A note for readers following David’s story
It’s been a while since the last chapter. The conversations with David never stopped. The publishing did, for a stretch. We’re back, and this is Chapter 7. A few more chapters remain before the series closes, including a couple of stories David has been saving for the right moment. Thank you for staying with it.
David Thiermann has interviewed two people who lived to 103.
Both were women. He spoke with them on separate days, in separate conversations, with no chance for comparison. He asked each the same question: can you give me some advice about whatever?
Both gave him the same answer.
Whatever you do, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.
He has been thinking about that for years. Two people who outlasted nearly everyone they knew, who had watched the world change from a distance most of us will never reach, and they both pointed to the same thing. Humor. Specifically: don’t lose it. The phrasing itself is a clue. “Develop a sense of humor” is one kind of advice. “Don’t lose the one you have” is another kind entirely. As if humor is a possession that can slip away while you’re not paying attention.
David pays attention.
Some days he gets too serious. He notices it the way you’d notice a change in weather: gradually, then all at once. The spiral downward, he calls it. Once it starts, it moves fast. The thing that stops it is a joke. A pun. A moment where he can make himself or someone else laugh.
He lives this deliberately.
In our last conversation, he was on camera with me and decided, mid-sentence, that I needed a laugh. He told me he wasn’t sure whether I was an introvert or an extrovert, but that I might be a pervert. He said it with the timing of someone who has practiced this, because he has. The room changed. We moved on lighter than we arrived.
That is a decision.
I recognized it because I do the same thing. A few weeks ago I was leaving Target with my wife, arms full, and the theft alarm went off at the door. The employee told us we were fine. I turned to my wife and yelled, “Run.” It landed. We laughed the whole way to the car. I made a choice to say it in the moment, because I know what happens when I don’t: when I just walk through the door and move on to the next thing on the list.
The good time doesn’t always show up on its own. You build it.
The same week, I had been reading research on intergenerational contact. I had spent a Friday afternoon with Andrew Middleton, who runs a program in the UK called INDY: I’m Not Done Yet. During our meeting, he mentioned a young colleague, somewhere in her early twenties, and described how much he learns from her. It stopped me.
I had been thinking of intergenerational exchange as a gift flowing in one direction: the experienced giving to the inexperienced. The research says otherwise. The World Health Organization has published data showing that positive intergenerational contact produces benefits for everyone across the exchange. The younger person learns from the older. The older person learns from the younger. The direction runs both ways, and the research is consistent on this.
When I shared this with David, he went straight to Tanzania.
He learned a Swahili greeting there in the 1960s that encodes the same principle. In the that culture, when a younger person meets an elder, the standard greeting changes. Instead of the usual exchange, the younger person says: Shikamoo. It means, literally, I hold your feet. I am at your feet. Under you.
The required response from the elder is: marahaba. I accept your respect.
The greeting names the hierarchy of age out loud and confirms it on both sides before anything else happens. The elder does not perform humility. The younger person does not pretend the difference doesn’t exist. They both say what’s true, and then they talk.
In the same week of research, I found that the generation reporting the most intense experience of ageism in Europe is ages 15 to 24. Young people who feel looked down upon, too inexperienced to have an opinion worth hearing, consistently dismissed by the generations above them. No equivalent study has been done in the United States, though I would not expect dramatically different results.
Shikamoo runs in both directions. Respect across age gaps is a discipline both generations practice toward each other, or neither does it well.
David is 80. He races bicycles. He plays thumb piano for people in retirement communities. He asked me in our last session what it would take to become one of our coaches at Betweenward. He is, by his own account, the only student enrolled at Santa Cruz University: the name he gave his life. Every person who sits across from him is a professor.
He is also, unmistakably, curious. I have been watching it across seven months of conversations. He comes in every week having already been somewhere: a thought, a book, a bat fact, a Swahili greeting he wanted me to have. He does not wait for curiosity to arrive. He goes looking for it.
I asked him directly: is this just who you are, or is this something you built?
He said he’d need two weeks to answer properly. That is itself an answer. A man who, when asked how he maintains his appetite for the world, says let me sit with that and come back with something worth saying.
He did offer one early thought. He told me, with full honesty and no apology, that his curiosity has always been linked to the women in his life. The ones who were smart, who told good stories, who made him laugh. The most curious and productive periods of his life lined up, when he looked back, with the presence of someone like that. Then he said: if we ever put women fully in charge of everything, including the politics, the world will be a better place for all of us. Guys had a nice run. It was a nice try.
He was not performing. He meant it.
I keep coming back to the two women.
One hundred and three years each. Separate conversations, no coordination, identical answers. Whatever you do, don’t ever lose your sense of humor.
They named humor. They spoke of the thing that lets you stay light enough to survive the heavy parts. David’s version of this is practiced rather than passive. It is a skill he has been sharpening since he was 19 years old in Tanzania, learning to be a mjanja: the clever one, the improviser who can pull a room into a story. The man who plays a parking meter and hands the cop his attorney’s business card. The man who, when the moment gets too serious, finds the word that cracks it open.
He is 80. He still does this every week.
The two women who lived to 103 would recognize him immediately.
Where we go next
I asked David to spend the next two weeks figuring out how he made curiosity a habit. How he kept choosing it. Through machine guns in Rio. Through the years selling oranges door to door. Through the graduate program he walked out of, the restaurant he burned out of, the metaphysical license that cost him a story.
We meet on May 4th. He will have sat with the question. I will find out what 40 years of career counseling and 80 years of living have taught him about keeping the appetite alive.
David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is, by his own account, an improviser. He is also, by the account of two women who each lived to 103, doing something right.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).