You bend down to pick up your granddaughter's sock.
Your knee clicks on the way back up.
And out it comes, with a little laugh.
"Well. I'm getting old."
Everyone laughs with you. It's the easiest line in the room.
Here's the thing.
Most of us say some version of it a dozen times a week.
At the salon.
In the birthday card aisle.
At lunch, when the menu print looks smaller than it used to.
"I'm too old for that."
"At my age, why bother?"
"That ship has sailed."
Said calmly. Like a fact.
What your words are doing
In The Power of Beliefs, Shawn Achor lists the twelve most common negative mantras.
These are the things we say over and over until our brain starts treating them as true.
Number four on his list is "I'm getting old."
His line on it stopped me.
"Where our words go, so go our brains."
He points to a 2024 study in The Journals of Gerontology. When older adults ran into negative ideas about age, they pulled back from their exercise goals and from their relationships.
They grew more timid in their steps, and took fewer of them.
Fewer steps.
That's the part I can't stop picturing.
The number I never chose
For years, I had a number.
75.
I never sat down and picked it. It just quietly became the age I planned around. How far ahead I let myself dream. What felt worth starting.
I'm 69 now. If I'd kept that number, I'd be planning for six more years.
Then I sat in a workshop that asked me one question about that number.
Says who?
I walked out with a new one. 108.
Same body. Same knee. A completely different list of what's worth starting.
Every time we say "I'm getting old," we're quietly setting a date. One we never chose.
Behind the paywall, I'll walk you through exactly how to hear yourself setting it, and how to move it:
The three-step Says Who sort for your own "at this age" sentence
How to tell a fact from a forecast in about a minute
The second half of the sentence that changes what your feet do next
Three journal prompts I use with my private clients
