You’ve probably met both kinds of older person. The one who’s developed, without seeming to try particularly hard, a clear-eyed way of seeing themselves. They can name what they got wrong without collapsing into it. They can tell you what they’re actually like. They don’t seem to be defending anything. Sitting with them is a relief, in a way you can’t articulate until later.
And the other kind. Also elderly. Also, on the surface, thoughtful. Also, in most cases, someone who’s genuinely achieved a great deal. But something about them stays busy in a way a person can feel. They’re still measuring themselves against something. Still answering a question you can’t hear. Still, at seventy-eight, trying to make the case.
Both, sometimes, are the same age. Both have had roughly the same kind of life. The two don’t sort by achievement. The difference between them appears to be something else, and this piece is an attempt to name what that something else might be, drawing on one strand of gerontological research that I think helps.
The strand of research this piece leans on
The most useful body of work I’ve found on the psychological development of older adults comes from four decades of research by the Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam. Tornstam interviewed older adults across Swedish and Danish contexts, first in qualitative studies and then in large postal surveys, and repeatedly identified a pattern he came to call gerotranscendence. In his 2011 paper “Maturing into Gerotranscendence” published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Tornstam described the pattern as a shift, occurring in some but not all older adults, in what the person considers worth attending to.
The specifics he documented were concrete. Older adults who scored high on gerotranscendence measures reported decreased interest in superfluous social interaction and increased selectivity in relationships. They reported decreased self-centredness and, in Tornstam’s words, “a new understanding of fundamental existential questions.” They reported reduced fear of death and reduced concern with the material and status markers that had once organised their lives. Tornstam framed all of this not as decline or disengagement, but as a form of maturation that Western gerontology, in his view, had systematically failed to notice.
Tornstam’s theory has been contested, extended, and refined by subsequent researchers, and gerotranscendence isn’t the only frame that could be applied to what I’m describing here. But it’s the frame I find most useful for naming the specific pattern I want to point at in this piece.
I’d also recommend this video that dives into the psychology of self-awareness – it’s not age-specific, but it does highlight some interesting points:
My interpretive move
Here is where I step outside what Tornstam’s research directly demonstrates and offer my own reading. The specific quality I’ve been describing in the older adults who seem to have arrived at unusual self-awareness looks to me like the observable form of what Tornstam calls the shift from a materialistic and rational meta-perspective to a more transcendent one. The clearer I try to specify what this shift involves, the more it appears to me to involve letting go of a particular question.
The question is something like: What did I make of myself?
Or, in the variations that turn up in interviews with older adults across many literatures: Did I do enough? Was I successful? Did I matter? Would I be respected if people knew what I actually did with my time?
All different phrasings. At the bottom, they seem to me to be the same question. The evaluative one. The one that asks the self to be answerable to some standard about how well the life has gone.
The older adults who read to me as unusually self-aware appear, from the outside, to have stopped trying to answer it. That’s my interpretive claim, not a research finding. Tornstam’s research doesn’t directly test this specific framing, and other researchers reading the same data might frame the shift differently. What I can say is that this framing helps me make sense of the observable pattern.
A related finding from adjacent research
One further piece of research is worth adding, again with a clear marker that I’m doing interpretive work with it. In a 2021 paper by Bethany Wilton-Harding and Tim Windsor in the journal Aging & Mental Health, the researchers examined how awareness of age-related change relates to older adults’ capacity for flexible goal adjustment. Their finding was that older adults with more accurate awareness of age-related gains and losses showed more flexible goal disengagement and re-engagement, which is to say, they were better able to let go of goals no longer serving them and to take up new ones that fit their current circumstances.
The Wilton-Harding and Windsor paper is about goal disengagement flexibility, not about self-awareness in the sense this piece is using the term. My interpretive claim, added on top of what their research demonstrates, is that goal disengagement flexibility looks to me like one observable form of the broader capacity to release the evaluative question. If a person can let go of a specific goal that has stopped serving them without treating the release as a personal failure, that’s a small daily version of the larger releasing this piece is trying to name. Whether the mechanism is really the same is a genuine empirical question that hasn’t been settled.
Why letting go seems to matter
The reason releasing the evaluative question changes so much, on my reading of the research, isn’t just that the person becomes more accepting. It’s that the machinery of self-defence, which was being fed by the question, has less to do. The person still knows they did some things well and some things poorly. They just aren’t sorting the incoming information about themselves into ammunition and threats anymore. And in that mental space, self-perception has room to become more accurate.
Tornstam’s own description of the phenomenon touches this obliquely. The gerotranscendent person, in his words, “will experience a new feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the universe, a redefinition of time, space, life and death, and a redefinition of the self.” I don’t need to endorse the cosmic language to notice what the redefinition of the self is doing. It’s the moment when the self stops being the thing under examination.
When older adults describe the shift in their own words, they often describe it in terms of relief. The relief of not having to make the case anymore. Not to themselves. Not to the imagined jury of everyone whose opinion once mattered. Not to the version of themselves that had, at forty or fifty, wanted so badly to arrive at a particular kind of adulthood. The case gets set down. And once it’s set down, a person can look at their own life the way one might look at somebody else’s. Curious. Honest. Not afraid of what one might find.
Which turns out, on the strand of research this piece has drawn on, to be the condition under which sharper self-perception seems to develop.
What this piece is not claiming
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying here. I’m not claiming that letting go of the evaluative question is easy, or that anyone can do it on demand, or that a middle-aged person reading this can shortcut into the state Tornstam is describing. Tornstam’s own view is that gerotranscendence is a developmental achievement that unfolds over decades and only in some individuals. The interpretive frame I’ve offered is my own gloss on what I see in the pattern he documented, and it might be wrong. The research on this territory is still developing.
What I can say, more modestly, is that the older adults with unusual self-clarity are not, in general, the ones who achieved the most. Achievement doesn’t seem to be the sorting variable. Something else is. And on the strand of research this piece has leaned on, that something else appears to involve the release of a specific way of relating to one’s own life, one that most middle-aged people don’t recognise they’re doing until, if they’re lucky, they finally stop.
The clarity isn’t the reward for a well-lived life. It looks more like what shows up when the person finally stops grading it.
By Kiran Athar. I write about psychology and human development for a general audience. I am not a psychologist, therapist, or clinician. What follows is my reading of one strand of research, offered as an interpretation rather than as clinical advice. If you’re carrying real weight on the questions this piece touches, a therapist familiar with existential or meaning-focused work is better equipped to help you sit with them than an article can be.