My grandfather started swimming at the age of 74. I mean, on a team with a coach, a kickboard, and about twenty other retirees. He’s been afraid to put his face in the water all his life and has spent sixty years telling people he’s just not a water person.
When I asked him what had changed, he said something that I have been thinking about ever since. He said he had finally run out of people whose opinions he was waiting for.
I’ve had many such conversations over the years, mostly by chance, mostly with people two or three decades ahead of me. They tend to say variations of the same thing. No one I’ve spoken to is averse to the risks. What comes up again and again is the concern, and specifically how much has come out of nothing.
Here’s what keeps coming.
1. How did anyone watch it?
Almost everyone gets to this first.
You spend years assuming there’s a room full of people who will form opinions about your car, your weight, your house, the fact that you left that job. Then at some point it becomes apparent that those people were busy dealing with their own car and their own weight and barely registered yours.
A woman in her seventies once put it this way: “I was so worried that I would be judged by people who only thought about themselves.” He wasn’t upset about it. He looked a little tired from the wasted effort.
2. What they looked like
This comes with a peculiar and somewhat painful twist.
It’s not just that people don’t care about gray hair or extra pounds anymore. The fact that they look back at photos from their 40s, the ones they hated back then, and think I looked good. Better is better. I was in the best shape for the rest of my life and spent the entire decade unhappy about it.
I have already heard this exact story from quite a few people, because I started looking at my own photos differently.
3. Falling behind in work
The promotion someone else got in 2009. Whether the title was high enough. The colleague who got there faster and made sure everyone knew.
It all seems overwhelming at the time, and so overwhelming that it’s hard to argue with it while you’re in it. Then he retires, and within about eighteen months no one in that building remembers the hierarchy he lived in. Half of them left. They bought the company.
What keeps people out of work isn’t rankings at all. Two or three colleagues are still ringing and have produced some things they are proud of. No one ever said to me that they wished they were more competitive.
4. Money, beyond the point is enough
I want to be careful with this because a lot of people over 65 have real money problems and telling them not to worry is unhelpful and somewhat insulting.
But there is a particular version of this that often comes up. People who were successful, who had enough for the whole time, and who were still lying awake in their forties and fifties. Worrying didn’t make better decisions. They haven’t even saved more than that, especially. It just sat there in the background for a decade asking for rent.
An acquaintance of mine described it as paying interest on a loan that never came due.
5. What did their adult children do with their lives
The degree that wasn’t practical. No one was sure about the partner. Moving overseas, changing careers at 30, grandchildren who either arrived late or didn’t.
Ask people in their sixties and seventies about this, and there’s often a bit of a wince. Not because things went wrong. Usually because they went well, and what sticks in the memory is the tension at the time and the stiff conversations they’d like to have for a year or two.
“I was right about him, as it turns out,” a family friend once said of his daughter’s first husband. Then he said it was worth a lot less than the two Christmases it cost.
6. Did everyone like them?
Somewhere in your seventies, the math on this changes.
You have a shorter list of people you actually want to see, and time has obviously become finite in a way that you don’t at forty-five. Keeping a tepid friendship alive out of habit ceases to make it pointless. So is the dinner you dread and the relative who’s been around since 1988.
The interesting thing is that no one I spoke to seemed to regret the faded friendships. They regret those who were continued out of politeness, while the good ones got the rest of the time.
7. Looking stupid while learning something
Back to my grandfather in the pool.
He was the worst swimmer on the team by a mile. Really bad, about a year ago. Old guys in hats were always ahead of him. And what he said about that was that at 74 there’s no point in pretending to be good at anything anymore, so the whole embarrassing apparatus just falls away and you’re free to be terrible in public.
It’s a shame when you think about it, because you can do this at any age. Most of us decide we won’t know until we’re old enough that no one expects anything.
What I took from it
I don’t think you can cut this short. That’s annoying. People don’t stop caring what other people think because someone gave them good advice at 45. They stop because time has done something to them that an article can’t.
But there is one thing I started that helped me more than I expected. When something is bothering me, I try to imagine describing it to someone at 78 and asking if it was worth the sleep. Most of the time the answer is immediately obvious and I feel like changing the subject.
My grandfather swam for eleven years. It was never good for him. He used to say that that was the best part, that it was the first thing he did just because he wanted to and he didn’t care if it was good at all, and if he had done it at 50 he would have lived another twenty-four years.
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