At 36, I moved into a building with mostly older and retired people. I have plenty of friends, and my life is fulfilling.

• Jennifer Rosner, 42, moved to a building in a Chicago suburb where most residents are older.
• Rosner has built fulfilling friendships and has a friend group spanning three generations.
• Living with older people has taught Rosner the value of enjoying life in the moment.

This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with Jennifer Rosner, 42, who lives in the suburbs of Chicago. At 36, Rosner moved into an apartment complex with mostly older residents. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2019, I had moved jobs, and the office was in the suburbs. I didn't want to commute from downtown Chicago, so I decided to bite the bullet and go to the suburbs. It's a slower life and not great for dating. Everyone's married with children.

I moved into a newly built apartment building, and it turned out to be predominantly older people. I hadn't assumed that it was going to be an older group at first. Many downsized from big homes. We actually align really well in terms of life stage. I've never gotten married or had children, and I probably won't at 42, whereas they already have done all that with their kids grown.

When I first moved in a few months prior to the pandemic, I was a private, autonomous person. I couldn't help but run into people and talk to them. I soon found out that everyone here loves to talk and hang out. They force themselves to talk to you. I wasn't sure, though, if I wanted to hang out with an 85-year-old on a Saturday night. Turns out that it's a lot of fun.

Have you moved into a retirement community before or right at 55? Have you made a major home renovation to age in place or bought a retirement home years before retiring? Please reach out to [email protected] to share your story.

It started off with me going to community events. One person started a book club. Another wanted to talk about current events. There was a canasta training one night. As a corporate person, my life is fairly empty. I'm going to work, and I like to write and hang out with family and a group of people my age. I became self-aware and asked myself why I couldn't do more things. I forced myself to update the way I was behaving.

I was helping my neighbors get their vaccines scheduled because they couldn't get online to the right place. I wanted to make friends with them without it feeling like a parent-child relationship. There are things I've done that a child probably does, like drive them to a doctor's appointment. It feels like an additional extended group of people I need to watch out for, and vice versa.

I'm an old soul

I'm an only child and have no cousins in my age range. I never went to day care. My mom would bring me along everywhere, and the same thing with my dad when he wasn't working. The three of us were like a pod.

I certainly was socialized and had lots of nice interactions with people my own age. But I was definitely more consumed with an older group of people. I also have three aunts on my dad's side who do not have children. I had really great grandparents who were fun, social, and young-spirited. My dad's mom is now 101.

It's more of a nurture-than-nature situation. I've always had a taste for older music. I was really obsessed with Tony Bennett. I watched lots of Mel Brooks and shows from the Borscht Belt. I was probably alive in the 1950s and have been reincarnated as a 42-year-old in 2026.

It's been easy to make friends

It's been hard for me to find people in my age group who are available to do what I want. My priorities are different from those of people my own age right now. I'm not having to save money for someone's college education or to scoot somebody out of soccer practice. I avoid the drama in mom chats.

At the same time, it can get lonely. It was really serendipitous and unintentional that I found this group of older women here who want to do everything together. They want to see a movie at 10 p.m. because they can. They want to go to dinner on a Tuesday because they can. They want to walk at whatever hour because they can.

They have a ton to share and have done a lot I haven't done yet or will never do. I'm learning from them, and they're learning from me. It's very symbiotic.

There's something happening here, which I can already tell has the foundational elements of a reciprocal relationship. Over the last four years, the group has gotten smaller. People naturally fade in and out, and some people die. Others moved out or moved in.

I have two super close friends here whom I hang out with all the time. We never run out of things to say. We've talked about hosting a recruitment fair, setting up a table in the lobby, almost like sorority rush. Whenever someone moves in, we talk about whether they would be a fun person to incorporate. There are definitely factions here, but everyone is still cordial and says hello.

Every Saturday night, there's an outing with three to four women. We get dinner, explore Chicago, run errands, and shop. We occasionally see movies. The building gets a lot quieter in the winter because a whole chunk of them go to Florida. It's sometimes hard to schedule because many of them pick up odd jobs like working at a pilates studio or running small businesses.

I've learned so much from living with these people

I've always had very good financial literacy, and I live within my means. Talking to these women has been a huge wake-up call that I'd better stay on my savings journey because there's a long road ahead of me, if I'm lucky. Some of these people need to work, or their retirement plans aren't super sound even if they are retired, and that scares me. I don't want to be 80 and have to wake up to an alarm to go to a job.

I do have some anticipatory grief. Sometimes, I have existential anxiety about getting older and not having many people around. I do have some friends in my age group, but many are 30 years older than I am. God willing, I live a long life, and they live long lives, but they will die first if things go according to plan, and that would 100% devastate me. I think a lot about how to plan correctly so I'm not taking myself to my own colonoscopies.

I really enjoy my life, and I can't say if this was the right or wrong decision because there could have been a better life path for me, but I wouldn't know it. I learned not to hold myself to a script because nothing ever happens the way it should. Life happens first, and if you give in and enjoy the moment, that's a satisfying life. People die sooner because they're lonely, and it really doesn't take much to spark a conversation with another person. I fly by the seat of my pants and do the things that make me happy.