Psychology says the people who seem unbothered by criticism in their 60s aren’t thick-skinned, they’ve simply run out of energy to perform for audiences that were never going to be satisfied anyway

Older adults are consistently rated as more emotionally stable than younger ones. Older adults also report caring less, in a specific way, about being liked by people whose approval they cannot influence. What the aging-and-emotion literature actually saysThe dominant finding across affective science over the past two decades is that older adults, on average, report better emotional well-being than younger adults, not worse. The audience problemThe title of this piece names something specific: audiences that were never going to be satisfied anyway. This pattern is not a claim that older adults do not experience hurt.