At sixty-three, my friend Margaret canceled her book club to sit by her window and watch birds. Not impressive birds—suburban sparrows and the occasional cardinal. Just regular Tuesday birds doing regular Tuesday things.
When I asked her why, she said something that stayed with me: “I realized I’d been reading about other people’s stories for decades. Now I want to pay attention to what’s actually happening.”
This wasn’t depression talking. Margaret is one of the most genuinely content people I know. She has this quiet satisfaction that makes you wonder what she knows that the rest of us don’t.
So I started paying attention to other people like her—folks in their sixties who seem genuinely happy. Not fake-it-till-you-make-it happy, but really, truly content.
What I found surprised me. The happiest people in their sixties aren’t chasing happiness at all. Instead, something else is happening that’s way more interesting.
The art of magnificent ordinary
Here’s what I noticed: the most content sixty-somethings I know have fallen in love with ordinary life. Not in a settling way, but in a “holy cow, how did I miss this?” way.
Take Sarah, a retired nurse who told me about her morning coffee ritual. She’s not being all fancy about it—she just started actually paying attention to what she was already doing every day.
The sound her coffee grinder makes. How the smell fills up her whole kitchen. That first sip that says “okay, day, let’s do this.” She’s been drinking coffee for forty years, but only recently started noticing how much she loves it.
“I spent so much time rushing through my mornings to get to work,” she told me. “Now I realize my mornings were already perfect. I just wasn’t there for them.”
This isn’t about meditation apps or mindfulness courses. It’s simpler than that. These people have stopped waiting for their real life to start and started noticing it’s been happening all along.
Margaret gardens now, but not to win any contests or impress the neighbors. She just likes having dirt under her fingernails and watching things grow.
Her friend David cooks elaborate Sunday dinners, not because he’s trying to be a chef, but because he loves the whole process—chopping vegetables, making his house smell amazing, having people around his table.
Recently, I picked up Rudá Iandê’s new book “Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life”, and found myself nodding at his observation:
“When we let go of the need to be perfect, we free ourselves to live fully—embracing the mess, complexity, and richness of a life that’s delightfully real.”
Reading that led me to examine my own relationship with ordinary moments, and I realized how much energy I’d been spending trying to optimize experiences instead of simply having them.
The people who’ve mastered this art of magnificent ordinary aren’t settling for less—they’re recognizing more. They’ve developed what I can only describe as expert-level appreciation for the unremarkable.
The way afternoon light hits their living room wall just so. How their spouse still laughs at their own terrible jokes after thirty years of marriage. The satisfying weight of a good book in their hands. Little things that the rest of us rush past without seeing.
It’s like they’ve become connoisseurs of regular life. And regular life, it turns out, is pretty spectacular when you’re actually paying attention to it.
The freedom of finally knowing yourself
There’s something else I’ve noticed about happy people in their sixties: they’ve stopped performing. After decades of being who everyone else needed them to be, they’re finally just being themselves. And the relief is palpable.
Janet worked in corporate communications for thirty years. She spent three decades being professional, diplomatic, always having the right response ready. Now? “I say what I think,” she told me with this huge grin. “I wear what’s comfortable. I’m too old to pretend I like things I don’t like. Turns out all that pretending was exhausting.”
This isn’t about becoming difficult or rude. It’s about the profound relief of no longer managing everyone else’s opinion of you. Janet still disappoints people sometimes, but she’s stopped feeling responsible for fixing their disappointment. She says no to things that drain her energy and yes to things that genuinely interest her, even if those choices seem weird to other people.
The book I mentioned talks about this beautifully. Iandê writes: “Most of us don’t even know who we truly are. We wear masks so often, mold ourselves so thoroughly to fit societal expectations, that our real selves become a distant memory.”
Reading this reminded me of how many happy sixty-somethings seem to have taken off those masks, not through some big dramatic moment, but gradually, like taking off uncomfortable shoes at the end of a long day.
Now they pursue what actually interests them. Margaret collects vintage postcards because she loves them, not because it’s a respectable hobby. Her neighbor Frank has become obsessed with identifying mushrooms. My aunt started learning about bird migration patterns.
None of these interests make them more impressive at cocktail parties, but they make them more themselves.
This self-knowledge extends to their relationships too. They’ve learned to love people as they are rather than as they could be with enough management or encouragement. They’ve stopped trying to fix their adult children or change their spouses or improve their friends.
Instead, they’ve mastered the art of loving people exactly where they are, which paradoxically creates more space for growth and connection than years of well-intentioned improvement efforts ever did.
It sounds simple, but it’s revolutionary. All that energy that used to go into managing other people’s lives gets redirected into actually living their own.
My friend Tom put it perfectly: “I finally understand my own rhythms. I know when I need to be alone, when I want company, what kinds of conversations fill me up and what kinds drain me dry. I honor that stuff now instead of fighting it.” He paused. “I’m not selfish. I’m just honest. Turns out that works better.”
The transformation isn’t about having everything figured out—it’s about being okay with not having everything figured out. Making peace with uncertainty, with imperfection, with the beautiful messiness of being human.
What I love most about these people is that they’ve discovered the sixties aren’t about decline. They’re about distillation. All the stuff that doesn’t serve them has been gradually stripped away, leaving something essential and surprisingly joyful.
Happiness, it turns out, isn’t something you achieve or earn or find. It’s something that was there all along, waiting for you to stop looking everywhere else and notice it was right where you were standing.
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