EVERYONE ONE DAY –
May 1, 2026 – I recently came across “The Smallest of Joys,” the new book by Diane Shiffer, the 69-year-old TikTok star known as Your Chubby Vintage Nana. In it, she writes that weirdness isn’t “a flaw to fix, but a thread to follow” back to “your truest self.” So I decided to ask her and a few researchers about embracing our “inner weirdo” as we get older. While “inner weirdo” wasn’t a term many of them used in their research (and they all cautioned that there’s no universal experience of old age), they did give me a few ideas to support my theory. Rebecca Schlegel, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at Texas A&M University who studies the “true self,” told me people can feel that they become more authentic over time. In her research, participants aged 19 to 67 were asked to think about life as if it were a book and rate each “chapter” using an authenticity scale.
