Last month, I sat down with 50 people in their sixties at various community centers, coffee shops, and retirement gatherings.
I asked them a simple question: what do you miss most about being young? I expected to hear about metabolism and energy levels. Instead, their answers hit me in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
At 64 myself, I thought I understood the landscape of aging. But hearing these responses forced me to confront truths I’d been avoiding. Some answers came quickly, almost rehearsed. Others emerged slowly, after long pauses and distant stares.
The common thread? They weren’t really about youth at all. They were about choices, assumptions, and the weight of accumulated years.
What struck me most was the resignation in many voices. Not sadness exactly, but a kind of acceptance that certain doors had closed forever. As someone still figuring out who I am after retirement, still burning off professional restlessness with long walks, these conversations felt like looking into possible futures.
1) The ability to waste time without guilt
“I could spend an entire Saturday doing absolutely nothing productive and feel fine about it,” one woman told me. “Now every moment feels numbered.”
This response came up in various forms from nearly everyone I spoke with. When you’re young, time stretches endlessly ahead. You can afford to be inefficient, to take the long way, to spend three hours in a bookstore without buying anything.
Now, with the arithmetic of remaining years impossible to ignore, every choice carries weight.
The cruel irony? Many of us have more free time in retirement than we ever had while working, yet we feel less permission to squander it. We’ve internalized decades of productivity messaging. We measure our days by accomplishment rather than experience. Even leisure feels like it needs justification.
I notice this in myself during my walks. I tell people I walk for health, for thinking time, for staying sharp. All true. But sometimes I just walk because I need to move, need to burn off that restlessness from no longer being professionally needed. The young don’t need reasons. They just are.
2) Making friends without trying
Remember when friendships just happened? You sat next to someone in class, worked on a project together, ended up at the same party, and suddenly you had a friend. No scheduling, no effort, no conscious decision to “maintain the relationship.”
After 60, every friendship requires intentionality. You have to work at it, schedule it, make it happen. The infrastructure that threw people together – school, early career, young parenthood – has dissolved. One man described it perfectly: “I have to convince myself to call people now. It feels like work.”
The ease of young friendship wasn’t just about opportunity. It was about openness.
We showed up as ourselves without decades of disappointments and betrayals creating armor. We didn’t yet know all the ways friendships could fail, so we didn’t protect ourselves from them.
3) The belief that fundamental change was possible
“I used to think I could become a completely different person if I wanted to,” a retired teacher explained. “Move to Paris, learn to paint, transform into someone unrecognizable. Now I know I’m pretty much who I’m going to be.”
This wasn’t expressed as tragedy but as fact. By 60, you’ve gathered enough evidence about yourself. You know your patterns, your limitations, your likely responses. The fantasy of dramatic reinvention dims against the reality of accumulated habits and preferences.
The young believe in transformation because they haven’t yet tested its limits. They haven’t discovered how stubbornly personality persists, how patterns reassert themselves, how the person you are at 25 is recognizably the same at 65, just with more data points.
In retirement, I’ve faced how much of my identity was tied to being useful and competent. I thought leaving work would fundamentally change me. Instead, I’m the same person, just applying those traits to different targets. My notebook of observations about what people say versus what they do includes plenty of entries about myself.
4) Physical unconsciousness
“I miss not thinking about my body,” one particularly articulate man said. “It just worked. I didn’t plan around energy levels or wonder if my knee would cooperate.”
Young bodies are like well-functioning computers, you only notice them when something goes wrong. After 60, the body becomes a constant negotiation. Will I have energy for both the morning meeting and afternoon gardening? Should I save my back for tomorrow’s golf? Every physical action requires calculation.
The young move through space without consideration. They sit on floors, jump fences, run for buses without weighing consequences. Their bodies are transparent, a means rather than a consideration. We’ve lost that unconscious trust in our physical selves.
Our bodies have become entities we manage rather than inhabit.
5) Unknown potential
A retired executive summed this up brilliantly: “At 30, I might still become anything. At 65, I know exactly what I became.”
The young live in a cloud of possibilities. They might write the great novel, start the revolutionary company, discover their true calling at 40. That uncertainty contains infinite potential. By our sixties, the die is cast. We know which dreams materialized and which remained dreams.
This isn’t about achievement or failure. It’s about the collapse of quantum possibilities into single realities. The executive who shared this had been successful by any measure. But success doesn’t replace the intoxicating uncertainty of unmade choices.
6) Intensity of experience
“Everything felt more,” was how one woman put it. “First love, first loss, first achievement – they burned brighter.”
The young experience life without the filter of repetition. Every sensation arrives fresh, unprecedented, worthy of complete attention.
By 60, you’ve been through most things multiple times. Experience brings wisdom but dims intensity. You know you’ll survive heartbreak because you have. You know success is temporary because it always was.
I sometimes miss that old intensity myself. The consuming focus of crucial negotiations, the adrenaline of high-stakes decisions. My walks help dissipate the restlessness, but they don’t replicate that feeling of everything mattering intensely, immediately.
7) The luxury of thinking death was theoretical
Nobody said this directly, but it underlay many responses. The young know about death intellectually. We know it personally. We’ve buried parents, friends, sometimes children. We’ve watched death arrive in various costumes – sudden, slow, expected, shocking.
This knowledge changes everything. It adds weight to decisions, urgency to relationships, poignancy to ordinary moments. The young can afford to be careless with time because death remains abstract. We can’t unsee what we’ve seen.
Closing thoughts
These conversations revealed something I hadn’t expected: we don’t really miss youth itself. We miss the worldview it allowed. The casual relationship with time, the assumption of endless possibility, the luxury of unconsciousness about our own limitations.
But here’s what I’ve learned from both conducting these interviews and living through my own sixties: mourning these losses too much blinds us to what we’ve gained. The intensity might be dimmer, but the understanding is deeper.
The possibilities have narrowed, but the choices are clearer. We can’t waste time without guilt, but we can choose our priorities without apology.
The hardest truth from these conversations? The things we miss most about youth are precisely what made us young. Taking them for granted was the point. You can’t simultaneously have the wisdom to appreciate them and the innocence to possess them. That’s the trade we all make, whether we realize it or not.
