Marlene Martin

Marlene Martin

Marlene Martin is a retired high school English teacher who spent 38 years in the classroom before discovering plant-based eating in her late sixties. When her daughter first introduced her to the idea of removing animal products from her diet, Marlene was skeptical. But curiosity won out over habit, and what started as a reluctant experiment became a genuine transformation in how she thinks about food, health, and aging.

At VegOut, Marlene writes about nutrition, wellness, and the experience of embracing new ways of eating later in life. She brings a teacher’s instinct for clarity and patience to topics that can feel overwhelming, especially for readers who are just beginning to explore plant-based living. Her writing is informed by personal experience, careful research, and a belief that it is never too late to change.

Marlene lives in Portland, Oregon, where she spends her mornings reading research papers, her afternoons tending a modest vegetable garden, and her evenings knitting while listening to audiobooks. She has three adult children and two grandchildren who keep her honest about staying current.

Lifestyle

I decided to stop calling my adult son first and discovered something I wish I hadn't — that I was the only one keeping us in contact, and he was comfortable letting that be true

Marlene Martin
Apr 4, 2026

Marlene Martin

Lifestyle

I decided to stop calling my adult son first and discovered something I wish I hadn't — that I was the only one keeping us in contact, and he was comfortable letting that be true

Psychology says the happiest people over 70 don’t actually ‘stay young’ – they’ve learned to stop measuring their worth against a version of themselves that no longer exists

I'm 70 and the most surprising thing about this chapter of my life is discovering how many things I quietly stopped wanting — and how many of them I'm taking back

Psychologists say there's a difference between being nice and being kind — nice makes you easy to be around, kind makes you worth knowing, and most people spend their entire social lives optimizing for the first one and wondering why they feel so unseen

I’m 70 and I woke up last Thursday and realized I couldn’t name a single thing I was looking forward to – not because nothing good was happening but because I’d trained myself to find meaning in being needed and nobody needs me anymore

I'm 70 and the lesson that took me the longest to learn is that the people who loved me most were often the ones I was least patient with — and by the time I understood that, some of them had stopped trying

Psychologists explain that when your partner asks for space after decades together, they're not rejecting the relationship — they're trying to salvage the parts of their identity that got absorbed into couplehood before those parts disappear completely

8 things your aging parents do every day that are silent cries for recognition (that most adult children completely miss until it's too late)

Adult children who wonder why their parents in their 60s suddenly seem distant rarely realize they're experiencing the natural consequence of only showing up when summoned

I'm 70 and I have stopped attending things I don't want to attend, stopped calling people I don't want to call, and stopped performing enthusiasm for things I stopped caring about years ago — and the social life that remains is smaller and more honest and the best one I have ever had

The reason some people become insufferable as they age while others become magnetic has nothing to do with wisdom — it's whether they learned to be interested or only learned to be interesting

I'm 70 and I just realized the most meaningful parts of my life weren't the promotions or vacations — they were the Tuesday mornings I made my daughter laugh so hard she snorted milk through her nose

I'm 70 and the kindness I remember most vividly from my entire life didn't come from family or close friends — it came from a stranger in a grocery store parking lot in 1993 who saw me crying and didn't walk away

I'm 70 and I feel like I don’t matter anymore — not because people are cruel, but because I've watched my entire identity as the capable one, the go-to person, the problem-solver slowly evaporate and nobody even noticed it was gone

I spent the first 5 years of retirement being a full-time babysitter and part-time bank for my grown kids - here’s what happened when I finally said enough

I stopped calling my adult children first to see how long it would take them to reach out – here’s what 11 weeks of silence taught me about modern families

I retired at 64 with a decent pension and good health and spent the first six months feeling like I had become invisible — not because people ignored me, but because I finally understood that my entire identity had been built on being useful to a system that replaced me in three weeks

There's a kind of love nobody warns you about — the kind where you watch your parent struggle with a jar lid and suddenly understand that the strongest person you've ever known has been quietly losing a war they'll never mention

The hardest part of turning 70 wasn’t my body slowing down – it was realizing that the people I sacrificed everything for had already built lives that didn’t include me in any meaningful way

I’m 70 and I finally understand that I’ve never actually been happy – I’ve been busy, useful, appreciated, and exhausted, but I genuinely can’t remember the last time I felt joy that didn’t come with an agenda attached to it

I’m 70, I spent 35 years at a job I tolerated, and I retired expecting to finally be happy – here’s what nobody tells you about the unhappiness that follows you into your older years

