How Oprah Feels About Getting Older: “Life Only Gets Better”

Oprah has kicked off 2020 with a new tour, traveling the country in partnership with Weight Watchers. She plans to focus on health and wellness with the goal of making 2020 “the year of transformation and triumph.” 

In her latest stop on the 2020 Vision Tour, she chatted with actress Tina Fey about getting older and what advice she had for the 49-year-old about to enter a new decade of life. 

Fey says to Oprah, “I feel like I’m at an age where all the things I’ve ever thought I wanted to do, I did them. I always wanted to work at Saturday Night Live; I always wanted to have a show; I always wanted to have children.”

Oprah responded to Fey with her personal insight that life only gets better with age and that Fey should listen to her intuition when deciding what to do next with her life and her career. She says, “When I turned 50, my dear friend Maya Angelou was still alive, and Maya said to me, ‘Babe, the 50s are everything you’ve been meaning to be. It’s everything you thought you might do. This is it. It’s coming in. You’re not even there yet.’”

Getting older is something to embrace, which is why we have been shifting the conversation about aging in general. Rather than being “anti-aging,” we prefer to be pro-healthy aging. Growing old shouldn’t be something to be ashamed of.