The “Third Thirty”

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

My advanced age has me thinking a lot about our aging years—and not as times of decline, but as times of progression. They’re another movement—and a series of choices we can make about who we’re becoming.

Recently, I listened as an “old friend,” Jane Fonda, spoke about believing that our lives unfold in three acts—and emphasized that each act lasts 30 years. Her ideas struck me immediately, both for their simplicity and for their accuracy.

In Fonda’s model, our first thirty years are a period of discovery, in which we figure out how to live, work, love, and become thoughtful about ways to survive our mistakes. Our second thirty years are a period of responsibility, in which we build careers, raise families, create homes, deepen commitments, and steady ourselves. And then—if we’re fortunate—we enter our third thirty years. Then, after sixty, we can finally look backward with clarity and also look forward with intention.

I am adopting Fonda’s view. She’s refusing to “get old” in any traditional sense. She doesn’t deny the body’s changes or the brevity of time ahead, but instead, suggests that by sixty, we’ve gathered enough wisdom to see our remaining years as something like a design project. That’s a new span of years for us to use, to edit, refresh, and refine—much like a cherished home or garden—which we finally have time to tend properly.

I agree with her, and I get her point—that each of us arrives at our third thirty carrying the sum of our experiences. She says that point represents our lessons learned: the habits that kept us going, the relationships that shaped us, and the courage we’ve gained the hard way.

What’s remarkable about our third stage is the sense that we’re not simply living out our remaining years—but actively shaping them. We’re deciding who we want to be in our third act. We might want to be identifiable—and thus, stylish or invisible, curious or complacent, engaged or withdrawn.

The old ideas about “not getting old” harken back to times when people tried to pretend they were younger than they were. Instead, new ideas about getting old have everything to do with staying current, interested, and actively in one’s own life.

Like Fonda, I want my style to say I’m still here. I want my choices to reflect a mind that’s awake. I want to use what I’ve learned from my first sixty—or eighty—years in ways that open and make my third stretch feel richer and more spacious—and maybe even more joyful.

It’s a relief to find myself thinking this way! To be imagining my third-thirty as not needing to be a “fading-out,” but instead be a revision—a reinvention—and a “creative third act.”

How extraordinary that the cycles of aging can lead to and allow us this—a moment when we have finally shed enough expectations to become more fully ourselves.

I sense others around my age feel similar rumblings. A sense of not being finished—not even close. Jane’s view captures what our third-thirties are meant to be—a time to show up dressed, interested, and ready to be the next version of ourselves.

— Diana