An 89-Year-Old's Don't-Wait Life Advice

Judy Robbins is eighty-nine years old, and she just decided to disappear for a year. Not quietly. She burst into her daughter-in-law's kitchen one morning, breathless with an idea: rent out the house, buy a backpack, and spend a year wandering Europe with her eighty-five-year-old partner, John (00:00). The plan would start the following August, right around her ninetieth birthday (05:45). It sounds like the setup for a feel-good anecdote. It is also, on this walk-and-talk episode of the Mel Robbins Podcast, something closer to an argument: a case for why nobody, at any age, should wait for the right time to live differently.

The idea arrived the way big ideas often do, half by accident. Judy and John had gone to a light show at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, eaten a cannabis gummy, and settled in afterward for a port at the St. Regis bar. That is when she turned to him and said it out loud: why not just go (04:52)? John, who Judy describes as the complete opposite kind of person from her, a news junkie who likes his life organized and his house looked after, responded by ordering another cocktail and telling her she was out of her mind (09:34, 22:47). Three days later, by Judy's account, he still thought she was crazy. She was not deterred. She had already started solving his objections one by one: rent the house, deal with the cat later, you're healthy enough now, so what exactly are you waiting for (23:12).

Then came the detail that turned a fun idea into something closer to urgency. A friend of the family, sixty-two years old, died in a car crash three weeks before this conversation (06:50). At a memorial held at the Battenkill River in Vermont, the woman's cousin told the story of her last night alive: she had been on the phone with him, and when the call wound down, they agreed to talk again tomorrow morning over coffee. Tomorrow morning came at six-thirty. She hit a truck and died (25:04). The cousin's takeaway, which Judy repeats twice during the walk, is blunt: don't wait to say I love you, don't wait to go to the restaurant, don't wait to take the trip.

Judy had already absorbed a quieter version of the same lesson a few weeks earlier, at her regular Wednesday night of duplicate bridge, a card game played in structured rounds with a fixed partner. She mentioned to the instructor that she'd looked around the table and realized that in five years, nobody in the room would still be there (17:09). He agreed. Bridge, he told her, is a dying game, because the generation behind hers isn't learning it. It's a small, almost funny data point, but it did real work in Judy's head. If her social world has a shelf life measured in a handful of years, then whatever she wants to do, she had better start now.

The Arithmetic of Running Out

Mel Robbins, host and Judy's daughter-in-law, pushes on this idea as they walk a familiar loop in Vermont with Mel's husband, Chris, and two dogs. Judy keeps a number in mind: she wants to live to ninety-eight, maybe a hundred if I had a mind, she says, meaning if her memory and judgment are still intact (20:32). She doesn't treat this as morbid. She treats it as useful. Having a target age, she argues, gives a person something to aim at instead of just letting the days pass.

"Why wait? What are we waiting for?" (Judy Robbins, [06:40])

That question becomes the engine of the conversation. Judy's case is simple: she and John are currently healthy enough to carry a backpack and get on a train without a cane or a walker, something she notes many of her friends now need (06:22). That window won't stay open forever. Waiting for next week, she argues, is really just a polite way of hoping the opportunity will still be there later, with no evidence that it will.

The conversation also drifts into money. Judy observes that many people her age refuse to spend savings on experiences because they feel obligated to preserve an inheritance for their children (33:14). She calls it an inherited habit, one she recognizes in herself from her own father, who could not keep the electricity on but would still buy silver the moment a client paid him (32:10). Mel pushes back gently: she doesn't expect an inheritance from her own parents, and she would rather see people spend on the life in front of them than leave money untouched for someone else's convenience (33:38).

To Be Interesting, Stay Interested

Midway through the walk, Judy brings up something Oprah said to Mel on an earlier episode: that everyone is here for a reason, and once a person figures out what that reason is, the job is to keep acting on it rather than rest on it (29:55). Judy decided her reasons are that she connects people and that she inspires them, and she takes the second one seriously enough to keep generating things worth being inspired by.

She connects this to older advice she once gave her son Chris, when he was eleven years old and sitting silently at a dinner table while adults talked around him. She told him then: if you're not interested in other people, you will not be an interesting person yourself (34:59).

"If you're not interested, you will not be interesting." (Judy Robbins, [35:05])

She sharpens this into an observation about why older people often get tuned out: it has less to do with age and more to do with talking mostly about childhood, career, and aches and pains instead of asking questions (35:29). The backpack trip, in this light, is also a supply run for interestingness: new countries and new people to bring home as stories, instead of another recap of the same complaints.

Mel's closing argument ties the walk together: the moment a person commits out loud to a decision, something shifts, from hunting for excuses to hunting for a workable path forward (38:13). Judy didn't wait until she had a fully worked-out plan before she said it to John at the bar. She said it first, half-formed, and has been solving the logistics ever since.

The episode ends with Mel turning to her own travel habits (41:36), a practical coda to an otherwise philosophical walk: pack for comfort, cancel the noise, carry a sentimental object, treat flight time as a private work block, and drink enough water. These are smaller stakes than Judy's plan, but they share the same spirit, which is deciding in advance how to make a chapter, even a six-hour one, worth having.

What makes the episode land is that nobody involved pretends this is easy. John still thinks his partner is out of her mind. Judy admits she hasn't fully convinced him. The trip might not happen exactly as planned, or at all. But the decision has already done its work. Judy walked into a kitchen and said the thing out loud, and once she said it, there was no quiet way back to bridge on Wednesdays and golf in the summer, at least not as the whole story.