The Questions Nobody Asks You After Sixty

People stop asking you things after a certain age.

Not practical things. You still get "Do you want a cup of tea?" and "Have you seen the car keys?" and the occasional "Are you alright?" from someone who doesn't really want the honest answer.

But the real questions — the ones that made you think, made you defend a position, made you discover what you actually believed — those dry up somewhere around retirement.

Nobody asks what you're working on anymore. Or what you think about the situation in wherever. Or what you'd do differently if you could go back.

The assumption, I think, is that you've already answered everything worth answering. That your views are fixed, your stories told, your conclusions drawn.

Which is nonsense, of course. I have more questions now than I did at forty. I just have fewer people interested in hearing them.

So I started writing them down.

Not answers. Questions. The kind I'd want someone to ask me if they were genuinely curious rather than politely passing time.

What do you know now that you wish you'd known at thirty? Everyone asks that one. It's on every retirement card and daytime television interview. The answer is always something safely wise about patience or presence.

Here's a better one: What did you believe at thirty that turned out to be completely wrong — and how long did it take you to admit it?

Or this: What did you almost become?

That one keeps me up some nights. The lives that didn't happen. The versions of me that took the other door, moved to the other city, said yes instead of no. I don't regret my choices, mostly. But I think about the ghosts of those other paths more often than I expected to.

Who do you owe an apology you're never going to give?

That's not a comfortable prompt. Neither is: What are you still angry about — and is the anger protecting you from something harder to feel?

A gratitude journal would never ask these. Gratitude journals want you to list three good things and feel mildly improved by breakfast.

I'm not interested in feeling mildly improved. I'm interested in understanding what happened. Who I was. Who I became. What any of it meant.

The American self-help industry wants you to journal your way to optimisation. More productivity. Better mornings. A shinier future self.

I don't need a shinier future self. I need to sit with the self I already have and ask it some honest questions before the window closes.

So I write. Not every day. But often enough.

Not because I have answers.

Because the questions are the only things keeping me awake in the right way.