The peace I feel at 65 isn't about having everything figured out, it's about finally being okay with not knowing and not needing to

David came into the vegan snack event I was covering looking like he absolutely did not want to be there, which meant I immediately wanted to talk to him. He was 65, well-dressed in that effortless way that suggests a lifetime of knowing who you are, standing near the fermented cashew cheese table with the expression of someone observing anthropological data. I introduced myself, made a joke about fermented cashews, and he laughed in a way that suggested we could probably have an interesting conversation.

We did. Over the course of an hour, I learned that David had spent the last decade in a particular kind of crisis that doesn’t usually get named as such: the crisis of finally being at peace with not knowing. Specifically, not knowing if he’d done everything right.

“I’m 65,” he said to me, mostly out of context, which made me understand that he’d been sitting with this thought for a while. “And I spent most of my life thinking that at this point, I’d have everything figured out. That I’d look back and understand it all—the choices, the mistakes, the reasons. That it would add up to something coherent.”

David had been a lawyer, a good one, successful in the traditional metrics. He’d built a firm, made partner, made money. He’d also divorced twice, had kids he loved but wasn’t sure he’d parented right, had spent a lot of his early 60s in therapy trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong or right, which direction the calculus even went.

“The thing that changed,” he told me, moving toward the nuts and seeds display like it was just background activity to thinking, “was when I gave up the idea that I was supposed to understand it. All of it. That if I were intelligent enough, or reflective enough, or had done enough therapy, I’d eventually reach a point where my life made sense as a narrative.”

The peace he’d found wasn’t the peace of having figured things out. It was the peace of being okay with permanent unknowability. His kids turned out fine—or they turned out how they turned out—and he’d never fully know if that was because of something he did or despite it or independent of it entirely. His marriages ended. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he should have done differently or if he should have at all.

“Most of my life, I interpreted that as failure,” David said. “Like I should have been more intentional, more consistent, more somebody. But at 65, I realized: maybe that’s just being alive. Maybe you don’t get the narrative coherence. Maybe it’s just choices and consequences and beauty and mistakes layered on top of each other, and trying to make it into a story you can tell yourself is just... another project.”

I asked him what had shifted, practically speaking. How does that philosophy change your daily life? And he laughed because it was a very writer question, very eager for the concrete detail.

“I stopped reading self-help books,” he said first. “I was reading like three at a time, trying to optimize. Trying to figure out the right way to age, the right way to eat, the right way to forgive myself. And at some point I realized I was just adding another layer of ‘should’ on top of a lifetime of shoulds. So I stopped.”

Research on meaning-making and life satisfaction in older adults shows that accepting uncertainty and relinquishing the need for comprehensive understanding actually increases wellbeing—which resonated with what David was describing. He wasn’t resigned. He was relieved.

He ate less strategically now, he mentioned. Not less, but with less calculation. He was no longer optimizing for longevity or appearance or any particular outcome. He ate foods he enjoyed and foods that made him feel good, and he’d let those two categories sometimes conflict, and that was fine.

“The peace I feel at 65,” he said, and I remember writing this down because he said it clearly, like he’d been waiting for someone to ask, “isn’t about having everything figured out. It’s about finally being okay with not knowing and not needing to. It’s about accepting that my life is not going to be a coherent story. It’s going to be moments and contradictions and some things that worked out and some things that didn’t, and I won’t be able to trace exactly why, and that’s actually fine.”

I asked him if that felt passive, like giving up. He thought about it seriously. “No,” he said finally. “It feels like finally being able to move without carrying around a constant internal auditor. I can make choices now without needing to justify them to some future version of myself who never actually materializes to judge anyway.”

For more on aging and acceptance, we’ve written about this in our lifestyle section. And this research on wisdom and uncertainty in later life offers interesting frameworks for understanding how peace can come from accepting rather than resolving.

Before he left the event (he was just there because his daughter dragged him, he explained), David mentioned something else. “I notice I’m more curious now,” he said. “About people, about food, about things I would have evaluated before through the lens of whether they fit my narrative. Now I can just be interested. It’s like I finally have attention available for things other than self-judgment.”

I’ve thought about David a lot since that conversation, especially when I notice myself spinning into interpretations about my own life, trying to make it cohere. There’s an age I’m heading toward where maybe I too will get tired of the project of creating coherence and will discover that peace is on the other side of acceptance. David seems to have found it. And the interesting thing is: he doesn’t look peaceful in a serene, resolved way. He just looks free.