A father turned seventy last month. He is, by any honest measure one could apply, one of the happiest men in the lives of those who know him.
It's worth being precise about what that means, because the word "happy" gets used loosely and it would be misleading to suggest he is, in some shallow sense, cheerful all the time. He is not cheerful all the time. He has bad days. He has small ongoing health concerns. He misses people who have died. He worries, in the quiet way men of his generation worry, about money and about the future and about the various uncertainties of being seventy in a world that has changed considerably since he was thirty.
What he has, underneath all of this, is something harder to name but easier to recognize when you're in a room with him. He has a particular kind of low-grade contentment that does not seem to depend on the day's events. He sleeps well. He laughs at small things. He is interested in the small details of his afternoon. He does not, as far as anyone can tell, spend much time wanting anything he does not have.
For a long time, his son — now thirty-eight — assumed this contentment was about what the father had. The marriage. The house. The pension. The children. The standard cultural framing suggested that happiness in late life was a function of accumulated assets, both material and relational, and this man, looking around at his life, seemed to be reasonably well-stocked on these. The happiness appeared attributable to the inventory.
But the older the son gets, the more clearly he sees that the inventory is not, on close examination, what is producing the contentment. The contentment is, much more accurately, a function of a long list of things the father stopped needing somewhere in his fifties. The happiness is, in some real way, subtractive rather than additive. He is not happy because of what he has accumulated. He is happy because of what he has, over the years, put down.
The list, as it can be reconstructed
His son has been paying attention to this for the last few years, partly out of a desire to understand what happened, and partly because at thirty-eight, there is, somewhere ahead, the chance to do something similar or not.
The list, as it has been reconstructed, includes the following.
He stopped, somewhere in his fifties, needing other people to think of him in any particular way. This is the first and largest item on the list. For most of his earlier life, those close to him watched him calibrate his behavior, in small ways, around the imagined assessments of various audiences. Colleagues. Neighbors. Extended family. His own father, who lived until this man was sixty-two. By his late fifties, the calibration had quietly stopped. He was no longer performing for an imagined gallery. He was no longer adjusting his tone to be more impressive, or his behavior to be more acceptable, or his preferences to be more presentable. He had, in some real way, accepted that the gallery's assessment was not, in the end, going to matter to him, and the acceptance had freed up an enormous amount of energy that had previously been going into the performance.
He stopped needing certain conversations to go in a particular way. He had, for most of his adult life, been a man who would push, in conversation, to make sure his point landed. By his sixties, he had stopped doing this. He would say what he thought. The other person would respond. If the response indicated that his point had not landed, he would, generally, let it lie. He did not seem to require the other person's agreement in order to feel that the conversation had been worth having. The conversation could be worth having simply because the two of them had been in a room together. The not-needing-the-other-person-to-agree was, on reflection, one of the larger sources of his late-life calm.
He stopped needing the future to look like anything specific. For most of his working life, he had been a man with plans. The plans were not grandiose. They were the standard middle-class plans of his generation. The house paid off. The retirement. The trips. By his late fifties, the plans had mostly been executed or quietly retired. What he did not do, after they were done, was generate a new set of plans to replace them. He let the future, for the first time in his adult life, become something he was not actively engineering. The future, accordingly, became less of a source of low-grade anxiety. It was no longer a project. It was, more modestly, just whatever was going to happen.
He stopped needing the children to be a particular way. His son acknowledges that the cessation was not, in any obvious sense, a verdict on him. The father had, for most of his son's childhood and young adulthood, had a particular vision of what kind of man his son would become. By the time the son was about thirty-five, the vision had quietly been retired. The father had accepted that his son was the man he was. The man he was was different, in various ways, from the man who had been imagined. The father had stopped, somewhere along the way, requiring his child to be the imagined one. The acceptance produced, between them, a relationship that was lighter and more honest than the relationship they had had when the vision was still active. It also produced, in the father, a small ongoing relief that he no longer needed to monitor whether his son was tracking against the imagined trajectory.
He stopped needing to be right about things he had been wrong about. This is, by observation, one of the rarer items on the list, and one that distinguishes this man from a number of his peers. He had, in his fifties, simply allowed himself to update his views on a number of subjects without making a project of the updating. He did not announce the updates. He did not apologize for the previous positions. He just, over time, started talking about various subjects from a different vantage point, and the new vantage point became, by quiet accumulation, his current one. The not-needing-to-defend-the-previous-positions freed up energy that other