I’m 70 and I spent forty years believing retirement would feel like relief – instead it feels like I finally have permission to become the person I was too busy to be, and that freedom is terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure

I'm 44 and my father never once told me he loved me but he taught me to change a tire in the rain at 14 — and it took me over thirty years to understand that for his generation, teaching survival was the only love language they knew how to speak

I'm 70 and I finally stopped asking myself 'what's my purpose' and started asking 'what makes me forget to check the time' — and that one shift changed everything about how I spend my days

My mother was the strongest woman I ever knew — she held everything together, asked for nothing, and performed fine so convincingly that none of us thought to check whether she was until the day she couldn't anymore, and by then the surprise we felt said more about us than it did about her

I'm 70 and my family has started describing me as 'difficult' ever since I stopped hosting every holiday and stopped being available every time someone needs something — and it took me this long to realize they loved my function more than they valued my personhood

Psychology says the people who seem happiest after 60 often aren't the wealthiest — they simplified their lives so ruthlessly that they only kept what actually mattered to them

Psychology says the loneliest part of getting older isn’t being alone – it’s realizing that some ‘friendships’ don’t survive the moment you stop initiating

9 things women over 65 quietly stop doing — not because they gave up, but because they stopped performing for people who never noticed

I'm 70 and the most empowering realization I've had in retirement is that nobody is coming to give me permission to live the way I want — not my kids, not society, not some imaginary authority I've been waiting my whole life to approve of my choices

I raised two children who both live within forty-five minutes of me and I haven't seen either of them since Christmas — and what breaks my heart isn't that they're busy, it's that I'm no longer part of what makes them feel busy

I'm 70 and my daughter asked me at Christmas if I was doing okay — and I said of course, the way I always do, and drove home understanding that the ‘of course’ had become so automatic that I could no longer tell whether it was reassurance or whether I had simply stopped checking

I raised two great kids, worked fifty-hour weeks for thirty-two years, and retired at 64 debt-free — and the night I turned 65 I sat in my kitchen and realized I had no one to celebrate with because I'd spent my entire adult life performing strength instead of building connection

I worked 50-hour weeks for 35 years so my kids could have a better life - now they live in different cities and I eat dinner alone

I'm 70 and I still catch myself apologizing for having emotions — because the generation that raised me treated feelings like something you were supposed to outgrow by age ten

Nobody talks about the specific kind of silence that happens when your last child moves out — not the empty nest everyone warns you about, but walking past their bedroom door at 9 p.m. and there's no light underneath it anymore

I asked 20 adults their biggest regret about their parents — most common answer wasn't what their parents did, but what they never asked

I spent forty years trying to make everyone happy and the month I turned 61 I just stopped — not out of bitterness but because I finally understood that their happiness was never actually my responsibility

I’m 70 and my biggest regret isn’t something I did - it’s the 40 years I spent being reliable instead of being honest about what I actually needed

I raised three kids who call me on my birthday and Mother's Day and nothing in between — and I finally realized the problem isn't that they're busy, it's that I taught them our relationship was a checklist item, not a living thing

People who grew up in the 1960s aren't tougher because they're naturally stronger — it's because their childhood required constant problem-solving in an analog world where help wasn't instant and failure had real consequences

I'm 70 and I watched my grandson cry because his Wi-Fi went out for twenty minutes — and I realized the word 'resilience' doesn't mean the same thing anymore because nobody in his generation ever had to sit with actual discomfort long enough to build tolerance for it

Psychology says the loneliest period of life isn’t adolescence - it’s after 65, and these 8 reasons explain why

I stopped giving my daughter unsolicited advice three years ago and last month she called me just to talk for an hour - no crisis, no favor, just wanted to hear my voice

I have a loving family, a comfortable retirement, and absolutely no close friends — and the loneliest part isn't being alone, it's realizing that I never actually learned how to build friendships that weren't based on work proximity or raising kids together

People who were always the strong one in the family often become the loneliest person in the room after 65

I'm 70 and I've been rich and I've been broke and the thing I learned is this: class is about how you treat people when there's nothing to gain from treating them well

There's a version of loneliness that belongs to people who reach 70 and still show up for everyone else while nobody thinks to show up for them

A letter to the man who smiled at every family dinner for thirty years and told everyone he was fine and went to bed every night carrying something so heavy that it eventually just became part of his posture — I saw it and I didn't know how to ask and I'm sorry I never asked

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

Psychologists explain why people who refuse to watch the news aren't uninformed — they've developed a psychological boundary that protects them from the anxiety spiral of 24/7 crisis narratives designed to keep you perpetually activated

