My grandfather took up swimming at the age of 74. That’s right, I mean, in a squad, with a coach and a board and about twenty other pensioners. All his life he was afraid to put his face in the water and for sixty years he told people that he was simply not a water person.
When I asked him what had changed, he said something I had been thinking about ever since. He said he had finally run out of people whose opinions he was waiting for.
I’ve had many similar conversations over the years, mostly by chance, mostly with people two or three decades ahead of me. They tend to say a version of the same thing. No one I’ve spoken to is averse to taking risks. What comes up again and again is anxiety, and in particular how much it turned out to be about nothing.
Here’s what keeps coming.
1. Did anyone watch
Almost everyone gets there first.
You spend years assuming there’s a room full of people who have formed opinions about your car, your weight, your house, and the fact that you quit your job. Then at some point you realize that these people were busy worrying about their car and their weight and barely registered yours.
A woman in her seventies once said to me, “I was so worried that I would be judged by people who only thought of themselves.” She was not bitter about it. She just looked a little tired from the wasted effort.
2. What they looked like
It comes with a specific and slightly painful twist.
It’s not just that people stop caring about gray hair or extra pounds. It’s that they look back at pictures of themselves in the forties, the ones they hated at the time, and think, well, I looked good. Better than good. I was in better shape than I had ever been in my entire life, and I spent a decade unhappy about it.
I’ve heard this story from enough people now that I’ve started looking at my own photos differently.
3. Falling behind on work
A promotion that went to someone else in 2009. Was the title senior enough. The colleague who got there faster and made sure everyone knew.
At the time, it all seems huge and overwhelming, which is hard to argue with while you’re inside it. Then you retire and in about eighteen months no one in that building remembers what hierarchy you lived in. Half of them left. The company was bought.
People seem to be avoiding work, it’s not a ranking at all. It’s two or three colleagues they still call and a few things they’ve done that they’re proud of. No one has ever told me they wish they were more competitive.
4. Money, past the point is enough
I want to be careful with this because a lot of people over 65 have real money and telling them not to worry is useless and a bit insulting.
But there is a certain version of this that is common. People who turned out to be good, who had enough time and who were still lying awake through their forties and fifties. Anxiety did not lead to better decisions. Basically it didn’t even make them save more. It just sat in the background for a decade collecting rent.
One guy I knew described it as paying interest on a loan that never came due.
5. What did their adult children do with their lives
A degree that was not practical. Nobody was sure about the partner. Moving abroad, changing careers at 30, grandchildren who are either late or not.
Ask people in their sixties and seventies about this, and they’ll often cringe. Not because things went badly. Usually because they were doing well and what sticks in the memory is the tension it caused at the time and a year or two of tough talk they wish they could take back.
“I was right about him, as it turns out,” a family friend once told me about his daughter’s first husband. Then he said that being right costs a lot less than the two Christmases it cost him.
6. Did everyone like them
Somewhere in your seventies, the math on this changes.
You’ve got a smaller list of people you really want to see, and time is clearly limited, as it isn’t at forty-five. Maintaining a warm friendship out of habit loses its meaning. So is the so-called dinner party you dread, and the relative who has been spending time around since 1988.
The interesting thing is that none of the people I spoke to seemed to regret the lost friendships. They pity those who were left out of courtesy, and the good ones got the rest of the time.
7. Looking silly while studying something
I return to my grandfather in the pool.
He was the worst swimmer on that squad by a mile. Really bad, about a year. Old dudes in caps are constantly overtaking him. And what he said about it was that at 74 there’s no point pretending you’re good at anything anymore, so the whole embarrassment apparatus just falls away and you can be terrible at it in public.
Which is a shame when you think about it, because you can do it at any age. Most of us just decide we can’t until we grow up enough that no one expects anything.
What I took from it
I don’t think you can cut it. That’s what’s annoying. People don’t stop worrying about what other people think because someone gave them good advice at 45. They stop because time has done to them what an article cannot.
But there is one thing I started doing that has helped more than I expected. When something eats at me, I try to imagine describing it to someone aged 78 and asking if it’s worth sleeping on. In most cases the answer is immediately obvious and I feel like changing the subject.
My grandfather was a swimmer for eleven years. He never succeeded. He said that was the best part, that it was the first thing he had ever done purely because he wanted to, without any interest in whether it was good, and that if he had worked it out at 50, he would still have twenty-four years.
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