There are moments, somewhere after 60, where you suddenly catch yourself becoming one of those people.

You know the ones.

The people who say things like, “I should probably think about where I’m going to age,” in the same calm, practical tone they’d use to discuss switching internet providers.

Meanwhile, in my head, I am still approximately 42. This delusion, I have discovered, is remarkably durable. It survives well into actual old age itself, which I find both hilarious and slightly alarming.

But lately I’ve been thinking about housing differently. Not in the “should I redo the backsplash?” sense. More in the “what kind of home still works if life decides to get creative on me?” sense.

Which is admittedly a less fun genre of thought. But here we are.

I’ve already written about the dollars-and-cents side of this question in a past article entitled “Is Home Ownership Still Right For Me?” In that article I discussed a practical cost-and-logistics analysis. It covered the financial math of solo homeownership, the DIY gap, the “singles tax,” the renting-isn’t-failure reframe, and the real dollar costs of maintaining a home alone. 

But lately it’s the emotional math that’s been bouncing around in my brain. I aim to cover the emotional and psychological territory of this same topic because that’s the thought loop I’m in right now. And maybe you are too.

The truth is, once you’re a solo person over 60, housing quietly shifts from being about financial security and taste to being about something more unglamorous: survivability.

Not survival in the dramatic, Bear Grylls sense — though I will say that hauling groceries across an icy Canadian driveway in February has its moments.

No, I mean survivability in the practical, boring, nobody-puts-this-on-a-vision-board sense:

• Can you maintain this place alone?
• Can you afford it alone?
• Can you recover there alone?
• Can you age there alone?

These questions, unhelpfully, arrive right around the same time your brain still insists you could absolutely start a new entrepreneurial pursuit if you just felt like it.

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Where I Actually Live (And Why I Love It, Mostly)

I live in a small bungalow in a quiet, nature-oriented neighbourhood near the water. On most days it feels like exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Dogs trot past. Mature trees do their tree thing. Wind moves through leaves instead of six lanes of traffic. In summer you smell cut grass instead of hot pavement slowly becoming soup in the sun. The pace feels human — and when I close my eyes and just listen, I can almost convince myself I’m at a cottage somewhere north, circa 1976, when life was simpler and nobody had yet invented notification badges.

I notice, increasingly, how much I need that.

Especially now, when modern life often feels like someone accidentally gave society cocaine and Wi-Fi at the same time.

I’ll walk through the nearby forest trail and think: this keeps me sane. And then, immediately, a second thought appears right behind the first like an uninvited guest at a party: yes, but what happens when these walks become difficult?

That is the strange gift of this life stage. Two completely opposing truths can exist simultaneously, and both can be entirely correct.

I may stay healthy and active for another twenty years — in which case, I don’t want to uproot my life prematurely to accommodate a version of myself that doesn’t exist yet. Or things may change faster than expected — in which case, waiting until I no longer have the energy or capacity to move would be its own kind of mess.

Both possibilities are real. At the same time. Right now. Isn’t that delightful.

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The Time I Tried Urban Living (A Brief & Not-so-Fun Story)

About 13 years ago I gave condo-style living a genuine shot. Two years in the condo as an owner, and then a stint as a renter in a lakefront highrise building with a gym and an outdoor pool. And on paper? It made perfect sense. Walkability! Simplicity! No maintenance! Amenities! Efficient use of space!

Reader, I hated it.

The noise. The hard surfaces everywhere. The loss of a yard and trees and actual growing things. The feeling of being a human stacked in a cube alongside other humans stacked in cubes. The cigarette smell drifting through the ventilation like an uninvited ghost. The upstairs neighbour’s high heels on uncarpeted floors and the weekend children visiting downstairs, doing what children enthusiastically do but without a yard to do it in.

And then there was one neighbour — a genuine night owl and social creature — who liked to host balcony gatherings that floated directly into my bedroom window while I was trying to maintain my 10pm bedtime.

I also noticed something interesting about safety: surrounded by hundreds of neighbours, I sometimes felt oddly more vulnerable than less. My head was constantly on a swivel in the underground parking. The sound of the elevator ding at 2am, lying there wondering if that was just someone coming home from a late shift, or someone who’d slipped in through the parking garage and was now lurking in the hallway pondering my demise.

The upside — and it was genuinely great — was never setting foot in a hardware store. Never budgeting for a mystery maintenance crisis. Never spending a Saturday I could have enjoyed instead doing home repairs.

But I couldn’t relax. I missed trees. I missed silence. I wanted to sit outside in the peace and quiet with my morning cup of tea, and enjoy the evening sunsets as I read on my patio in a tranquil setting. I missed hearing the wind do literally anything.

So I left. Moved back into a house and became a homeowner again. I was immediately greeted by a beautiful fox and her puppies on my back deck. Wildlife came and went daily: raccoons, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, birds of all kinds, turtles, ducks, Canada Geese, muskrat, bunnies, coyotes and the odd opossum. I was in heaven. That was almost 10 years ago and here I still am, quite happy most of the time, except for this recurring argument I keep having with myself.

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The Argument I Keep Having With Myself

One part of me says: stay here as long as possible. This place works for your nervous system.

Another part says: yes, but only while your body cooperates.

The second voice is annoying. It is also not entirely wrong, which makes it more annoying.

Because the honest reality is this: a detached house works beautifully for a solo person right up until the moment it suddenly doesn’t. And when there’s no second person in the equation, there’s nobody to quietly absorb the chaos when things go sideways.

