I live in Saigon, and there’s something I’ve noticed here that took me years to put into words.

There are men and women in this city in their late sixties, even their seventies, who somehow look closer to fifty. They walk with intention. They dress with care. They’re curious about everything and everyone. You’d guess their age wrong by a decade, easily.

And then I’ll travel back home, or hop on a video call with someone from the West who’s a similar age, and I’ll think, “Wait, how did you accelerate yourself into old age?”

What I’ve come to realize, after years of writing about psychology and behavior on Hack Spirit, is that the people who look young in their sixties aren’t doing anything magical. They’ve just quietly stopped doing the things that age everyone else. The trick isn’t addition. It’s subtraction.

And the things they’ve dropped are precisely the things most people refuse to give up.

Here are eight of them.

1. They stopped complaining about their body

This is the big one.

Somewhere around their fifties, most people develop a running commentary on their physical decline. The bad knee. The dodgy back. The shoulder that “isn’t what it used to be.” Every conversation becomes a status update on their joints.

The people who look ten years younger have something in common. They have most of these aches too. They just stopped narrating them. They mention pain to their doctor and their partner, and that’s it. They don’t perform their decline at every dinner party.

Once you start listing your physical complaints, your whole identity starts to organize around being unwell. People treat you accordingly. And you start to look the part.

2. They stopped saying “back in my day”

Nothing ages a person faster than constant nostalgia.

“In my time, kids respected their elders.” “Music was better in the eighties.” “We didn’t have all this technology, and we were fine.”

This is a verbal tic that signals one thing very clearly. The speaker thinks their best years are behind them. They’re a historian of their own life, no longer an active participant in the present one.

The ageless people I know talk about now. They have favorite new songs. They have opinions on current films. They’re irritated by recent politics, not politics from forty years ago. Their attention is forward, not backward.

3. They stopped dressing in defeat

There’s a particular kind of clothing that says “I’ve given up.” Shapeless. Beige. Comfortable in the way a hospital is comfortable. Bought because it was practical, not because it was chosen.

You can spot it across a room.

The people who look young haven’t necessarily become fashionable. They’ve just kept making choices. A scarf they like. A jacket that fits properly. Shoes that aren’t orthopedic by default. They take five minutes in the mirror before leaving the house, the same way they did at thirty.

That small act of self regard reads as vitality. The absence of it reads as surrender.

4. They stopped resisting technology

“I’m just not good with computers.” “I don’t do that internet stuff.” “My grandkids have to set it up for me.”

Every time someone over sixty says this, they add visible years to themselves.

The people who look young don’t resist tech. They might not love it, but they engage with it. They send messages. They use the apps. They learn what the new thing is, even if they decide they don’t like it. The point isn’t enthusiasm. The point is willingness.

The moment you draw a line and say “this is where I stop learning,” you’ve started ageing rapidly. And everyone around you can feel it.

5. They stopped slumping

Walk through any park and you can identify the ages of the people there without seeing their faces. You can do it from posture alone.

Sixty year olds who look fifty stand up. Their chests are open. They walk with their head over their shoulders, not in front of them. They don’t shuffle. They take normal length steps.

This is partly fitness. But mostly it’s habit. Most people stop noticing their posture in their forties, and by sixty it’s collapsed into something that screams “old” before they’ve said a word.

This is something I work on every time I run along the Saigon River. How am I carrying myself? Am I letting my shoulders cave in? It’s a small daily practice that pays compound interest.

6. They stopped talking down to younger people

This one is more subtle, but visible the moment you spot it.

Some older people address anyone under forty as if they’re a slightly dim child. The tone. The over explaining. The faint condescension. It signals that they’ve decided everyone younger than them has nothing to teach them, and they’ve shut down accordingly.

The young looking ones treat younger people as equals. They ask them questions. They listen to the answers. They learn things from them and admit it openly. They aren’t trying to be cool. They’re just genuinely interested in what people unlike themselves are thinking about.

That posture of curiosity is, on its own, a fountain of youth.

7. They stopped holding grudges

Grudges are heavy. You can see the weight of them on a person’s face.

The brother who didn’t show up at the wedding twenty years ago. The business partner who screwed them in 1998. The mother in law who said something at Christmas in 2003. Some people are still carrying these around, fully loaded, decades later.

The people who look younger have, by necessity or wisdom, put most of those down. Not in a saintly forgive everyone way. They’ve just decided that staying angry at someone who isn’t even thinking about them is a bad trade.

This is something I’ve come to understand through Buddhist practice. Resentment ages you in a way that’s visible on the body, not just the mind. Letting go of it is one of the most practical anti aging tools available to a human being.

8. They stopped saying “I’m too old for that”

This is the line that ends a life.

I’m too old to start a new hobby. I’m too old to learn the language. I’m too old to travel there. I’m too old to date again. I’m too old to change careers. I’m too old to try.

The people I admire in their sixties and seventies have effectively banned this phrase from their vocabulary. They start things. They travel. They take classes. They date. They are sometimes embarrassed by being a beginner, and they do it anyway.

The phrase “I’m too old” is almost never about age. It’s about fear, wrapped in age as a respectable excuse.

Final thoughts

None of this is about denying that the body changes. It does. Joints wear down. Skin loosens. Energy isn’t what it was at twenty five. That’s biology, and you can’t think your way out of it.

But the gap between two sixty year olds, one who reads as fifty and one who reads as seventy, is almost never explained by biology. It’s explained by behavior. By what they’ve stopped doing.

Looking younger isn’t really about looking younger. It’s about staying engaged with your own life. Everything else is a side effect.