true friendship across the chasm. This mixture does not allow them to calcify in one epoch. You will often find that they are more modern than their age would suggest because someone in their circle is always pulling them towards new things.
4. When plans come along, they say yes.
Someone suggests something last minute or a little outside of their routine, and their instinct is more yes than no.
By default, the value becomes “no” for most people as they age. It’s more comfortable, more predictable, easier on the schedule. The young at heart continue to point in the other direction. A trip, a new restaurant, something they had never done, they entered before they talked themselves out of it.
Reckless is not the right word. They still know their limits. But they see the spontaneous invitation as an opportunity, not an intrusion. You’ll notice that their lives are full of little adventures, mainly because they kept saying yes to them long after their peers started saying yes.
5. They laugh at themselves easily
They can become the focal point without injuring them. A mistake, a confusion, a lost train of thought, and they laugh first.
It gets harder for people who take themselves seriously, and many of us take ourselves more seriously as we age, not less. Every stumble becomes a small threat to dignity. The young at heart hold on to their own dignity so loosely that they consider themselves ridiculous.
Being around someone who doesn’t protect an image feels easy. They will tell an embarrassing story about themselves over dinner, laughing the loudest. You’ll notice that people are attracted to this ease in the sense that they don’t always gravitate towards polish.
6. Refusal to “behave for one’s age”
They never received a set of rules about what a person their age should like, wear or do. Or they took it out and threw it away.
There’s an unspoken script that most people follow, one that says at this age you move on to smart shoes and bland hobbies and stop being into new music. The young at heart just ignore it. They will take on something new in their sixties, blast out a loud album, wear the bright colors that everyone said were for the young.
This is not a suit, and not a crisis. It is a simple position that their interests belong to them and the number cannot assign them. Watching someone live off-script is a small, fun rebellion against a rule that no one really has to follow.
7. Enthusiasm without rolling your eyes
They are genuinely passionate about things and don’t hide it behind irony to seem cool.
Somewhere along the line it became fashionable to like everything at a safe, ironic distance, never to actually be caught. The young at heart did not pick up on it, or spilled it. They will talk about their hobby, their favorite show, a bird they saw, with an openness that can be almost surprising.
Genuine enthusiasm is a bit vulnerable, so people resist it. Saying it out loud means you might get teased for it. They accept this trade without a second thought. You will notice that other people’s guards tend to surround them – the fashionable distance begins to seem unnecessary.
8. They try things they fail at
They’ll pick up something new, knowing full well they’ll be terrible at it for a long time, and start anyway.
Adults tend to stick with what they’ve already mastered because being a clumsy beginner seems unworthy when you’re used to being competent. The young at heart don’t mind the awkward initial stage. They will take a pottery class, try a new sport, try a language program, have fun being naughty and not worry.
It allows them to grow in a way that comfort never grows. The desire to be a beginner again at any age is one of the surest signs that someone is still fully awake to their own life. Craft is convenient. The beginning is where liveliness tends to be.
It doesn’t require energy you don’t have or a face transplant. Most of them simply refuse to close the door that closes on its own with age.
If, while reading, someone has come to mind who seems more alive at seventy than most people at thirty, you already know how nice it is to be around them. And if you feel a little stiff while reading, that’s okay. The nice thing about staying young at heart is that you can start all over again on any ordinary Tuesday.
