Editor’s note: This article was reviewed and updated in June 2026 to meet The Vessel’s latest editorial standards.
I once heard a story about an elderly woman at a family gathering. She didn’t speak much to the people around her — not out of hostility, but out of something quieter. She was calm. Not performatively calm, not “I’ve meditated my way to enlightenment” calm. Just settled. Like a person who’d stopped arguing with the world about who she was.
When someone asked her family about it — had she forgiven everyone who’d ever hurt her? — the answer came with a laugh: “No. She just stopped caring whether they understood her.” That idea stuck with me for a long time, because it contradicted almost everything I’d absorbed about what it means to age well.
The forgiveness myth we’ve been sold
We’ve been told — relentlessly — that forgiveness is the key to inner peace. Forgive your parents. Forgive your ex. Forgive the friend who ghosted you. And I’m not here to say forgiveness is worthless. It can be genuinely transformative when it happens naturally. The trouble is that for a lot of people, the pressure to forgive becomes just another form of performing for an audience — another way of shaping yourself around other people’s expectations of how you should process your own pain.
What I’ve noticed — both in studying psychology at Deakin and in the years since, working through my own anxiety in my twenties — is that the people who seem most at peace later in life aren’t necessarily the ones who forgave everyone. They’re the ones who stopped needing other people to validate their choices. And those are two very different things.
The psychological weight of needing to be understood
Self-determination theory research has long identified autonomy — the sense that your actions align with your own values rather than external pressures — as a consistent predictor of well-being across the lifespan. Not achievement. Not approval. Autonomy. A meaningful contributor to how peacefully you age isn’t whether people understood your divorce, your career change, your decision to move across the world, your choice to cut off a difficult sibling. It’s whether you stopped requiring their understanding in order to feel okay about it.
I think about this in my own life constantly. When I left my warehouse job in Melbourne — the one where I spent my days shifting TVs and my breaks reading about Buddhism — people thought I was making a terrible decision. Mates, family members, people who genuinely cared about me. They didn’t understand why I’d walk away from a stable paycheck to write. For years, I carried this low-grade need for them to eventually see it, to say, “Okay, you were right.” And the irony? Even when some of them did come around, it didn’t fill the hole I thought it would. The urge to over-explain and seek validation often comes from something much older than the current situation. If that kind of chronic anxiety feels familiar, speaking with a psychologist or counsellor can help.
What actually happens when you stop explaining yourself
Something shifts when you genuinely release the need to be understood. Not in a bitter, “I don’t care what anyone thinks” way — that’s usually just a defense mechanism wearing a leather jacket. I mean in the quiet, almost boring way where you simply stop building a case. You stop rehearsing conversations in the shower where you finally explain yourself perfectly. You stop monitoring whether people “get” why you made that choice. You stop curating your life so it looks legible to people who aren’t living it.
A theoretical paper in the Journal of Personality examining self-determination theory and meaning-making argues that living in alignment with internally generated goals — what researchers call “self-concordance” — is linked to greater hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. The key insight isn’t that people with self-concordant lives had it easier. It’s that they’d stopped measuring their choices against other people’s yardsticks. You can see this play out in real time if you pay attention to the people around you. The ones in their sixties and seventies who seem most at ease aren’t the ones who patched every relationship or earned universal approval. They’re the ones who got comfortable with being misunderstood.
The quiet cost of living for legibility
Spending your life making sure other people understand your choices eats years. Decades, sometimes. I spent most of my twenties doing this. Every decision ran through an invisible committee in my head — would my family approve? Would my mates think it was stupid? Would people look at me and see someone who had it together?
During that time, I was working in a warehouse, battling anxiety that I couldn’t name, and reading about mindfulness on my lunch breaks because something inside me knew I was living someone else’s version of my life. The anxiety wasn’t random. It was the cost of constantly translating myself for an audience that was never going to fully receive the translation. And this is where it connects to aging. Because the people who carry that habit into their forties, fifties, sixties — that chronic need to be legible to others — they accumulate something heavy. Not resentment exactly, but a kind of exhaustion. A bone-deep fatigue from decades of explaining, justifying, and performing coherence for people who were never going to get it anyway.
People who soften with age tend to share one quality: they stopped performing for an audience. The ones who harden are often the ones still waiting for recognition that isn’t coming.
This isn’t about cutting people off
This idea can get distorted into something it’s not. Releasing the need to be understood isn’t the same as isolation. It’s not “I don’t need anyone.” That’s avoidance, and avoidance is its own kind of prison. What I’m describing is something more nuanced: maintaining your relationships while no longer requiring them to include a clause that says, and I fully understand and approve of everything you do.
My relationship with my brother Justin is a good example. We work together at Hack Spirit, and we’re close. But we’re very different people. There are choices I’ve made — the way I’ve structured my life, the things I’ve prioritised — that I don’t think he fully relates to. And that’s genuinely fine, not in the “I’m pretending it’s fine” way, but in the settled sense that it just stopped mattering to me whether he saw my life the way I see it. That didn’t damage the relationship.
If anything, it freed it — because I stopped asking him to be something he isn’t: a mirror that reflects me back exactly as I want to be seen.
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