The birthday card says 67. The thought that follows might be: "I should still have the energy I had at 40."

In On Old Age, Cicero had Cato ask which of the things people dread actually come with age. It's a question worth asking before the next birthday.

Cicero wrote the dialogue in 44 BCE, when he was about 62, and gave its arguments to Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman in his eighties (On Old Age, Evelyn Shuckburgh's translation). Cato works through the fears people attach to growing older and asks whether each one is really the fault of age. Here are eight beliefs that people who soften into their later years often seem to have let go.

1. "Getting older will make me bitter"

Montaigne feared exactly this. "Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face," he wrote, adding that souls very rarely grow old without coming to "smell sour and musty" (Essays 3.2, "Of Repentance", Charles Cotton's translation).

Cicero's Cato disagreed. He had known many old men who "never said a word of complaint against old age," and he concluded that "the blame for all complaints of that kind is to be charged to character, not to a particular time of life." People who are "reasonable and neither cross-grained nor churlish find old age tolerable enough," he said, "whereas unreason and churlishness cause uneasiness at every time of life" (ch. 3).

In other words, a sour 70-year-old was often a sour 40-year-old too. That's encouraging, because it suggests bitterness isn't simply a side effect of the calendar. When crankiness does appear in later life, it can also have causes worth addressing, such as pain, loneliness or feeling dismissed. Noticing those, rather than assuming bitterness is inevitable, leaves room to do something about them.

2. "My best work is behind me"

Cato pointed to people who kept producing into very old age. Plato, he said, "died at his writing-desk in his eighty-first year" (ch. 5). Isocrates began writing his Panathenaicus at 94, as he notes at the start of the speech (Panathenaicus 3, George Norlin's translation).

His favorite example was the playwright Sophocles. According to the story Cato tells, Sophocles's sons took him to court, claiming he was too feeble-minded to manage his property. The old poet read the jury the play he had just written, Oedipus at Colonus, and asked whether it seemed like "the work of a man of weak intellect." He was acquitted (ch. 7).

Not everyone will write a masterpiece at 90, and the story may have grown in the telling. But "my best is behind me" is a belief, not a fact. Many people find that later life brings work of a different kind, often more patient and less driven by other people's expectations.

3. "My mind is bound to go"

Cato was blunt on this point. "Old men retain their intellects well enough, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed," he said. He also noted that older people "remember everything that interests them," from business appointments to who owes them money (ch. 7).

Cato was overconfident by modern standards. Conditions such as dementia aren't a matter of effort or attitude, and no one should blame themselves or a loved one for them. But for many people, the fear of decline can arrive long before any real change, and it can lead them to give up on learning too early.

Staying curious, reading, learning a skill and keeping up conversations are worthwhile for their own sake. If memory or thinking does seem to be changing, that's worth raising with a doctor rather than quietly worrying about.

4. "I should still want what I wanted at 30"

Cato thought each stage of life had its own gifts. "To each part of our life there is something specially seasonable," he said. Children have their feebleness, youth its high spirit, maturity its soberness and old age its "ripe wisdom," and each has "a certain natural advantage which should be secured in its proper season." His advice about the strength of youth was simple: "enjoy that blessing when you have it; when it is gone, don't wish it back" (ch. 10).

A lot of dread around birthdays comes from measuring the present against an earlier season: the energy of your thirties, the career of your forties, the body of your twenties. Those comparisons rarely end well.

A more useful question is: "What does this season offer that earlier ones didn't?" For many people, the answer includes more time, fewer obligations and a clearer sense of what matters.

5. "Needing more help means losing my say"

Cato compared an older person to the steersman of a ship. While some of the crew climb the masts, others hurry along the gangways and others pump out the bilge water, the steersman sits quietly in the stern holding the tiller. "He does not do what young men do; nevertheless he does what is much more important and better," Cato said. "The great affairs of life are not performed by physical strength, or activity, or nimbleness of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion" (ch. 6).

He's sitting still, but he's steering the ship. Cato thought older people should keep hold of that role. Old age is respectable, he said, "just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one" (ch. 11).

That applies in ordinary ways today. If your family starts making plans for you without asking, it's reasonable to say, "I'd like to be part of that decision." Needing help doesn't mean handing over your say.

6. "It's too late to start anything new"

Cato described elderly farmers in the Sabine country, neighbors of his, without whom hardly any important sowing or harvesting got done. That didn't surprise him, he said, because "no one is so old as to think that he may not live a year." What impressed him more was that these old men also planted trees they would never see grow tall, for the generation after them (ch. 7).

That gives a different reason to begin something late. You don't have to be there for the harvest for the planting to be worthwhile.

A garden, a recorded family history, a skill taught to a grandchild or a small project in your community can all outlast the person who starts it. If you've been putting something off because it feels too late, try asking: "Who might be glad I started this, years from now?"

7. "Every birthday is just a countdown"

Cato didn't avoid the hardest belief on his list. He described death in old age as natural rather than violent: "just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old." He even found something consoling in it: "as I approach nearer to death, I seem as it were to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage" (ch. 19).

Not everyone will share Cato's calm, and grief about getting older is real. But treating each birthday only as a number subtracted from what's left tends to make the remaining years feel smaller.

Some people find it helps to mark birthdays differently: as a chance to look back on the year, to notice what went well and to choose one thing to look forward to in the next.

8. "Aging well is just a matter of luck or money"

When Cato's young friend Laelius suggested that wealth and position made old age easy for him, Cato didn't deny it entirely. "There is something in that, Laelius, but by no means all," he replied. A wise person couldn't find old age easy "in the depths of poverty," he admitted, but neither could a fool find it "anything but a burden though he were a millionaire." The best preparation, in his view, was "culture and the active exercise of the virtues" (ch. 3).

Health, money and support make an enormous difference, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise. But they aren't the whole story. Habits of curiosity, kindness and engagement, built over years, also shape how later life feels.

The good news is that, unlike luck, those habits can be practiced at any age.

Softening into age doesn't mean pretending it's easy

Cicero's Cato was a wealthy, powerful man speaking in an idealized dialogue. Real aging can bring illness, loss, financial strain and loneliness, and no change of belief makes those disappear. Feeling sad or anxious about getting older is a reasonable response, not a failure of attitude.

The aim isn't to force cheerfulness. It's to notice which fears are based on what's actually happening, and which are assumptions you can set down.

One place to start

Before your next birthday, write down the belief about aging that weighs on you most. Then ask Cato's question: is this really a feature of age, or of something else, like health, loneliness or habit?

If it's something else, pick one small step to address it this year. If it's simply age, look for one thing this season offers that an earlier one didn't.