The people who feel genuinely lighter as they age may not be the ones who took up new hobbies — they’re the ones who quietly let go

by Lachlan Brown | May 8, 2026, 7:25 pm

Nobody warns you that the heaviest things you carry in life don’t weigh anything at all. They’re not boxes in an attic or debt on a spreadsheet. They’re the grudge you’ve been feeding for eleven years, the opinion of a person who never bothered to show up for you, and the version of yourself that still hasn’t stopped auditioning for people who left the theatre a long time ago.

Psychology has been quietly building a case for something that feels almost too simple: the people who feel genuinely lighter as they get older aren’t the ones who found a new hobby or radically reinvented themselves. They’re the ones who stopped. Stopped carrying. Stopped performing. Stopped waiting for apologies that were never coming.

Here’s what the research actually shows, and what it means for the rest of us right now, regardless of how old we are.

Letting go of grudges isn’t just spiritual advice. It’s physiology.

We’ve all heard the line about how holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to suffer. It’s a cliche because it’s true, and now there’s real science behind it. Research by psychologist Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet found that when people recalled a grudge, their blood pressure and heart rate increased and they sweated more. Rumination on old wounds produces a measurable stress response in the body, every single time you revisit it.

And for older adults specifically, a study published in Trends in Psychology found that resentment carries a wide range of negative impacts on wellbeing, including physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. The same research found different positive impacts of forgiveness across those same dimensions. Not imagined ones. Measured ones.

There’s something worth sitting with here. A grudge isn’t just a feeling. It’s a running program in the background of your life, consuming resources, generating low-grade stress, keeping old wounds fresh. The people who report feeling lighter in later life aren’t necessarily the ones who resolved every conflict. Many of them simply decided they were too tired, and too wise, to keep paying that cost.

Buddhism has known this for a long time. The Pali word “upadana” refers to clinging, the act of grasping onto experiences, identities, and resentments as if they define us. The practice isn’t to suppress those feelings. It’s to recognize them, acknowledge the hurt, and consciously choose not to build a house in them.

The opinions of people who never showed up were never yours to carry.

Most of us can relate to spending a good chunk of our 20s anxious about what people thought of us. Not close friends or family. Acquaintances. Former colleagues. People who floated at the edges of our lives and whose approval we were quietly chasing. Lying awake reconstructing conversations, wondering what we’d said wrong or what they thought of some decision we’d made. Looking back, it’s almost comical how much energy that takes.

Research published in PMC found that the need for approval from others is directly linked to anxiety, and that people who depend heavily on external validation struggle to feel good about their own accomplishments without receiving praise or positive reinforcement from others. It’s a trap that tightens the more you feed it.

Self-determination theory, developed by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, shows that external validation actually undermines our psychological needs for autonomy and competence, making our sense of worth dependent on something we can never fully control: other people’s opinions. The people who feel genuinely free in later life tend to be the ones who stopped outsourcing their self-worth to an audience that wasn’t paying close attention anyway.

There’s a useful filter here. Ask yourself whose opinion genuinely matters to you, and why. Usually the answer is people who have actually shown up, people who have seen you at your worst and stayed, people with skin in the game of your life. The rest? Their verdict about you is mostly a projection of their own inner world. It tells you very little about who you actually are.

The exhaustion of trying to be impressive is real, and most people feel it long before they’re old.

There’s a psychological shift that tends to happen as people age. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen spent decades studying it. Her socioemotional selectivity theory explains that as people perceive their time as more limited, they naturally begin to prioritize emotionally meaningful goals over goals aimed at acquiring information or expanding social status. Older adults shift from proving themselves to feeling deeply connected to what actually matters.

In plain terms: the drive to impress people gradually loses its grip. Not because people give up, but because they get clear. They stop investing in relationships and performances that don’t return anything real. Research on emotional aging supports this, finding that most older adults enjoy high levels of affective wellbeing and emotional stability into their 70s and 80s, often surpassing the emotional wellbeing of younger adults who are still scrambling to establish themselves.

The version of yourself that was still trying to be impressive was exhausting to maintain. It required constant vigilance, constant performance, constant self-monitoring. It wasn’t protecting you. It was just keeping you busy.

The quiet work of letting go is something you can start right now.

Here’s the thing nobody says often enough: you don’t have to wait until later in life for any of this. The lightness that people find as they age is mostly available now, if you’re willing to do the quieter, less glamorous work of putting things down.

That doesn’t mean forgetting what hurt you. It doesn’t mean pretending the people who let you down were fine. It means recognizing that carrying their weight inside your body, in your nervous system, in your sleep, is a cost you’re paying and they probably aren’t. Forgiveness, in the Buddhist sense, isn’t really about the other person at all. It’s about reclaiming the energy they’re still taking from you, years after the fact.

The same goes for the identity you’ve been dragging around. The version of you that needs to seem successful, polished, interesting, put-together. That version was built in response to fear, not from it. Underneath it, there’s usually someone quieter and more at ease who’s been patiently waiting.

My daughter is still very small. She has no idea what it means to be impressive, and she doesn’t care in the slightest. Watching her, I think about how much of adult life is just a long, slow process of learning to recover what she already has naturally: the ability to just be, without running a performance in the background.

The people who feel lightest as they age didn’t find some secret. They just got tired of carrying things that were never really theirs to hold. And at some point, quietly, they set them down.

What are you still carrying that you’ve been meaning to put down?

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.