No one to mow the lawn while you recover from surgery.

No one to shovel snow during a bad February (and February will be bad).

No one to deal with the leaking water heater while you’re sitting in a specialist’s waiting room trying to remember what you were just told.

“Oh, you can hire people!” say the well-meaning.

Yes. You can. Provided you can afford it, organize it, supervise it, remember who you hired, and still possess the executive functioning to coordinate everything — which, it turns out, becomes less guaranteed as we age. Not necessarily in a dramatic way. Just in a less mental fuel for complexity way. I’ve already noticed the gap between my late 50s and mid-60s. Less appetite for chaos. Less energy for giant life transitions.

And moving itself is absolutely brutal.

The packing, sorting and paperwork. The selling, donating and disposal bins. The endless decisions about mysterious cords whose original purpose has been lost to time.

Why do extension cords reproduce in drawers when nobody is watching? Why does one person need this many? These are questions I cannot answer.

What I can say is this: if I wait too long, the move may eventually stop being my move and start being my family’s burden. I don’t want my adult children standing in my house someday holding up objects saying “what even IS this.” I don’t want them managing the logistics of clearing and selling a home while simultaneously managing illness, hospitals, or grief.

And yet — I also don’t want to leave a home I genuinely love out of fear of hypothetical futures that may never arrive.

There it is again. The same wrestling match.

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The Financial Wildcard Nobody Loves Thinking About

Here’s another layer: for years, Canadians were basically conditioned to believe real estate only moved in one direction. Then the past couple of years happened. I have watched “For Sale” signs sit outside neighbourhood homes for what feels like geological time. A few properties near me have been listed for a solid year now.

It’s clearly a buyer’s market.

Which makes me wonder: if the pendulum swings back toward sellers in the next five to eight years, should I consider moving then — even if emotionally I’m not ready? Because my later years are largely going to be funded by the eventual sale of this house. The stronger that sale, the more options I have for help or care down the road. 

The rational answer is obvious: move when the timing is smart, not when crisis forces your hand.

Human beings are famously not rational, though.

We get comfortable. We get attached. We develop strong feelings about our specific trees.

We tell ourselves maybe this will all still work in fifteen years — and honestly? Maybe it will. There are 82-year-olds out there still gardening and hiking and climbing ladders while their families collectively hold their breath. And there are 67-year-olds whose worlds changed almost overnight.

You simply don’t know which story will be yours.

And when, at what age, does a parent stop thinking about parenting? Because with the way the world is going right now, I sometimes think “I should keep the house just in case one of my adult kids & their spouses lose their own homes and jobs, and need a safe place to land. It’s a small place, but they could move in with family, and we could figure out where I could move to so that “the whole family’s needs are met”. It would certainly be a lot cheaper for me to find a place to rent than it would a full family with kids.

It’s not an insane thought. There have been many times in history where the unthinkable has happened and many have fallen upon dark times. It is in those instances when family takes care of family. Maybe it’s a foolish idea to untether from secure housing in today’s unstable world.

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The Isolation Thing Nobody Warns You About

Solo seniors — and I say this from my corner of Canadian suburbia — need to think seriously about isolation.

Many suburban neighbourhoods are basically designed for families and cars. They function wonderfully for that. Less so for an older solo adult whose driving situation may eventually change, either medically or financially.

When that happens, walkability stops being a nice feature and starts being a genuine lifeline. Being able to walk to groceries, a café, a library, a pharmacy, a park — that’s not just convenience. That’s one of the main defences against slowly disappearing into your own house.

And yet many highly walkable places come packaged with exactly the environments some of us find genuinely hard: noise, concrete, congestion, overstimulation, the relentless visual chaos of busy streets. (See: my condo era.)

So: no perfect answer. Only trade-offs.

That might actually be one of the more useful realizations of this life stage. You stop looking for perfect solutions and start trying to find manageable compromises. Which sounds defeatist until you realize it’s actually just wisdom wearing practical shoes.

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Where I’ve Landed (For Now)

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. I’m not going to wrap this up with a confident action plan, because I don’t have one.

Stay? Downsize? Rent? Move somewhere more walkable? Stay close to nature? Simplify aggressively?

Some days one answer feels completely obvious. A week later the opposite does.

What I am doing, as a practical compromise, is quietly simplifying while I’m still in good shape. Clearing out possessions I don’t actually use. Streamlining the gardens so they require less physical work. Looking at what will realistically need to happen in the five-to-fifteen year range and trying to get ahead of it — before I no longer have the energy to manage it.

It’s not exactly a victory lap. But it feels like the right kind of honest.

And I don’t think I’m alone in any of this. The same questions show up everywhere I look — podcasts, online groups, conversations with people at exactly this age and stage. The uncertainty seems to be part of the experience, not a sign that I’m doing it wrong.

Maybe the experience of solo seniors isn’t universal at all — it probably varies wildly depending on health, finances, personality, support systems, and plain luck. But a few things seem to come up consistently:

Isolation matters. Maintenance burden matters. Walkability matters. Simplicity matters. And making decisions before a crisis almost always goes better than making them during one.

Even if none of us really want to admit we’ve arrived at the age where these things matter.

Which, unfortunately and somewhat rudely, we have.

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Have you wrestled with any of this? I’d love to hear where other solo seniors are landing on the housing question — drop your thoughts in the comments.