I'm 70 and the thing I learned too late isn't that I should have traveled more or worked less - it's that I spent forty years waiting for permission to want things and nobody was ever going to give it to me

I turned seventy last month. My kids threw a party. There were balloons and a cake and a toast where my son said something generous about me being a man who always put his family first, and I smiled and thanked him, and later that night when everyone had gone home I sat in my kitchen and thought: that's exactly the problem.

I did put my family first. I put my job first. I put the mortgage and the retirement fund and the school fees and the expectations of people I respected first. And somewhere inside all of that putting-first, I lost track of a question that I now believe is the most important question a person can ask themselves: what do I actually want?

Not what should I want. Not what's reasonable to want. Not what a good man, a responsible father, a reliable husband is supposed to want. What do I, specifically, in the privacy of my own mind, want for my life?

I spent forty years not asking that question. And the reason I didn't ask it wasn't that I was too busy. It was that I was waiting for someone to tell me it was okay to ask it in the first place.

Where the Waiting Comes From

There's a concept in self-determination theory called introjected regulation. It describes a type of motivation where you do things not because you genuinely value them, but because you've internalized external expectations so deeply that they feel like your own desires. You perform because of shame, guilt, or the need for approval, and because the internal pressure is so seamless, you don't recognize it as pressure. You think it's just who you are. You think wanting something different would be selfish, impractical, or ungrateful.

I lived in introjected regulation for the better part of four decades. I took the safe job because that's what responsible men did. I stayed in it because people depended on me. I shelved every interest that didn't directly serve the family or the career, and I told myself I was being mature, that there would be time later, that wanting things for myself was a luxury I could afford once the real obligations were met. But the obligations never ended. They just changed shape. The school fees became the university fees, which became the wedding costs, which became the question of whether we had enough saved for retirement. There was always a reason to defer. Always a more responsible use of whatever time and energy I had.

And all the while, the part of me that actually wanted things got quieter and quieter until I couldn't hear it anymore.

What Nobody Tells You About the Long Run

Psychologist Thomas Gilovich has spent decades studying what people regret. His research, spanning telephone surveys, written questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews across multiple populations, found something consistent: in the short term, people regret things they did. In the long term, they regret things they didn't do. When people look back on their lives, it is the failures to act that generate the greatest and most lasting regret.

In one study, 74 percent of the regrets listed by the oldest participants, professors emeriti and nursing home residents in their seventies and eighties, involved things they had not done. Not the mistakes they'd made. Not the risks that went wrong. The paths not taken. The interests not pursued. The versions of themselves they never gave permission to exist.

I read that and felt it in my chest. Because my regret isn't about a specific missed opportunity. It's not that I should have started a business or moved abroad or learned to paint. My regret is more structural than that. It's that I spent forty years with the wanting switch turned off, and by the time I noticed, I'd lost the habit of knowing what I wanted at all.

The Permission Nobody Gives You

Here's what I've come to understand at seventy, and what I wish someone had told me at thirty: nobody is ever going to give you permission to want things for yourself. Not your parents, not your spouse, not your employer, not your culture. The world is perfectly happy to accept your compliance. It will take every hour you offer and never once say, "That's enough, now go do something that matters to you." The permission has to come from you, and for people like me, raised to believe that selflessness is the highest virtue and personal desire is something to be managed rather than honored, giving yourself that permission feels like breaking a contract you signed before you were old enough to read the fine print.

Research on self-determination and well-being consistently shows that autonomy, the sense of being the author of your own choices, isn't a luxury. It's a fundamental psychological need. When it's chronically unsatisfied, people don't just feel unfulfilled. They experience diminished well-being, reduced engagement, and increased burnout, regardless of how stable or successful their external circumstances appear. You can have a good job, a loving family, a comfortable home, and still feel hollow if the life you're living was assembled entirely from other people's expectations.

That hollowness was my companion for decades. I wouldn't have called it that at the time. I would have called it being responsible. Being a provider. Being steady. And those things were real, and they mattered. But they weren't the whole of me, and the parts they left out didn't disappear. They just went underground.

What I'd Say to the Younger Version of Myself

I wouldn't tell him to work less. I wouldn't tell him to travel more. Those are the regrets people expect you to have at seventy, and they're fine, but they're surface-level. What I'd tell him is this: wanting things for yourself isn't selfish. It's necessary. And the belief that you need someone's permission before you can take your own desires seriously is the most expensive lie you'll ever accept, because it compounds over decades. Every year you defer, the muscle that knows what you want atrophies a little more, until the day you finally have the time and the freedom and you realize you've forgotten how to use them.

I'd tell him that putting everyone else first sounds noble, but when you do it for forty years without interruption, what you're actually doing is building precisely the kind of life you'll regret in the long run: a life of inaction on the things that mattered most to you, dressed up as sacrifice.

I'd tell him that at seventy, nobody remembers whether you were always available. They remember whether you were alive. Whether you had something in your eyes when you talked about your days. Whether you seemed like a person who was doing something he'd chosen, or a person who was enduring something he'd agreed to.

I'd tell him to stop waiting. The permission isn't coming. It was never coming. The only person who can authorize your life is you, and every year you wait is a year you don't get back.

I know that now. I wish I'd known it sooner. But the most useful thing about being seventy isn't wisdom. It's clarity. And what's clear to me now, with a clarity that would have terrified me at thirty, is that the thing I learned too late isn't about where I should have gone or what I should have done. It's that I spent forty years standing in front of a door that was never locked, waiting for someone to open it for me.