My grandfather started swimming when he was 74 years old. I mean, on a swim team, there’s a coach, a kickboard, and about 20 other retirees. He spent his entire life afraid of putting his face in water and spent sixty years telling people he was not a water person.
When I asked him what had changed, he said something that has been on my mind ever since. He said he finally had no one waiting for his opinion.
I’ve had many of these conversations over the years, mostly by chance, mostly with people who were two or thirty years ahead of me. They tend to say different versions of the same thing. No one I spoke to regretted these risks. What comes up again and again is something worrisome, especially how many of them turn out to be pointless.
This is what happens over and over again.
1. Is anyone watching?
Almost everyone is exposed to this first.
You spent years assuming that a room full of people formed opinions about your car, your weight, your house, and the fact that you left that job. And then at some point, you suddenly realize that those people are so busy worrying about their cars and their own weight that they’re barely registering your weight.
A woman in her seventies once said to me, “I’m very worried about being judged by people who only think about themselves.” She didn’t resent it. She just looked a little tired from wasted energy.
2.Their appearance
This one has a specific, slightly painful twist.
It’s not just that people no longer care about gray hair or ten extra kilos. It’s that they look back at photos from their forties, photos that they hated at the time, and think, well, I look good. Better than good. I was in the best shape of my life for the rest of my life, but I was unhappy for ten years.
I’ve heard this exact story from enough people that now I start to look at my own photos differently.
3. Falling behind in work
A promotion that someone else received in 2009. Is the title senior enough? That coworker gets there faster and makes sure everyone knows.
All of this gave people a sense of hugeness at the time, and its load-bearing capacity was undisputed when you were in it. Then you retire, and within about eighteen months, no one in that building remembers the class system you lived in. Half of them have left. The company was acquired.
What people don’t seem to work on is not rankings at all. They still called two or three colleagues and made something they were proud of. No one told me they wished they were more competitive.
4. Money is no longer enough
I want to approach this with caution because a lot of people over 65 do have real money worries and telling them not to worry is useless and a bit insulting.
But there is a specific version that appears frequently. People who have had great outcomes, they’ve had enough all the time and are still sober into their forties and fifties. This concern does not lead to better decisions. Most of the time, this doesn’t even save them more. It just sits there in the context of a decade, collecting rent.
Someone I know described it as paying interest on a loan that never came due.
5. What their adult children are doing
This degree is impractical. No one is sure of the partner. Move overseas, change careers at age 30, and have grandchildren either arrive late or never arrive.
If you ask someone in their sixties or seventies this question, they tend to cringe a little. Not because things are going badly. Often it’s because they went well, and what remains in the memory is the tension it created, and a year or two of stale conversations they wish they could revisit.
“It turns out I was right about him,” a family friend once told me about his daughter’s first husband. He then said that this right was worth much less than the two Christmases he spent on it.
6.Whether everyone likes them
By the time you reach your seventies, the math of the problem changes.
The list of people you really want to meet gets shorter, and time becomes decidedly more limited than it is for Forty-Five. There is no point in maintaining a lukewarm friendship out of habit. So are the dinner parties you dread, and the relatives who have been exhausted since 1988.
Interestingly, no one I spoke to seemed to regret the loss of the friendship. They feel sorry for those who continue to leave out of politeness while the good ones get the rest of the time.
7. Looking silly while studying
Grandpa back in the pool.
He was the worst swimmer on that team by a mile. It’s really not good, I’ve been using it for over a year. The old guy in the hat kept passing him. His version of this is that by the age of 74, there’s no point in pretending you’re good at something anymore, so the whole embarrassment mechanism goes away and you can act terrible in public.
It’s such a shame when you think about it because you can do this at any age. Most of us just decide we can’t until we’re old enough that no one expects anything.
what do i get out of it
I don’t think you can take shortcuts. That’s the annoying bit. People don’t stop worrying about what other people think just because someone gave them good advice at age 45. They will stop because time does something to them that articles cannot.
But I’ve started doing one thing that’s helped more than I expected. When something bothers me, I try to imagine describing it to a 78-year-old person and ask if it’s worth sleeping on. Most of the time the answer is obvious and I can feel myself wanting to change the subject.
My grandfather swam for eleven years. He was never good at it. He often said that was the best part, it was the first thing he did purely because he wanted to do it and didn’t care if he was good or not, and if he had solved this problem by the time he was 50, he would have done it for another twenty-four years.
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