There is a particular kind of peace that appears in the lives of some adults somewhere in their sixties and seventies, and that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly precise language to. The peace is visible, in most cases, as a small structural change in how the older person conducts conversation. They explain themselves less. They argue less. They allow misunderstandings to stand rather than producing the additional rounds of clarification the misunderstandings would, in earlier decades, have provoked. They are, in some real way, no longer trying to be understood by the wider environment in the way they used to be.
The cultural framing of this configuration tends to interpret it in one of two unhelpful directions. The first interpretation is that the older person has given up. They have stopped trying because the trying has, by long fatigue, become more effort than they can sustain. The second interpretation is the opposite. The older person has arrived at a kind of serene acceptance, in which the need to be understood has been transcended by a deeper spiritual maturity that the rest of us should aspire to.
Neither interpretation, on close examination, captures what is actually happening. The peace is neither resignation nor transcendence. The peace is, more accurately, the structural truth of someone who has, by long observation, finally arrived at an honest assessment of which of her conversational efforts were actually producing results and which were not, and who has, accordingly, reallocated her remaining energy to the ones that were.
What the reallocation actually involves
It is worth being precise about what the reallocation consists of, because the cultural register has tended to flatten it into something both less specific and less interesting than it actually is.
The older person, across the previous four or five decades, has been involved in countless conversational efforts at being understood. Some of these efforts produced results. The other person, after the explanation, understood. The relationship deepened. The misunderstanding was resolved. The effort paid out.
The other efforts did not. The other person, despite the explanation, did not understand. Or understood the words but missed the substance. Or appeared to understand at the time and then, six months later, demonstrated by their behavior that nothing had actually landed. The older person, having paid the cost of the explanation, did not receive the substantive return the cost was supposed to buy. The effort was, in the accounting of her life, an expenditure that produced nothing.
Across forty or fifty years of these expenditures, the data accumulates. The older person, by her sixties or seventies, has a fairly precise sense of which people in her life have, by long demonstration, established themselves as capable of receiving the substantive part of what she is saying, and which have not. The set of the first kind is usually small. The set of the second kind is, in most cases, the wider environment.
The peace this article is describing is what happens when the older person stops, on the basis of the accumulated data, expending energy on the second set. She no longer explains herself to them. She no longer argues. She no longer attempts to correct the small ongoing misreadings that the second set continues to produce. The energy that previously went into these efforts is, by structural redirection, now available for other uses. The other uses tend to be the small daily activities that, by her honest accounting, actually return something to her. The walk. The conversation with the one friend who has always understood. The book. The grandchild who has, by some accident of temperament, become a substantive interlocutor.
What the research says about this
This is, on close examination, consistent with what the wider psychological literature has documented under the framework of socioemotional selectivity. Carstensen and her colleagues have proposed that as people age and perceive their remaining time as more limited, they become more selective about how they spend their emotional and conversational resources. The selectivity is not, on the available evidence, a function of declining capacity. It is, more accurately, a function of changed time horizons. The older person, aware that her remaining decades are fewer than her previous decades, has been compelled to make explicit allocational choices that her younger self could afford to leave implicit.
The choices, in most cases, favor the substantive over the maintenance, the deep over the broad, the people who have actually been listening over the people who have not. The choices produce, in the older person’s emotional life, what the research consistently describes as improved emotional functioning relative to younger adults. The improvement is not, in any obvious sense, a function of the older person becoming a different person. The improvement is, more accurately, the structural consequence of having stopped spending energy in places where the spending was not producing returns.
What is particularly relevant to the configuration this article is describing is the research on what is sometimes called antecedent emotion regulation. The same body of work has found that older adults appear to manage their emotional lives less by reacting to difficult situations after they have arisen and more by structurally avoiding the kinds of situations that would have produced the difficult emotions in the first place. The avoidance is not, in this framing, cowardice. The avoidance is, more accurately, the rational response of a system that has accumulated enough evidence about which situations are productive and which are not, and that has decided to allocate its remaining energy accordingly.
The conversation with the relative who has, across decades, demonstrated an inability to actually receive what the older person is trying to say, is one of those situations. The older person, in her sixties or seventies, has stopped having the conversation. The not-having is the antecedent regulation. The not-having is what produces, in the older person’s daily emotional landscape, the calm that the wider register notices as peace.
Why this is not, in itself, sad
The wider cultural register, when it notices this kind of peace, sometimes interprets it as sad. The interpretation usually runs that the older person has, in some real way, accepted a diminished version of her social life. She has fewer conversations than she used to have. She explains herself to fewer people. She is, in some sense, smaller in the world than she was when she was forty.
The interpretation misses, on close examination, what the older person has actually done. She has not become smaller. She has, more accurately, withdrawn from the parts of the wider environment that were not, on her honest accounting, supporting the life she was actually trying to live. The withdrawn parts were not, in her experience, providing what the cultural register assumed they were providing. The withdrawn parts were, in some real way, costing more than they returned. The withdrawal is, accordingly, the structural removal of cost rather than the loss of benefit.
What she has kept, in her remaining conversational life, is the substantive part. The small set of people who actually listen. The activities that actually nourish her. The interior life she has been developing for seventy or seventy-five years, which has accumulated, by this stage, into something considerably more substantive than the wider environment has the capacity to engage with anyway. The interior life is, in some real way, where she now lives. The wider environment is where she occasionally appears, on her own terms, for the limited purposes she has decided are still worth her time.
This is not a sad configuration. The configuration is, more accurately, what the wider research literature suggests is one of the more reliable predictors of late-life flourishing. The older person who has done this work tends, on the available evidence, to report higher life satisfaction than the younger person who has not yet figured out which of their conversational efforts are paying out and which are not. The flourishing is real. The cultural register has, in some real way, miscategorized it as resignation because the cultural register does not yet have particularly good vocabulary for the structural shape of the actual state.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The peace that arrives in some women’s sixties and seventies is not the peace of having given up. It is, more accurately, the structural truth of having stopped expending energy on conversations that were not, by her long observation, ever going to give her what she was asking for. The audiences that were not listening are still not listening. The older person has, by now, accepted this as the structural fact it is, and has redirected her remaining energy accordingly. The redirection produces the visible calm that the wider environment registers as peace.
The wider environment is sometimes mildly affronted by the redirection. The affront is itself the data. The audiences who notice that the older person has stopped explaining herself to them are, in some real way, registering that they have been moved out of the substantive set. The registering is uncomfortable. The discomfort produces, in some cases, the cultural framing of the older person’s calm as withdrawal or coldness. The framing is the wider environment’s reading of its own demotion. The framing is not, on close examination, an accurate description of what the older person has actually done.
What she has done is, more modestly, allocated her remaining time to the people and activities that have demonstrated, by long evidence, that they were worth the allocation. The allocation is the peace. The peace is real. The peace is, in some real way, the dividend on forty years of conversational effort finally being claimed by the person who paid the cost of accumulating it. The dividend was, all along, available to be claimed. The claiming is what the older person has, finally, done. The not-having-done-it-earlier was, in some real way, the cost of not yet knowing which of her efforts were going to be the productive ones. By her sixties or seventies, she knows. The knowing is the peace. The peace is the structural truth. The truth is not sad.
