If you still do these 9 things at 60, you’re ageing better than you think

My dad turns seventy nine next year. He learned to use a bread maker at sixty eight, badly, and has been making very heavy loaves ever since. He also still argues with me about politics and occasionally admits he was wrong, which I did not inherit.

I’m not sixty yet. But I’ve spent enough time around people who are, both in Australia and here in Saigon, to notice that the ones who seem to be ageing well aren’t the ones with the best knees or the biggest super balance. It’s smaller than that, and it shows up in behaviour.

Here are nine things I keep seeing.

1. You’re still bad at something

Not something you used to be good at. Something new, that you took up recently, that you are genuinely hopeless at.

Most people quietly stop being beginners somewhere in their forties. It’s understandable. By then you’ve built a life where you’re competent, and being a novice in front of other people is uncomfortable in a way it never was at twenty two.

If you’re sixty and still willing to be the worst person in the room at something, that’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.

2. You’ve changed your mind about something in the last few years

Not a small thing either. Something you held firmly, that you now see differently.

Plenty of people arrive at sixty with their opinions set like concrete, and then spend the next thirty years defending the positions they happened to hold at fifty five. If you’ve moved on something, even one thing, your thinking is still alive.

3. Your friends aren’t all your age

This one is underrated. It’s easy to end up in a life where everyone in it is within five years of you, and then to slowly find the world confusing.

The people I know who age well have a spread. A neighbour in her thirties. Someone from the tennis club who’s eighty. A younger colleague they still get a coffee with. They stay in the current, rather than in the pocket of it that formed around 1985.

4. You don’t lead with what hurts

There’s a version of conversation that a lot of us fall into eventually, where the first ten minutes are a rundown of everything that’s playing up.

Nobody’s saying you should pretend to be twenty five. Bodies do things, and talking about it with people who care about you is fair enough. But if someone asks how you are and your answer is still mostly about your week rather than your ailments, you’ve kept hold of something a lot of people let go of.

5. You still make plans a long way out

A trip next spring. Something you’re building that won’t be finished for two years. A tree you planted knowing perfectly well who’ll be sitting under it.

People who have quietly given up stop planning far ahead. They keep the calendar short, just in case. If you’re still booking things twelve or eighteen months out without a second thought, some part of you is clearly assuming there’s plenty left, and that assumption tends to be self fulfilling.

6. You’re curious about things that are of no use to you

My father in law here in Vietnam is in his seventies and has recently become extremely interested in how bees make decisions. He has no bees. He is not going to get bees.

Useless curiosity is one of the better signs going. Most people, past a certain point, only learn things that have a job to do. Learning something purely because it’s interesting means the machinery is still running for its own sake.

7. You can still be embarrassed

By yourself, mostly. You do something a bit foolish, you catch it, you laugh, you feel the ears go warm.

The alternative is a kind of armour that some people put on in their late fifties, where nothing lands and everything is somebody else’s problem. Embarrassment means you’re still holding yourself to a standard and still capable of seeing yourself from the outside. Both of those keep you decent company.

8. You’ve let go of something you were owed

An apology that never came. A share of something. A version of events where you were the one hard done by.

I know people in their sixties still carrying an argument from 1994 and I know people who’ve simply put it down, not because the other party deserved it, but because carrying it was tiring and they had better uses for the energy. The second group looks about a decade younger, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Meditation taught me this the slow way, over about fifteen years. You don’t forgive people for their benefit. You do it because resentment is heavy and you’re the one holding it.

9. You haven’t decided which era was the good one

Every generation eventually nominates a golden age, and it’s always suspiciously close to the years when they were between eighteen and thirty.

If you still try new music occasionally, still eat food you can’t identify, still poke at whatever new bit of technology your grandkids are using rather than announcing that it’s all rubbish, you’ve dodged the biggest trap of the lot. The people who insist the world peaked when they were young have, in a quiet way, stopped participating in it.

What all of these have in common

Not one of them is about the body. That’s the part that surprised me when I started paying attention.

The people who strike me as ageing well aren’t necessarily the fittest or the wealthiest ones. They’re the ones who’ve stayed open. Still learning badly, still changing their minds, still curious about bees, still willing to be a beginner in front of people half their age.

And the ones who seem older than their years usually closed up somewhere along the way. It rarely happens all at once. It’s just a slow narrowing, one decision at a time, until the world is smaller than it needs to be.

If you read that list and recognised yourself in most of it, you’re doing better than you probably give yourself credit for. And if a couple of them stung a bit, that’s useful too. None of them are locked in. My dad started the bread at sixty eight.