‘Magical,” “special,” a “total badass”: step forward Kamala Harris, the 59-year-old dynamo who has rebranded her country at lightning speed, offering it up as a nation synonymous with optimism, hope and patriotism. For the rest of us, Kamala’s gift is her joy and vibrancy – and the way she is smashing it just months away from her seventh decade, holding up 60 in all its power and glory. Welcome to the new golden age.
Hers is the vibrancy of a woman who owns her power, a woman who is manifesting her experience and expertise, a woman who knows her time has come. No more waiting in the wings while Sleepy Joe calls the shots – and blows them. No more hiding that smile, or keeping down the laughter. She’s here, she’s got the platform. What’s more, the VP now looks positively youthful when compared to 78-year-old Donald Trump and 81-year-old Joe Biden. Barack Obama may have been younger than Kamala by 12 years when he ran for president, but today Kamala’s 60 looks like the first blush of youth thanks to the energy-sapping Trump/Biden effect.
It is no coincidence that next month, a matter of weeks before she may become the first Black female president of the United States, the former prosecutor will turn 60. There’s a party to look forward to before we even get to the big one on 5 November! On her 60th birthday, Kamala will be joining a roster of sexagenarians who are putting the oomph and the whoosh and the we-can-do-this into turning 60 – not as overnight success stories, but as grafters who’ve been in it for the long-haul, as comedian Wanda Sykes made clear on turning 60 in March. “I finally hit what I said I wanted to do when I started out … It’s taken more than 30 years to get to that place where I’m doing what I said I wanted to do.”
Some are looking good on it, too, by hook, crook or, in broadcaster Fiona Bruce’s case, mother nature. I don’t care about ageing,” she said ahead of her big six-oh last April, “and I don’t look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh no, there’s another line … I just think, ‘This is great.’ I definitely count my lucky stars.” Others need a little more effort. Singer and songwriter Lenny Kravitz, by contrast, does eye-popping gym workouts – in skin-tight black leather trousers – while the ever-youthful actor Rob Lowe has an almost fanatical focus on a low-carb, high-protein diet. As for 60-year-old former model and businesswoman Elle “the Body” Macpherson, she credits her 20 years of sobriety for her “vitality” and “inner peace”. Brad Pitt, 60, and newly sober, wants only “to be happy and stay healthy”.
Sarah Lindsay, three-time Olympian, transformation trainer and founder of the Roar Fitness gyms, has seen “more people approaching 60 getting fit for the first time”, with women now outnumbering men on her 200-strong City of London client list. “It’s a real cultural shift. People finally understand the importance of weight training for ageing well. The men don’t come in asking to be beach-buff,” and both men and women have “more patience”, she says. “It’s an attitude: we see people really living their lives and not accepting that they are old.”
Attitude is everything. Actor Juliette Binoche brings what she calls her “fiery energy” to the new decade. “Turning 60? It’s much the same as turning 40,” she says. “I feel able to keep taking risks, because life usually teaches me what I need to make them pay off.”
It’s also a time to seize new opportunities, whether that’s changing the world (Belarusian human rights activist Alex Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 at the age of 59), or simply accepting new challenges, like beauty entrepreneur Trinny Woodall, who is about to open her first flagship store on the Kings Road in Chelsea.
Bridgerton star and firebrand Adjoa Andoh, 61, was a jobbing actor for years before the hit Netflix series. What she valued, on turning 60 last year, was how you “become consciously alert to things that are precious in your life: the people you love, the causes you support.”
So, along with Kamala-grade vibrancy and contagious energy, the power of 60 is fired by identifying what you find meaningful and being true to your self. For writer Bernardine Evaristo, winning the Booker prize aged 60 – the first Black female to get the award – has brought “career Christmas for me every day since”. But, she adds, “60 years of living without being well known is long enough to be rooted in yourself and to feel a deep sense of gratitude when good things happen.”
Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, work a different vibe to gen X, often because they’ve had it relatively easy. Final-salary pension, a house bought for a song, it all helps smell those roses. “I’m going to be 67 soon. Hoorah,” chirps self-described “smug boomer”, author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry, who joined as OM’s agony aunt when she herself was 63 and whose career has been flying ever since. She’s paid off the mortgage, has “a nice little pension coming in”, and work. But, she says, 60 feels so good because the 50s can be hard going – a lead-up Sandra Bullock has likened to climbing a mountain. “Middle age, before you hit 60, is often the hardest stage of life as you still have to cope with full-time work, plus responsibility for teenage children and ageing parents. Hang on in there, generation X. It’s going to get better.” And this is why, she says: “Older adults tend to have better emotional regulation. They’ve had years of experience in managing their emotions, and they’ve developed coping mechanisms that allow them to handle life’s challenges. They have embodied helpful philosophies, such as ‘This too shall pass.’” Jodie Foster, 62, can testify to that. The director and actor says she was “struggling” in her 50s. “Sixty,” she said, “was the best shift of all,” adding, “the day I turned 60 was, you know, one of the best days of my life.”
