JOYFUL LIVING
My neighbour knocked on my door a few weeks ago to show me something on her phone.
She’s 72. For months she’d been muttering about smartphones — small buttons, updates, apps that rearrange themselves overnight just to confuse you. Three weeks earlier she was ready to throw the thing into the sea. I’d seen her at the market, huffing at her screen, muttering in Vietnamese words I couldn’t catch but whose meaning was perfectly clear.
Now she was standing at my door, practically glowing, showing me a photo of her garden. Edited. Turned into a short video with music. Sent to her grandchildren in Australia that morning.
I asked what changed.
She said: “I decided to get curious instead of feeling stupid.”
I laughed. Then I stood there a moment longer than I should have, because her words had landed somewhere uncomfortable.
When did I decide I was too old to learn new things?
I couldn’t answer that. But I knew I had decided it — quietly, without noticing. Somewhere along the way I’d started meeting unfamiliar things with wariness instead of wonder. New technology. New directions. New anything. A kind of cautious scepticism I’d been mistaking for wisdom.
It wasn’t wisdom. It was just the habit of someone who’d been winning at one game so long he’d forgotten there were other games to play.
This happens slowly. In my forties, I was still the person who figured things out. New software at work? I’d be the first one poking around in it. New process? Give me a week and I’d have an opinion. Somewhere in my fifties, that shifted. I started delegating the learning. Let the younger team members figure it out and brief me. It felt efficient. It was also, I see now, the beginning of a kind of retreat.
By sixty, I had a full set of things I “didn’t do.” Didn’t do social media. Didn’t do new apps. Didn’t do anything that required reading a manual longer than two pages. I’d convinced myself this was knowing my limits. Looking back, it was more like slow-motion surrender.
Last month I decided to learn about astronomy.
Not because I needed to — because I stepped outside one evening in Vung Tau and realised I had no idea what I was looking at. After all these years of living here, staring at the same sky, I couldn’t name a single constellation. The night sky over the South China Sea — one of the great views of my life — and I was functionally illiterate in it.
I spent hours reading. Watched videos. Eventually bought a small, embarrassingly basic telescope off Shopee. The kind a twelve-year-old might get for a birthday. The first night I found a constellation on my own — I want to say it was Orion but honestly it might have been something less impressive — I felt like a child who’d discovered buried treasure.
Nobody knew. Nobody cared. It mattered to nobody but me. That’s exactly why it felt so good.
I also tried bread-baking after watching a video that made it look effortless. My first loaf was dense as a doorstop. Hau tried a slice and said something diplomatic in Vietnamese that roughly translates to “maybe the next one.” I laughed, ate a slice out of stubbornness, and tried again. The second one was better. The third one she actually complimented — which, in our house, is the real benchmark.
When I was working, failing at something felt like a verdict on my competence. A bad presentation, a missed target — those things stuck to your sense of self. You carried them into the next meeting, the next quarter. Now? Failure is just… Tuesday. Try again. Adjust. Try differently. Nothing about it means anything about who I am.
That’s a freedom I didn’t know I’d been craving for forty years.
The thing about learning in retirement is that there’s nothing riding on it.
No grades. No performance reviews. No one watching. When I was younger, every new skill had a purpose. Learn Excel to get the promotion. Learn Mandarin for the posting. Learn the new ERP system because the old one was being decommissioned and you had no choice. Everything was instrumental. Everything served something else.
Learning astronomy serves nothing. I will never use it. Nobody will ever ask me to identify a constellation. There is no reward waiting at the end of this effort except the thing itself — the pleasure of standing under a sky I’ve lived under for twenty years and finally knowing what I’m looking at.
That’s not a small thing. In a life that was, for decades, measured entirely by outcomes and deliverables, doing something for no reason at all feels almost subversive.
I keep thinking about the moment most of us stop being beginners.
At some point in working life, we became the people who knew things. The ones consulted, not taught. Junior staff came to us with questions. Clients assumed expertise. Even in casual settings — dinner parties, family gatherings — we were the ones with answers. The discomfort of not knowing, which children handle every day without drama, became something to avoid at all costs.
My 72-year-old neighbour didn’t let herself avoid it. She spent a morning learning to make a little video for her grandchildren and got the delight of sending it to them and the bigger delight of their reply — a string of heart emojis and a voice note from a five-year-old saying “Ba Ngoai, you’re on YouTube!” which wasn’t technically accurate but was entirely wonderful.
All it cost her was the willingness to feel foolish for a little while first.
I’m trying to follow her lead. Some days I manage. Some days the old wariness wins. But the days I try something — even something small, even something I’ll never be good at — are almost always better than the days I don’t.
Hau caught me with the telescope last week. She didn’t say anything. Just smiled in that way she has — half affection, half amusement — and brought me a cup of tea. I think she understands something I’m only beginning to learn: that at this stage of life, the point isn’t mastery. The point is staying open.
I don’t want to be the person who stopped being curious. I don’t want to be the person who decided, somewhere in his fifties, that he was done learning. That’s not retirement. That’s a kind of early exit from your own life.
My neighbour was right. Curiosity is worth more than dignity. And the sky, it turns out, is absolutely full of things I’ve been missing.
There are five things I’ve learned that changed how I see retirement. I wrote them down — they’re yours.
Get the Free Guide — The 5 Keys to Retirement Happiness →What about you? Ever caught yourself deciding you were too old for something, and then did it anyway? I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Leave a comment below or write to me — I read every one.
Keep well and enjoy the journey,
Farook
Leave a Reply