As a young thing of 63, I wrote a top ten list of things I’d learned by that point.
But here I am standing just outside door 70, about to step into a whole new world. Turns out you CAN teach an old dog new tricks!
10) Tweak your bucket list. Most people never do half that shit anyway and then feel bad about it. Aim for smaller moments of joy and satisfaction. If you haven’t skydived or hiked to Machu Picchu by 70, maybe find stuff to do that won’t put you in traction.
9) “When you’re 20, you worry what everyone thinks, when you’re 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60, you realize no one was even thinking about you.” I’d like to add “when you’re 70, you’re invisible, so do whatever TF you want.”
8) It helps enormously to stop believing everything must change before you can be happy. Especially since we’re all living in a dystopian hellscape with great streaming services.
7) Define yourself by what you love and not what you leave. Unless you cure cancer, of course. Then absolutely feel free to mention the hell out of it at cocktail parties.
6) Looking young is nice, but actually being young is torture. I’ll swap the rollercoaster for the wrinkles any day.
5) People ask me if you ever get over grief. No, you don’t. It just becomes something you learn to live with, like the couch your cat scratched the hell out of.
4) Erik Erikson said our final developmental stage is Generativity vs. Stagnation. Cooking, gardening, protesting or just fucking around and having fun (I’m very good at that one)—it all counts as generativity. Focus on what you CAN do instead of what you CAN’T because otherwise you’ll spend your remaining years rage-scrolling and ordering useless crap from Temu.
3) I’ve learned that not only can’t I change others, but believing I could was borderline delusional. If you want to pay me professionally, I’ll gladly join Team Change, but you’ll be doing the heavy lifting. I’m exhausted.
2) I’ve learned to cultivate the most important relationship I’ve ever had: the one with myself. I don’t fear loneliness, because I’m damned good company. And if I’m longing for companionship, I can usually coerce someone to hang out with me.
1) Learning to roll with the punches may be the single most valuable lesson of my life. I used to get butt-hurt about absolutely EVERYTHING, and yes, I sometimes still do, but I recover much faster now. Life’s too short. Work it out or walk away. Most people are more clueless than malicious.
If aging has taught me anything thus far, it’s that life is far less controllable than I imagined and far more survivable than I feared. I’ve lost people, versions of myself, illusions, certainty, collagen, and more reading glasses than I can count.
But I’ve gained perspective, self-forgiveness, resilience, and the ability to laugh at almost everything. Eventually. I finally know that joy matters more than achievement, liking myself matters more than being liked, and a good sense of humor is like having a spare immune system.
In the age of social media, the hardest thing for many of us is to inhabit our lives instead of performing them. At 70, I finally understand that a good life is less about becoming someone and more about learning to enjoy being the person I already am.
Mostly, I know how lucky I am to still be here—wrinkled, opinionated, inappropriate, and deeply grateful.
Kvetchin With Gretchen 