I’m seventy-three. Five of my friends and I came out of the working world within about four years of each other, which means we’ve spent a lot of dinners comparing notes on how it’s going.
They have lists. Dave has been to Portugal, Vietnam, and a place in Wyoming where you can learn to fly-fish from a man who used to be somebody. Marianne is doing a master’s in art history, at seventy-four, and is dead serious about it. Two of them share a spreadsheet. With tabs.
I don’t have a list. I’ve never had a list. And somewhere in the last two years, my friends decided that this means something is wrong with me.
It doesn’t. I’ve never been less interested in proving anything to anyone in my life, and I’d like to make the case that this is a legitimate way to spend the end of one.
What my days look like
I’ll go first, since everyone’s imagining something worse than the truth.
I get up around six-thirty, which is a habit I couldn’t break if I wanted to. I read the paper front to back, including the parts I don’t care about, because there’s no longer any reason to skim. I walk about three miles, the same route, and I’ve come to know a specific dog on my street well enough that we have a relationship independent of his owner.
I cook. Badly at first, better now. I’ve got a granddaughter who comes on Thursdays and thinks my house is where the good snacks live. I watch too much baseball. I have a stack of books by the chair, and I get through maybe one a week.
That’s it. That’s the whole operation.
Nobody’s writing about it, and nothing on that list would survive a dinner-party question about what I’ve been up to. I’m aware of how it sounds. I’m telling you it’s the best I’ve felt since I was about thirty.
I already did the striving
Here’s what my friends keep missing. I didn’t get here because I ran out of energy. I got here because I’ve done forty-three years of proving and I’m finished.
I proved I could support a family. I proved I could keep a business alive through two recessions, which involved a stretch in 2009 I still don’t like to think about. I proved it to my father, who never said so. I proved it to a boss who fired me in 1988 and to whom I have been mentally responding for thirty-eight years.
The proving is done. There’s nobody left in the stands.
And I’ve since found out that this shift has a name and a body of research behind it.
Laura Carstensen spent a career on what happens to people’s goals as the time ahead of them gets shorter, and the finding is consistent. When the horizon is long, people chase new experiences, new information, and new people. When it shortens, they turn toward what already matters, savoring the present instead of banking on a future.
She also ran it the other way around. She took young people and asked them to imagine they didn’t have much time left. They started wanting what old people want: the people they already loved, the things they already knew, no interest in anything new.
So it isn’t age that does it. It’s how much time you think you’ve got. Which means what’s happened to me isn’t decay. It’s a decision my brain made without consulting me, and having thought about it, I’d have signed off on it anyway.
More Bolde Stories
What my friends say about it
They are not subtle.
“Use it or lose it,” says Dave, who says it every time, and who believes with his whole chest that he is the first person to have thought of this.
“You’re going to atrophy,” says Marianne, gesturing at me with a fork, and she doesn’t only mean the muscles.
“What are you going to do, sit there for twenty years?” That one was my son, who I’ll forgive, because he’s frightened, and because he’s watching his father do the thing that comes right before the part he’s dreading.
They think the reading and the walking and the dog on my street is a holding pattern. They think I’m waiting. They believe, sincerely and out of love, that the trip to Portugal is what keeps a person alive, and that a man who won’t book one has started to make his arrangements.
My friends do have a point
Here’s where I have to be straight, because it would be easy to write this whole thing as a man swatting away his friends and never engaging with what they’re saying.
They’re not making it up. The research on this is real, and it isn’t gentle.
Patricia Boyle and a group of researchers at Rush University followed more than two and a half thousand older adults, none of them with dementia when they started, and sat down with every one of them once a year for as long as they had them. At the start, they asked each person how much their life felt like it was going somewhere — whether they had reasons, whether their days pointed at anything.
The ones who said yes got Alzheimer’s later. And they died later. Not by a rounding error, either.
So when Dave tells me at dinner that people who stop doing things stop being here, he’s crudely paraphrasing a real study, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend he isn’t.
A bucket list isn’t a purpose
But when you look closer at what Boyle measured, it isn’t what my friends think it is.
She measured purpose — whether a person derives meaning from their experience, whether they’re focused and intentional, whether their days feel like they’re going somewhere. She did not measure passport stamps. There is nothing in that research about going to Vietnam or Portugal or Wymoning.
And once you see the difference, you can’t unsee it. You can have every bit of that purpose on a porch. You can also have absolutely none of it while standing on a mountain in Tanzania at sixty-eight, checking off an item you added to a list in 1994 for a father who’s been dead since 2003 and wasn’t impressed the first time.
Half of what’s on those lists isn’t purpose. It’s the same proving I just spent forty-three years doing, except now it’s in a different country. And every item on the list is something you haven’t done yet, which means the whole business keeps you living a few months ahead of wherever you’re actually standing.
My mornings are not a holding pattern. The dog is not a placeholder for Portugal. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I’m doing it on purpose, which, as far as Boyle is concerned, is the entire ballgame.
More Bolde Stories
There’s a difference between resting and hiding
All that said, I’d be a fool to pretend everybody sitting in a chair is sitting there for my reasons. Some people aren’t resting. Some people are hiding, and they’ve got a lovely story about how they’ve earned it, and the story is true, and it’s also a door they’re holding shut.
So here’s how I check myself, and you can borrow it.
Think about the trip you’re not taking. Really picture it — the airport, the booking, the whole business. Now ask which of two things you feel.
If the thought of it mostly exhausts you, if your first reaction is God, what for, then you’re done proving, and you can stop apologizing to your friends about it.
But if it appeals to you, if part of you wants to go and you still haven’t booked it, that isn’t rest. Something is stopping you, and you don’t know what it is, and that’s worth an afternoon of your attention.
I’ve run myself through this more than once, usually after a dinner where Marianne has been pointing at me with the fork. And every time, I get the same answer:
I don’t want to go to Portugal. I want to be here, on Thursday, when my granddaughter comes.
Maybe that changes. I’ve been wrong about myself before, and if I wake up at seventy-five wanting to see Lisbon, I’ll go and see Lisbon, and Dave will be unbearable about it for a year.
Until then, I’m free to do what I want and free to skip what I don’t. It took seven decades to get hold of both halves of that, and I’m not handing either one back.
Dave leaves for Croatia in March. I hope he has a wonderful time. I’ll be right here.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
Submit your stories [email protected]
