My dad will be seventy-nine next year. He learned how to use a bread maker badly at sixty-eight, and has been baking very heavy loaves ever since. He also still argues with me about politics and occasionally admits he was wrong, something I didn’t inherit.
I am not yet sixty. But I’ve spent enough time with people, both in Australia and here in Saigon, to notice that those who seem to age well aren’t the ones with the best knees or the biggest super balance. It’s less than that, and it shows in behavior.
Here are nine things I keep seeing.
1. You are still bad at something
Not something you used to be good at. Something new you’ve taken up recently that you’re really hopeless at.
Most people imperceptibly stop being a beginner somewhere in their forties. It is clear. By then, you’ve built a life where you’re competent, and being a newbie in front of other people is uncomfortable, something you never felt at twenty-two.
When you’re sixty and you still want to be the worst person in the room at something, that’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.
2. You have changed your mind in the past few years
Not a small thing either. The things you held fast that you now see differently.
Many people reach the age of sixty with fixed opinions and then spend the next thirty years defending the positions they held at fifty-five. If you have advanced something, even something, your thinking still lives.
3. Your friends are not of age
This one is underrated. It’s easy to find yourself in a life where everyone in it is within five years of you, and then gradually find the world confusing.
People I know who are well into old age have the spread. A neighbor in her thirties. Someone from the tennis club who is in his eighties. A younger colleague with whom they still have coffee. They stay in the flow, not in a pocket of what was formed around 1985.
4. You don’t lead with what hurts
There’s a version of the conversation that many of us end up getting into where the first ten minutes are a summary of everything that’s going on.
Nobody says you have to pretend you’re twenty-five. Bodies do things, and talking about it with people who care about you is fair enough. But if someone asks how you are and your answer is still about the week and not about the illness, then you have kept what many have given up.
5. You still make plans far away
Travel next spring. What you are building that will not be finished for two years. The tree you planted, knowing full well who would sit under it.
People who quietly give up stop planning far ahead. They keep the calendar short, just in case. If you’re still booking things twelve or eighteen months out without thinking, some part of you clearly assumes there’s plenty left, and that assumption tends to be true.
6. You are interested in things that are useless to you
My father-in-law here in Vietnam is in his seventies and has recently become very interested in how bees make decisions. He has no bees. He is not going to start bees.
Idle curiosity is one of the best signs. Most people only learn what to do after a certain point. Studying something purely because it’s interesting means that the mechanism is still working for its own sake.
7. You may still be confused
Myself, mostly. You do something stupid, you catch it, you laugh, you feel your ears getting warm.
The alternative is a kind of armor that some people put on in their fifties, where nothing lands and everything is someone else’s problem. Embarrassment means you are still held to standards and still able to see yourself from the outside. Both of them make you decent company.
8. You let go of what you were owed
An apology that never came. A share of something. A version of events where you were the only heavy one.
I know people in their sixties who are still fighting an argument from 1994, and I know people who just dropped it, not because the other side deserved it, but because it was tiring and they could use their energy better. The second group looks about ten years younger, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Meditation taught me this slowly, over about fifteen years. You don’t forgive people for their own good. You do it because the hurt is hard and you hold it.
9. You haven’t decided which era was good
Every generation eventually has a golden age, and it’s always suspiciously close to the years when they were eighteen to thirty.
If you still try new music every now and then, still eat food you can’t recognize, still poke at whatever new technology your grandkids use instead of declaring it all bullshit, you’ve avoided the biggest trap. People who insist that the world peaked when they were young have quietly stopped participating in it.
What do all these have in common
None of them are about the body. This is the part that surprised me when I started paying attention.
People who age well in my opinion are not necessarily the healthiest or wealthiest. These are the ones who remained open. Still learning badly, still changing their minds, still interested in bees, still ready to be a beginner in front of people half their age.
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And those who seem to be older than their years, usually closed somewhere along the way. It rarely happens immediately. It’s just a slow narrowing, one decision at a time, until the world is smaller than it needs to be.
If you’ve read this list and recognize yourself in most of it, then you’re doing better than you think. And if a couple of them stung a little, then that is also useful. None of them are closed. My father started bread at sixty-eight.
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