7 things people over 65 wish they’d stopped worrying about twenty years earlier

My grandfather took up swimming at 74. Properly, I mean, in a squad, with a coach and a kickboard and about twenty other retirees. He’d been afraid of putting his face in the water his entire life and had spent sixty years telling people he just wasn’t a water person.

When I asked him what changed, he said something I’ve thought about ever since. He said he’d finally run out of people whose opinion he was waiting for.

I’ve had a lot of conversations like that over the years, mostly by accident, mostly with people who are two or three decades ahead of me. They tend to say a version of the same thing. Nobody I’ve spoken to regrets the risks. What comes up again and again is the worrying, and specifically how much of it turned out to be about nothing.

Here’s what keeps coming up.

1. Whether anyone was watching

Almost everyone gets to this one first.

You spend years assuming there’s a room full of people forming views about your car, your weight, your house, the fact that you left that job. Then at some point it dawns on you that those people were busy worrying about their own car and their own weight and had barely registered yours.

A woman in her seventies once put it to me like this: “I was so worried about being judged by people who were only thinking about themselves.” She wasn’t bitter about it. She just seemed a bit tired at the wasted effort.

2. How they looked

This one comes with a specific and slightly painful twist to it.

It’s not just that people stop caring about the grey hair or the extra ten kilos. It’s that they look back at photos from their forties, the ones they hated at the time, and think, well, I looked fine. Better than fine. I was in the best shape of the rest of my life and I spent the whole decade unhappy about it.

I’ve heard that exact story from enough people now that I’ve started looking at my own photos differently.

3. Being behind at work

The promotion that went to someone else in 2009. Whether the title was senior enough. The colleague who got there faster and made sure everyone knew.

All of it feels enormous at the time and load bearing in a way that’s hard to argue with while you’re inside it. Then you retire, and within about eighteen months nobody in that building remembers the hierarchy you were living in. Half of them have left. The company got bought.

What people seem to keep from work isn’t the ranking at all. It’s two or three colleagues they still ring, and a handful of things they made that they’re proud of. Nobody has ever told me they wish they’d been more competitive.

4. Money, past the point of enough

I want to be careful with this one, because plenty of people over 65 do have real money worries and telling them not to fret is useless and a bit insulting.

But there’s a specific version of this that comes up a lot. People who turned out fine, who had enough the whole time, and who still lay awake through their forties and fifties running numbers. The worry didn’t produce better decisions. It didn’t even make them save more, mostly. It just sat there in the background of a decade, charging rent.

One bloke I knew described it as paying interest on a loan that never came due.

5. What their adult children were doing with their lives

The degree that wasn’t practical. The partner nobody was sure about. The move overseas, the career change at 30, the grandchildren that either arrived late or didn’t.

Ask people about this in their sixties and seventies and there’s often a bit of a wince. Not because things went badly. Usually because they went fine, and what stuck in the memory was the tension it caused at the time, and the year or two of stiff conversations that they’d love to have back.

“I was right about him, as it turned out,” a family friend told me once about his daughter’s first husband. Then he said the being right was worth considerably less than the two Christmases it cost him.

6. Whether everyone liked them

Somewhere in your seventies, the maths on this changes.

You’ve got a shorter list of people you actually want to see, and time has become obviously finite in a way it isn’t at forty-five. Keeping a lukewarm friendship alive out of habit stops making sense. So does the dinner party you dread, and the relative who’s been draining to be around since 1988.

The interesting part is that nobody I’ve spoken to seems to regret the friendships that faded. They regret the ones they kept going out of politeness while the good ones got the leftover time.

7. Looking foolish while learning something

Back to my grandfather in the pool.

He was the worst swimmer in that squad by a mile. Genuinely bad, for about a year. Old blokes in caps overtaking him constantly. And the thing he said about it was that at 74 there’s no longer any point pretending you’re good at something, so the whole apparatus of embarrassment just falls away and you’re free to be terrible at it in public.

Which is a shame, when you think about it, because you can do that at any age. Most of us just decide we can’t until we’re old enough that nobody expects anything.

What I’ve taken from it

I don’t think you can shortcut this. That’s the annoying bit. People don’t stop worrying about what others think because someone gave them good advice at 45. They stop because time did something to them that an article can’t.

But there’s one thing I’ve started doing, and it’s helped more than I expected. When something’s eating at me, I try to picture describing it to someone at 78 and asking whether it was worth the sleep. Most of the time the answer’s obvious immediately, and I can feel myself wanting to change the subject.

My grandfather swam for eleven years. He never got good at it. He used to say that was the best part, that it was the first thing he’d ever done purely because he wanted to, with no interest at all in whether he was any good, and that if he’d worked that out at 50 he’d have had another twenty-four years of it.