Research suggests the happiest people over 70 don’t actually ‘stay young’ – they’ve learned to stop measuring their worth against a version of themselves that no longer exists

People born between 1946 and 1965 share these 10 traits that most younger people never develop — not because they're superior, but because they were raised in a time when toughness wasn't optional, it was the baseline expectation for survival

I'm 70 and I realized I had been lonely for so long that I stopped recognizing it as loneliness — I just thought this quiet, untethered feeling was what life after retirement was supposed to feel like

I thought I was doing my kids a favor by never complaining about my marriage — but at 70 I realized I taught them that love means silently enduring someone who doesn't see you, and now I watch them repeat the same pattern in relationships where they've learned to make themselves smaller

The most exhausting part of modern life isn't being busy — it's these 8 invisible tasks that didn't exist 25 years ago but now consume hours every week without anyone acknowledging them as actual work

I'm 70 and I still remember the exact feeling of being twelve and realizing my family was lower-middle class pretending to be middle class — and that specific shame of being neither poor enough for sympathy nor comfortable enough to relax has followed me into retirement

I'm 70 and I grew up in a house where we had enough but never extra — and the thing nobody tells you about that life is that it trains you to see every good thing as temporary, so even now when I'm secure, I'm always braced for loss

Research suggests the reason you feel like you're forgetting more isn't cognitive decline — it's that the sheer volume of trivial information you're expected to retain daily has increased exponentially while your brain's capacity hasn't changed at all

I'm 70 and the hardest part of aging isn't my knees or my memory — it's that I finally have the wisdom to know what matters and absolutely no one under 50 wants to hear it

I’m 70 and my daughter asked me last week if I was happy and I said yes automatically – but the real answer is I don’t think I’ve been happy since my mid-forties and I’ve just gotten so good at performing contentment that I fooled myself too

I’m 70 and I’ve stopped trying to feel appreciated by my children because I’ve finally realized that they love me but don’t actually value what I have to offer

I retired with less money than financial advisors say you need and my kids worry about me constantly — but I wake up every morning without the weight of wanting more, and that freedom is worth more than any amount they think I'm missing

Research says people with no close friends aren't always lacking in social skill — they're lacking in social risk, and social risk is the only raw material that genuine friendship has ever actually been made from

I have a healthy pension, grandchildren who visit, and a garden I tend every morning — and some afternoons I sit in it and feel a loneliness so sourceless and so complete that I have stopped trying to explain it to anyone who hasn't felt it

Research suggests the boomers who report the highest life satisfaction aren't the ones who achieved the most - they're the ones who learned to stop performing achievement and started asking what enough actually looked like for them

7 phrases classy women use when someone disrespects them that shut it down without drama

I'm 70 and my mind is clearer than it was at 40 — here are 6 things I stopped doing that changed everything

I did everything I was supposed to do, retired at 64 with enough money and nowhere I actually wanted to go — and the morning I understood that was the morning I finally started paying attention to what the last third of my life was going to require of me

I'm 70 and I've made peace with the fact that my children love me and find me irrelevant in roughly equal measure — and the peace is real, most days, though it took longer to arrive than I expected

I'm 70 and the advice I'd give anyone approaching retirement isn't about saving more money or planning trips — it's figure out who you are when nobody's watching and nothing is required of you, because if you don't know that, retirement will feel like solitary confinement

The generation that communicated love through pot roast, through showing up, through fixing the dripping tap at midnight without being asked, is now being told their love language is outdated by people who express affection through text messages they take four hours to return

The generation now entering their 70s isn't aging faster because of biology — they're aging faster because they inherited a script that said 60 means decline and 70 means irrelevance

I started learning Italian at 66 with no travel plans and no Italian friends — and by month three I realized I wasn't learning a language, I was proving to myself that the best parts of my brain hadn't retired, even when my body did

I'm 70 and I've been awake every night between 2 and 4 a.m. for three years — and I finally realized the insomnia isn't about sleep, it's about the fact that I have nowhere I actually need to be anymore

I spent forty-three years sleeping next to my husband and then moved to the guest room at 66 — not because anything was wrong, but because I realized that waking up rested made me a kinder, more patient, more present partner than forcing myself to sleep poorly ever did

I'm 70 and the loneliest retirees I know aren't the ones without family — they're the ones who spent forty years building connection through usefulness and when the usefulness ended the connection ended with it and nobody told them those were the same thing

I'm 70 and my children think I watch too much television and what I've never told them is that the television isn't entertainment — it's the only voice in this house after 6pm and some nights the choice is between a stranger on a screen and a silence that has weight