Here’s what nobody mentions about getting older: at some point, the exhaustion of performing yourself for everyone else gets outweighed by the relief of just being who you actually are. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s gradual—a slow quieting of the voice that spent decades telling you to be more agreeable, more impressive, more whatever it was you thought the room expected. And then one day you realize the voice has gotten very quiet, and you’ve never felt more like yourself.
I’m sixty-five. I’ve made enough mistakes, had enough uncomfortable lunches, maintained enough friendships past their natural end to know what I actually want from the time I have left. These are the six things I’ve officially stopped doing. My only regret is the decades I spent doing them.
1. What other people think of how I choose to live
For most of my adult life, I made decisions with an invisible audience in mind. Not a specific person—a general sense of what someone reasonable would think if they saw my choices laid out in front of them. What would they say about the car I drive, the neighborhood I live in, the way I spend my Saturdays? I spent real energy on this. I bought things I didn’t love because they seemed like the right things to buy. I passed on things I wanted because they seemed harder to explain. It’s only now, from this side, that I can see how much of my life was quietly curated for a crowd that wasn’t watching.
What I know now is that most people are too busy managing their own image to pay sustained attention to mine. The ones who do have opinions about my choices would have opinions regardless of what I chose—there’s no version of my life that would satisfy them, so I might as well live the one that satisfies me. I make decisions based on what I actually want now, and the results have been dramatically better. The car I have, I chose because I love it. The neighborhood I live in makes me happy every morning. That’s what life looks like when you stop designing it for an audience that was never really there.
2. Friendships that take more than they ever give back
There are friendships that run on history rather than genuine affection, and I maintained several of them for way too long. You know exactly what I mean—the people you’ve known for decades who you’re always glad you saw but never actually miss. The lunches that feel like appointments you can’t get out of. The catch-ups where you talk for two hours and leave feeling vaguely depleted. I kept these going because I thought that’s what good, loyal people did. You don’t abandon someone just because they no longer light you up. Except—and this took me a while—there’s a difference between abandoning someone and quietly accepting that a friendship has run its natural course.
Life is shorter at sixty-five than it was at thirty-five—not in a dramatic way, just in a clearer one. I can see how much of it I have, and the way I want to spend it is with people who actually replenish me. Not people who leave me flat, ready to be home, counting down to a reasonable exit. The friendships I have now are the ones I’d choose again today—people I call because I want to, not because I should. Smaller circle, considerably better quality. The people who fell away when I stopped maintaining things past their expiry date? I don’t miss them. I missed the idea of them, briefly. That passed.
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3. Keeping up with things I was never really into
I spent years building what I can only describe as a fake cultural library. A working familiarity with things I’d never actually sought out, maintained so I could participate in conversations I wasn’t that interested in having. Shows I’d seen enough of to have a take. Books I’d absorbed secondhand. Music I’d nod about knowingly while privately wondering why people loved it so much. I did this because keeping up felt like the entrance fee to seeming engaged and relevant—and for a long time, seeming engaged and relevant felt more important than actually being interested in anything.
It isn’t anymore. I haven’t watched several very important things, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. When it comes up, I say so—and here’s the part I didn’t expect—the conversation usually gets more interesting. Turns out the “have you seen it” exchange is more fun when someone says no and has to be told what it’s actually about. I’ve also started noticing, now that I’m no longer maintaining a fake library, how much more time and attention I have for the things I actually love. Which, it also turns out, I love quite a lot. I just spent too many years keeping company with things I didn’t.
4. Getting everything perfect before I let myself start
Perfectionism is a very convincing liar. It tells you you’re not procrastinating—you’re being responsible. You’re not avoiding—you’re being thorough. The conditions aren’t right yet. You need a little more time, a little more information, a cleaner starting point. I believed this for decades. I have projects I didn’t start because I couldn’t start them perfectly, and I couldn’t start them perfectly because they were never going to be started at all. I have ideas that lived in my head for years, gathering what I told myself was context, but was really just evidence that I was afraid of getting it wrong.
At sixty-five, I don’t have the luxury of indefinite waiting, and honestly, I’m not sure I’d want it anymore. What I know now is that imperfect and done beats perfect and theoretical every single time. I’ve sent things that weren’t exactly right. I’ve started projects without knowing how they’d end. I’ve made decisions on incomplete information because complete information was never coming. And the thing that surprised me—what I wish someone had told me thirty years ago—is that most of it worked out fine. Better than fine, often. The version of me I was waiting to become was already there. I just kept getting in the way of her.
5. Drama that has nothing to do with my actual life
There is so much drama available, constantly, if you’re willing to make yourself available to it. Other people’s conflicts. Online arguments. Family situations that technically don’t involve you but somehow keep pulling you in. For a long time, I had a weak spot for all of it—not because I wanted trouble, but because staying informed about everyone else’s situation felt like a form of caring. Like being connected. I’ve since figured out that what it actually was is a way of staying busy in someone else’s life, so I didn’t have to be as fully present in my own.
I’m not available for it anymore. I’ll show up completely for the people I love in actual crisis—that will never change. But the ongoing noise? The situations that require me to pick a side in something that has nothing to do with me, the drama that arrives in my inbox looking for a response? I’ve stopped responding. What I found when I stepped back is that I don’t miss any of it. Not one bit. The conflicts either resolve or they don’t. My involvement wouldn’t have changed the outcome. In the space where that noise used to live, I’ve put things I actually care about. It’s a significant improvement.
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6. Softening who I am to make a room more comfortable
This is the one that took the longest. I was very good, for a very long time, at making myself easier to be around—filing down the edges of opinions that might cause friction, laughing at things I found more uncomfortable than funny, and presenting whatever version of myself seemed most likely to land well in a given room. I thought of this as a social skill. It is, technically. But it’s also a slow erosion, done over enough decades, of the version of you that exists before you start adjusting. At some point, I realized I’d been adjusting so long I’d lost track of the original.
I’ve stopped. I have opinions, and I state them. I find some things funny and other things not, and the people around me know the difference now because I’ve stopped blurring it. I’m not trying to be difficult—conflict for its own sake has never interested me. But I’m done performing a more palatable version of myself for people who, it turns out, were never asking me to. The ones worth having around prefer the real version. The ones who don’t—I’ve learned something useful about them, and adjusted my circle accordingly.
All of this—every item on this list—comes back to the same thing. Getting older has a reputation problem. People talk about it like it’s all loss. What they don’t mention loudly enough is what you gain: the accumulated weight of enough experience to know your own mind, and the specific freedom of caring less about whether everyone else approves of it. I spent my first sixty-five years becoming who I am. I’m not going to spend the rest of them pretending to be someone more convenient. I’ve earned this version of myself. I’m keeping her.
Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.
