As of June, 2025 I’ve turned seventy. This means, depending on whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person, that I’m either entering the prime of life or am just plain old. If I am getting old, I don’t really mind. After all, there is only one alternative, and it’s not very attractive. But it’s a hard thing to get your head around. My generation, the dreaded Boomers, defined themselves by their collective youth. I was still quite young in the 1960’s, but aware of the sense of optimism that, once our generation came to power, everything would be better. Sadly, that hasn’t quite happened. In fact, you could make a reasonable case that we’ve collectively screwed things up worse than just about any other generation. Does it help if I say we meant well?

It’s an interesting age, seventy. You can do most of the things you’ve always been able to, though you might find you’ve less energy than you did earlier. At the same time, you can clearly see eighty looming on the horizon. Assuming that I continue to avoid cancer and heart disease, I can be reasonably confident of hitting eighty. After that, based on what I’ve seen around me, all bets are off. I might make it to ninety. Most men don’t. And, in their eighties, pesky medical problems seem to have a way of piling up and quality of life can take a big dip. The long and short of it is that this is the last decade where I can reasonably count on being healthy enough to do what I want.

The problem therein is two-fold. First, what is it that I really want to do? Because that seems to change as time goes by. More on that in a minute. The second problem is that, at this point, a decade flashes past in the blink of an eye. It seems ridiculous to think that ten years has passed since my sixtieth. The next ten years will be likely pass even more quickly.

So, what do I want to do? That is the question of the hour. Or rather, the question of the decade. As an example of the problem, let’s consider books. I long imagined that, when I retired, I’d spend time re-reading old favourites. Along the way I’ve accumulated many books. So many that, at the time of writing, they’re in piles on my basement floor in addition to filling up multiple book cases. A number of my paperbacks date back to the 1960’s. Back then, I was terrified of breaking the book’s spine, and read them at odd angles while opening the book a crack. Perhaps not surprisingly, those books are in great shape. They include many of the Doc Savage series, a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, and Robert E. Howard. There was Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and, a favourite when I was young, E.E. “Doc” Smith. I was also a bit of a science nerd, so I have a couple of books about cosmology that are so old that they were written before the Big Bang was universally accepted, and they also cover a competing theory called Continuous Creation. I don’t spend a lot of time re-reading these books. To be honest, many haven’t aged particularly well, or perhaps were never meant for adult eyes. But they were a bright light in my childhood and I plan to keep them around a while yet. I do re-read my beloved Charles Dickens novels, but not a lot else. I don’t tend to re-read most of the books I’ve acquired since, preferring to read new books over old. So, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I don’t need to keep most of my books. That being said, you’ll have to pry my favourite, The Little Prince, from my cold, dead hands.

The world has changed a lot in seventy years. Among Doctor Who fans, it’s popular to ask, who was on the cover of Doctor Who Magazine the month they were born? In my case, not only was there no DWM, there was no Doctor Who! For me, 1963 was the year of Fireball XL5. I lived, breathed, and slept that show. People were sick of me going on about it, and I remain fond of it to this day. I also remember, in 1963, watching the funeral of President Kennedy on our black & white, vacuum tube TV. I remember pressing my nose against store windows when colour TVs started to become available. When we got ours, I particularly loved Batman, Star Trek, and whatever the Bugs Bunny / Road Runner show was called back then. My family was in England when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. It was the middle of the night, so, sadly, we didn’t watch it live. I was at a conference in the early 1990’s when a speaker asked the audience if we’d heard of a program called Mosaic. None of us had. This was our first introduction to the World Wide Web. Computer networks had been around for ages, but not a network of networks. Not the Internet. This, of course, changed everything.

As an aside, have you seen the movie Last Night in Soho? It concerns a modern-day fashion designer who finds herself transported to the Soho of the 1960’s. As I was watching, I found myself thinking, wouldn’t that be a thing—walking the streets of Soho in the 1960’s. Then I had to laugh out loud. Because I’ve done it. My mother’s family lived in the north-east of England. When we went to visit, we’d stay a night or two in London to get over the jet lag before traveling up north. We stayed at the Bonnington Hotel (now a Double Tree Hilton) and walked through Soho to a Turkish restaurant that was a favourite of my father’s. My recollection of Soho is a bit different to what I saw in the movie. It seemed rather seedy to my young eyes, but, most notably, we passed several establishments whose exteriors were decorated with black & white photos of topless women. And while my young eyes gaped, my father growled that I should watch where I was going. For what it’s worth, the restaurant was pretty good. I don’t remember its name, but no doubt it’s long gone. As for the hotel, the rooms were tiny and on each floor there was a TV room. There were no TVs in the actual guest rooms. I recall the TV room on our floor packed to overflowing with people. I walked into the lobby of the hotel in 2019 when I was last in the UK. Clearly, they had done the place up a bit. I didn’t like it.

With age comes a sort of wisdom. For instance, I can impart to you the Secret of Happiness at no extra charge. It boils down to the same 80-20 rule that applies to so many things. No matter where you are in your life, the business of life is drudgery. Groceries. Cooking. Cleaning. Working! All the busy work that needs doing. That can account for 80% of your time, and that might lead you to think you’re doing something wrong. You’re not. What you need to focus on is, not the drudgery, but that golden 20% — time spent with friends and family, quality alone time, whatever makes you happy. Simply put, the secret of happiness is to not expect happiness every moment of every day, but to appreciate that 20% of the time when you’re in your happy place. And anyway, if not for the 80%, the 20% wouldn’t seem nearly so lustrous.

Put another way, the old adage is true: happiness comes from within rather than without. It’s being thankful for what you have, rather than longing for what you haven’t.

Happiness can also be had by thinking back to key moments that you collect throughout a lifetime. When I started university, I wanted to be a scientist. It took a while, but getting accepted to grad school was definitely a key moment. Another was when my first scientific paper was published. Still another, of course, was when my Doctor Who stories “Landbound” and “Battle Scars” were published by Big Finish. That was a beautiful, mad time and I treasure the memory of it. And still another key moment was when I self-published my first collection of short stories. I suppose another will be when I self-publish my first novel. Assuming I ever finish the thing. Kidding! A Familiar Voice will be available later this year. (If you’re wondering, there have also been many key personal moments, but they’re, you know, personal.)

Does all of this mean that we have to be satisfied with our lot? With what we have today? Of course not. So here’s the actual, true secret of happiness: It’s learning to know what it is that makes you happy, and being happy with what you have while striving for the things that make you happy that you don’t have. I think it’s the striving that gives us purpose, and having a purpose is something that makes most of us happy.

Thanks for reading. May you enjoy many years of happiness.