Let’s not forget, though, that ours is an ageing population, so gen X is having to work for longer and therefore be healthier. A higher life expectancy, says Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford University and chair elect of global NGO HelpAge, partly explains why 60 no longer means old. “Globally, life expectancy at birth has risen from 46 years in 1950 to 73 years currently and, in high-income countries such as North America and Europe, life expectancy at 60 is now over 80 for men and 85 for women.”
For competing bodybuilder and trainer Tony Barnbrook (Train with Tone), who specialises in training men in their 50s and 60s, “Sixty should be seen as a milestone that comes with confidence, wisdom and freedom. Turning 60 can be a new chapter full of opportunities. Most of my clients in their 60s are still working, travelling and pursuing their passions.” That includes Tom Cruise, 62, who plans to do his own stunts into his 80s. Gasp.
Times have certainly changed, says Sarah Harper. “Whereas only a generation or so ago, 60 would be seen as the end of an older women’s active life, now women in their 60s in many North American and European countries are likely to be economically active for several years to come, will be active carers for both older relatives and grandchildren and will continue to play a key role in their local communities. We also know that educated women in their 60s, who keep their bodies and minds fit and active, can expect to push back the onset of chronic disease and decline well into their late 70s or early 80s.”
Knowing your limits, however, says philosopher Julian Baggini, is another bonus ball of being 60. “Overall, people who perform well in their 60s tend to be people who are just as aware of what they can no longer do as what they have become good at. They don’t try to compete with youth for stamina, strength or agility, mental or physical. But they know they have acquired skills and experience that the young do not have and they set out to apply them with calmness.”
Hmm. I can’t help thinking that Baggini’s wisdom sets him apart from some of today’s more excitable, not to mention body-conscious, 60-year-olds. I refer him to Friends star Courteney Cox’s Instagram reel, made shortly after her 60th birthday in June. We see her climbing out of a kitchen freezer in a black bikini, a face pack on and wearing a baseball cap. “What?” she says to the camera, her voice deliciously deadpan. “It’s cryotherapy.” Cut to her pulling weights on some kind of cross trainer. “So I’ve just had a birthday,” she says. “Don’t love the number, but I clearly have no choice. You just gotta do the best you can.”
Well, good for her because, as fellow training obsessive Lenny Kravitz said just before he turned 60 in May, “It’s all about longevity now.” And “hardcore” training “like an elite athlete” and “preparing my mind. All of it works together. Glory to glory.” Amen, Len, because brain-health is where it’s at, cognitive decline notwithstanding. Playing chess, learning the french horn, it’s all on the list cometh the hour.
But so is knowing what’s right, doing what’s right. It’s about naming the hard stuff around ageing, as well as the highs. For Kamala’s fellow trailblazer Michelle Obama, now 60, that means naming the menopause. “I have no shame in talking about the fact that I am going on 60 and […] how do you continue to feel sexual and vibrant?” Noting that “some doctors don’t know this stuff,” we have to “have those conversations”, she adds. “I don’t want my girls growing up surprised by their bodies, right?”
For musician Nick Cave, now 66, himself a parent, life’s third quarter has brought terrible loss – but also moments of transcendence, and new creative expression through ceramics. His youngest son, Arthur, died aged 15 in 2015. His older son, Jethro, brought up by his mother in Australia, died seven years later, aged 31. He has talked of being “fundamentally changed” by his loss and of the joy “that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering”. A track on Wild God, his new album with Bad Seeds, called Joy, is testament to that understanding: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”
Kamala, for different reasons, recognises that. As her equally exuberant 60-year-old running mate Tim Walz says, “She emanates the joy.” Our rather more sober premier Keir Starmer, 62, may not do effervescence, but he, too, proves the power of 60: he is at the top of his game and brings a steeliness and moral compass to the job we can learn from. Each to their own. Each to the power of 60.
• This article was amended on 9 September 2024. Michelle Obama is 60, not 62 as an earlier version said, and Keir Starmer is 62, not 61.
