Aread Johnston I was sitting on the couch one Sunday morning reading the Wall Street Journal when I came across an article by a 60-year-old writer who felt bored because he always told his friends the same stories. “I’m doing this,” Johnston thought. “So a couple of weeks later, when I turned 70, I made a commitment to do 70 new things within a year.”
Johnston created a website Fabulous70.com. She made a table and started filling it with ideas. The only rule was: “It has to be something I’ve never done before.” Her first “first” was eating neme—a type of spring roll—at the supper club where she lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
She also attended the conference to explore her erotic agenda – “it pushed a lot of boundaries, but it was transformative” – and as a result, she says, “she had some of the best sex of my life.” Over the next 12 months, she took pole dancing classes and flying lessons, ate dessert before main, walked new trails, minted a meme coin, and got a Brazilian wax.
From then on, whenever she got together with friends, “it was the first question they asked me: “What new did you do this week?” I couldn’t even go to the chiropractor’s office without reporting what I had done.”
“We shouldn’t accept excuses from ourselves,” she says now. “I didn’t even realize how much I was doing it.”
Two years before starting her project, Johnston got divorced. She and her husband have been married for 30 years. “But I just realized that I'm not myself. It became important to understand who I really was at that age and be honest with myself,” she says.
“I think I've always tried to be responsible. With my time and my money.” Until she was 60, she stayed home when her partner didn't want to go out, rather than socialize alone. “You always get this question: 'Where is your husband?'”
Therapy helped. She kept a diary. “And one of the questions I had to answer was: What do I want? It's not something I spent a lot of time on. It was life-changing to sit down and be honest about what I want,” not what her partner or daughter or grandchild wants. “This will teach you something,” she says.
One day, she says, she woke up and realized: “I don't need anyone's permission. In fact, it's okay to be a little irresponsible. The world doesn't end because you go out on your own. So now I do it.”
The fear of irresponsibility was always present. “If you want to analyze my childhood, my father was the fastest belt in the West,” she says. “You didn't argue with him. There were beatings. It was just the way he ran his household. So I was always a little afraid.”
Johnston grew up on a farm 45 miles from where she now lives and was “afraid of her own shadow.” Even now, she feels “an avoidance reaction. You always think you're in trouble because you did something wrong. Learning to let that go is a huge step.”
In her late teens, against her father's wishes, she went to college to study art. Her first marriage, when she was 20, did not last long. So Johnston could support herself as a single parent, her grandmother sent her to night school. “I learned to program back in the 1980s, before it became mainstream,” Johnston says.
She became a banking consultant, helping write code on the large mainframe computers that banks ran and moving data when banks were bought out or sold. Today she is an entrepreneur. She is launching a new project aimed at combating loneliness and promoting longevity.
Johnston is now 71 years old and has flown 70 missions, but she is still looking for new experiences. “It became who I am,” she says. “I'm much more adventurous. I love learning new things. I feel like I've found myself. This is truly the best season of my life.”
