Being young at heart has nothing to do with skin cream or gym memberships. In her much later years, she’s met people who feel lighter and more alive than half their age, and it’s not because they’re fighting the clock. They just held on to something that most people are slow to let go of.
It’s not about looking young. Many have gray hair and creaky knees and zero interest in hiding. Something else remained switched on in them, a certain openness, a rejection of rigidity.
Here are eight habits you’ll notice in people who have kept it.
1. They still get excited about the little things
A good peach. First snow. A song they like to play in the car. They react to small pleasures like small pleasures, loud and unperturbed.
Somewhere, many people consider it more dignified to fall short. Enthusiasm starts to seem childish, so everything is dialed in with a cool, slight nod. The eager young never got that memo.
You’ll notice that it makes them a little more fun to be around. Their joy is contagious. When someone shines a light on the quiet, wonderful little thing, it gives everyone else permission to enjoy it too—and you’ll notice the room doing it more often.
2. The willingness to look stupid
They dance at the wedding, wear the ridiculous hat, join the game even though they lose. It doesn’t scare them if they look a little silly.
As most people age, they become more protective of themselves, more concerned about dignity, and less willing to risk being the one who looks stupid. Enthusiastic young people simply renounced this fear. They decided to get into the fun more than the people above it.
Check them out at a family gathering. They are actually the grandparents down on the ground playing with the children, not the one watching from the good chair. The rigidity that keeps other adults on the sidelines never shows up. They tend to be silly and accommodating rather than calm and detached.
3. Making friends for all ages
Their friends are not all from the same decade. They collect people, not mates.
It’s easy to end up socializing only with your own age group, everyone compares the same pains and remembers the same decade. Enthusiastic young people do not box themselves in this way. They make friends with the twenty-five-year-old at work, the neighbor’s kid, someone forty years younger than them, and they mean it.
There is no putting down, no “when I was your age”. Just sincere friendship across the divide. This mixture prevents them from calcifying into an era. You can often find that they are more current than their age would suggest, because someone in their circle is always pulling them towards new things.
4. When plans come up, they say yes
Someone suggests something outside of your routine at the last minute, and your instinct is more yes than no.
The default for most people hardens toward gender as they age. The schedule is more convenient, predictable and easier. The young at heart are constantly leaning the other way. The road, the new restaurant, the thing they’ve never done, they’re in it before they talk themselves out of it.
Reckless is not the word. They still know their limits. But the spontaneous invitation is treated as an opportunity rather than an intrusion. You’ll notice that their lives are full of little adventures, mostly because they said yes to them long after their peers started to decline on principle.
5. They laughed at themselves easily
They can be your punch line without hurting them. A laugh, a scramble, a lost train of thought, and they laugh first.
This becomes more difficult for those who take themselves seriously, and many of us take ourselves more seriously as we age, not less. Every stumble is a minor threat to dignity. Enthusiastic youngsters maintain their dignity loosely enough to find themselves funny.
There’s a lightness to being around someone who doesn’t protect an image. During dinner, they tell the embarrassing story about themselves, laughing the best. You’ll find that people are drawn to this lightness in a way that they aren’t always drawn to sanding.
6. Refusing to “Act Their Age”
They were never given the rule book of what a group of their age should like, wear or do. Or they got it and threw it away.
There’s an unspoken script that most people follow that at this age you switch to sensible shoes and soft hobbies and stop getting excited about new music. Enthusiastic youth simply ignore it. At sixty, they’re going to record something new, blast the loud album, wear that bright color that everyone said was for the young.
This is not a costume, and it is not a crisis. It is the simple position that their interests are theirs and cannot be assigned a number. Watching someone live off-script like this is a fun little rebellion against a rule that no one really has to follow.
7. Enthusiasm without rolling your eyes
They deal with things honestly and don’t hide behind irony to sound cool.
Somewhere it has become fashionable to love everything from a safe, ironic distance, so that they never get to actually care. The young people living in their hearts didn’t pick up on this or dismissed it. They will rave about their hobbies, their favorite show, the bird they saw with an almost shocking openness.
Real enthusiasm is a bit vulnerable, so people brace themselves against it. Caring loudly means you can get teased for it. They accept this trade without thinking. You may notice that other people’s guard tends to drop around them – the fashionable distance seems unnecessary.
8. They try things they are bad at
They pick up something new, knowing full well that they’ll be awful for a long time, and start anyway.
Adults tend to stick to what they have already mastered because being a clumsy beginner feels unworthy when they are used to being competent. Enthusiastic young people don’t mind the awkward initial phase. They go to the pottery course, try out a new sport, fiddle with the language app, cheerfully wrong and unperturbed.
It keeps them growing in a way that comfort never does. The willingness to start over 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 the liveliness tends to be.
It doesn’t require energy you don’t have or a personality transplant. Most of them just don’t close the doors that tend to close by themselves with age.
If you’ve ever thought of someone reading this who somehow seems more alive at seventy than most people do at thirty, then you already know how good it feels to be around them. And if you felt a little stiff while reading, that’s okay. The nice thing about staying young at heart is that you can start over on any ordinary Tuesday.
