Expanding My Joyspan
My grandfather walked everywhere. He swam nearly every day. He retired more than once, kept his friendships alive and only stopped gardening for other people when he became ill. He died at seventy‑two, cancer but mercifully fast, and I don’t think I ever heard him complain. Being around him just felt good. Some of my happiest childhood memories come from the time spent with him.
My grandmother was different. She’d been “dying” for as long as I can remember, and I say that with affection because I flew home five times to say goodbye and each time she was miraculously recovered by the time my sister and I arrived. She was incredibly talented and could knit, sew, embroider and crochet beautifully. Best of all she baked the kind of birthday cakes every child dreams about. But she was a glass‑half‑empty person. There was always a reason to stop doing the things she loved. After my grandfather died, she spent seventeen more years saying she was ready to go.
I’ve been thinking about them both lately, after coming across an idea I’d not heard before, a Joyspan.
I heard the word on a podcast, the way I find lots of ideas that spark my interest. A Joyspan, not a lifespan or a healthspan but the span of your life where you actively experience joy. I found myself down another rabbit hole, eventually landing on the book by Dr Kerry Burnight.
What hooked me was the premise that the loss of joy is not an inevitable part of growing older. That many of our strengths actually get better with age. Judgment, empathy, patience, appreciation. Problem solving becomes more grounded and resilience grows. The book talks about a JoySpan Matrix and the idea that joy expands when you keep growing, connecting, adapting and giving. It suggests you can see aging as a period of expansion rather than contraction and to consider what it would mean to live a great life all the way to the end.
I love a framework, and while the idea seems simple, simple is not always easy. Growing is something I naturally gravitate to with ongoing learning, new experiences, experimenting with technology and publishing on Substack. Adapting is a little harder, but my knees aren’t quite what they used to be, so I’ve been to my first over fifties exercise class. It’s technically called seniors fitness. I’m sticking with over fifties. I’d rather change what I do than stop doing something I enjoy. Giving comes a little more naturally. I’ve volunteered at different times, and this year I formally joined a mentoring program as a mentor.
Connection is where I have the most work to do. I’m an introvert, and while building and maintaining relationships is something I struggle with, I understand how much it matters. I’ve been thinking about how to be more intentional in that space, the way I am about my health. Regular check ins, not leaving it to chance.
When I read about the framework, I thought immediately of my grandfather. He was the JoySpan Matrix without knowing it. He kept moving, kept connecting, kept showing up for people. He didn’t shrink. I thought of my grandmother too, spending her final years waiting for it all to be over.
Two people. The same era, the same world, very different approaches to the time they had. The difference wasn’t circumstance. It was something harder to name than that.
Thinking about my grandmother made me realise how much of her view of aging had come from societal norms, absorbed rather than chosen. It made me pay attention to the same thing in myself. The negative ideas about getting older that show up in your thoughts before you’ve even noticed them, internalised ageism that’s easy to overlook because it feels so familiar.
It’s the voice that tells you to dress a certain way, avoid a certain shop, behave a certain way, stay in your lane. The hesitation before trying something new because you worry you’ll look silly. The urge to shrink yourself so you don’t draw attention. No one teaches you this directly. You absorb it from the world around you. From the jokes about getting old and the way older women disappear from screens. From the compliments that are really warnings. You look good for your age. You don’t look fifty‑five. You move well for your age. As if the worst thing you could be is exactly what you are.
It shows up in small ways too. I catch myself joking that I’m just old when I forget a name. Downplaying my experience so I don’t feel like I’m imposing my views or sounding like I think I’ve seen it all before. Stopping myself from wearing something I love because I think I’m too old for it. Habits that become part of your thinking and you can’t tell where they came from.
The hardest thing about internalised ageism, or internalised sexism for that matter, is that it can make you complicit in your own shrinking. You start policing yourself. You step back instead of forward and you edit yourself before anyone else has the chance.
This is what my grandmother did, I think. Not necessarily consciously, but because her approach to life and the world she lived in told her a particular story about what her later years were supposed to look like. I’ve been thinking about which one of them I’m more like, and which one I want to be.
This is where the idea of a Joyspan lands for me. Not in chasing youth or meeting some external standard, but in deciding how I actually want to live the years I have. In noticing what expands joy and what contracts it. In recognising the beliefs I’ve absorbed that aren’t really mine to carry.
It’s funny how once something catches your attention you start seeing it everywhere. Articles, conversations, things people say in passing all circling the same question. What does it mean to age well? Western culture doesn’t have a great answer. The cynic in me thinks the cult of youth is largely tied to consumerism. Sell tweens preventative skincare. Sell people in their twenties and thirties preventative tweakments. Then sell everyone over forty a suite of products that promise to fix what was never actually broken. It’s a brilliant business model if you don’t think too hard about the damage it does.
Some cultures revere aging. They understand that there are things you can only earn with time. I’d like to be part of a generation that starts to reclaim that idea.
My grandfather didn’t wait for permission to keep living fully. He just did it. I think about that a lot. I can’t control the years, but I can choose what I do with them.