My father will be seventy-nine next year. He learned to use a bread machine when he was sixty-eight, but was terrible at it, and has been making heavy bread ever since. He still debates politics with me and occasionally admits he’s wrong, something I haven’t inherited.
I am not yet sixty years old. But I spent enough time with people in Australia and Saigon to notice that the people who looked like they were aging well were not the ones with the best knees or the greatest super balance. It’s smaller than that and shows up in behavior.
Here are nine things I keep seeing.
1. You’re still terrible at something
This is not something you were good at before. Something new you’ve recently started getting into, but you’re really feeling hopeless about.
Most people quietly stop being beginners in their forties. This is understandable. By then you’ve built a capable life, and being a newbie in front of others will be more uncomfortable than it was at twenty-two.
If you’re sixty years old and you’re still willing to be the worst person in the room about something, that’s no small thing. That’s the whole game.
2. You have changed your mind about something in the past few years
It’s not a small thing either. What you held on to, you now see in a different way.
Many people reach their sixties with their views crystallized and then spend the next thirty years defending the position they happened to hold when they were fifty-five. If you have started doing something, even just one thing, your idea is still there.
3. Your friends are not the same age as you
This one is underrated. It’s easy to end up falling into a life where everyone is within five years of you, and then slowly discover that the world is confusing.
Older people I know have spread. Neighbor, in his thirties. An eighty-year-old man at the tennis club. They still meet for coffee with a younger colleague. They stay in the trends, not in the pockets of trends that were formed around 1985.
4. Don’t use hurtful things to guide you.
Many of us end up falling into a conversational format where the first ten minutes are a summary of everything that’s being played.
No one said you should pretend to be twenty-five. The body does things, and it’s only fair to talk about it with someone who cares about you. But if someone asks you how you are and your answer is still mostly about your week rather than your illness, you’ve retained something that many others have given up.
5. Your plans are still far away
Going on a trip next spring. You’re building something that won’t be finished in two years. You plant a tree and know exactly who will sit under it.
Those who give up quietly stop planning for the long term. They keep their calendars short, just in case. If you’re still mindlessly booking something for twelve or eighteen months out, some part of you is obviously assuming there’s a lot left, and that assumption tends to be self-fulfilling.
6. You are curious about things that are of no use to you
My father-in-law in Vietnam is in his seventies and has recently become very interested in how bees make decisions. He has no bees. He won’t get the bees.
Useless curiosity is one of the better signs. Most people, after a certain point, only learn things that have work to do. Learning something purely because it’s fun means the machine is still functioning for itself.
7. You’ll still feel embarrassed
Most of the time it’s on your own. You do something stupid, you discover it, you laugh, you feel your ears warm.
The alternative is a kind of armor that some people put on in their fifties, where everything falls into place and everything is someone else’s problem. Awkwardness means you still hold yourself to a standard and are still able to see yourself from the outside. Both will get you decent company.
8. You have given up what is owed to you
An apology like never before. a share of something. A version of events in which you are the one who feels the hardest.
I know some people in their sixties who still carry the quarrel from 1994, and I also know people who simply let it go, not because the other person deserved it, but because carrying it around was tiring and they could use the energy better. The second group looks about ten years younger, which I don’t think is a coincidence.
Meditation taught me this slowly, over about fifteen years. You don’t forgive others for their own good. You do this because the resentment is strong and you are the one who holds it.
9. You haven’t decided which era is a good era yet
Each generation eventually nominates a golden age, and it’s always suspiciously close to their age between eighteen and thirty.
If you still occasionally try new music, still eat food you don’t recognize, and still study whatever new technology your grandchildren are using instead of declaring it all garbage, you’ve avoided the biggest pitfalls. Those who insist that the world peaks in youth have quietly ceased to participate.
What do all of these have in common?
None of them deal with the body. This is the part that surprised me when I started paying attention.
In my opinion, those who age well are not necessarily the healthiest or wealthiest people. They are the ones who have stayed open. Still bad at studying, still changing his mind, still curious about bees, still willing to be a beginner in front of people half his age.
And those who look older than they are usually end up in closure somewhere along the way. It rarely happens at the same time. It’s just a slow narrowing down, one decision at a time, until the world becomes smaller than it needs to be.
If you read this list and recognize yourself in most of it, you’re probably doing better than you think. It would also be useful if some of them stung a little. None of them were locked in. My father started making bread when he was sixty-eight.
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