By Ken Falke

I was recently standing in a local grocery store when I overheard something that stuck with me.

An older woman was talking to what appeared to be her adult daughter. At one point, the woman said, quite matter-of-factly, “I don’t give a s**t what people think.”

I’ve heard older people say some version of this many times. It has almost become a cultural cliché: I’m old. I’ve earned the right to say whatever I want. I don’t care what anybody thinks.

But hearing it in a crowded grocery store made me stop and think. When did getting older become an excuse for becoming rude?

Somewhere along the way, we began confusing getting older with earning the right to disregard everyone around us. We excuse the short temper, cutting remark, condescending tone and unnecessary criticism with a shrug: That’s just the way she is. Or, He’s earned the right to say whatever he wants. They haven’t!

Getting old may bring gray hair, slower steps, a few more aches and pains and perhaps a lower tolerance for foolishness. It may give you decades of experience and a lifetime of stories. But it does not give you permission to treat other people badly.

In fact, I would argue the opposite. The longer we live, the more responsibility we have to demonstrate the character we spent a lifetime developing.

I was reminded of that recently while reading Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. It is a beautifully written novel, and I highly recommend it. At its heart is Theo, an older man who moves through a community with remarkable warmth, generosity and curiosity. Through seemingly small acts of kindness, he changes the lives of people around him.

That is the lesson I took from the book: age can make us smaller, more cynical and entitled—or it can make us kinder, wiser, and more generous.

Theo reminds us that getting older is not about caring less about other people. It can be about caring more. There is an enormous difference between not living your life for other people’s approval and not caring how you treat other people. One is freedom; the other is selfishness.

Reputation is not what we say about ourselves. It is what other people experience from us. It is how we treat the waiter when the food is wrong, the young person who doesn’t know what we know, or the receptionist, cashier, flight attendant, neighbor or stranger who happens to inconvenience us.

And yes, it is how we behave when we are tired, frustrated or angry. Anyone can be kind when life is going their way. Character reveals itself when it isn’t.

We live in a culture that increasingly celebrates being loud, blunt and unapologetic. Somehow, rudeness has been repackaged as honesty. Cruelty gets called toughness. Arrogance gets mistaken for confidence. We tell ourselves we are simply “speaking our mind” when we are often just being inconsiderate.

There is nothing courageous about making someone else feel small. There is nothing strong about humiliating a person who has less power than you. And there is certainly nothing admirable about reaching old age and becoming the person everyone hopes won’t sit next to them at dinner.

Age should make us wiser, not meaner. Experience should make us more patient, not more entitled. A lifetime of mistakes should make us more forgiving of the mistakes of others.

That doesn’t mean we have to agree with everyone. It doesn’t mean surrendering our convictions or stopping our hard truths. We can be direct without being disrespectful. We can disagree without being disagreeable. We can set boundaries without insulting people.

The difference is character.

And character matters because, in the end, very little of what we spend our lives chasing will matter nearly as much as we think it will.

Someday, if we are fortunate, people will gather at our gravesite. They may talk about our careers, the houses we lived in, the awards we received, the money we made or the titles we held.

But after a while, those details fade. What remains are the stories. What kind of parent were you? What kind of friend were you? Did people trust you? Did you make people feel valued? Did you keep your word? Did you show up when someone needed you? And perhaps most importantly, how did you make people feel when they were around you?

That is when character becomes your reputation. And your reputation is built one interaction at a time. You don’t get to retire from that responsibility. You don’t get a senior discount on decency. You don’t get a lifetime exemption from saying “please,” “thank you,” “I’m sorry,” or “I was wrong.”

Getting older is a privilege. It is an opportunity to become a better version of yourself, pass along hard-earned wisdom and leave behind an example worth following.

So perhaps as the years accumulate, we should ask ourselves a simple question: Am I becoming someone people respect more because of how I treat them, or someone they tolerate because they feel obligated to?

Because one day, we will all be remembered by someone. The question is not whether they will remember how old we were. They will remember who we were.

And long after the dates on our gravestone are forgotten, our reputation may be the most enduring thing we ever leave behind.

Ken Falke, is a 21-year veteran of the US Navy Special Operations Explosive Ordnance Disposal community. Falke is a serial entrepreneur and the chairman and founder of Boulder Crest Foundation, an organization focused on the teachings of posttraumatic growth. He is also the author of “Struggle Well: Thriving in the Aftermath of Trauma” and “Lead Well: 10 Steps to Successful and Sustainable Leadership.