The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

When the masks finally come off

There's something both liberating and unsettling about the idea that we spend most of our lives performing—keeping up appearances, managing how others see us, playing roles that feel necessary or safe. But what Pavese captures is that this performance eventually becomes exhausting in a way that forces honesty. When you're older, you've got less time to invest in the charade, so the stakes of pretending somehow drop away.

This matters now because we're constantly curating ourselves online and in real life. We're all still at that masquerade party, except it never seems to end. The twist is that you don't have to wait until the final years to drop your mask. Some of the happiest people you know probably realized earlier that the energy spent maintaining a false version of themselves was mostly wasted—that people generally prefer authenticity, messiness and all. The real relief comes not from aging, but from deciding that you're tired enough of performing to stop.

That said, there's a gentler reading too: maybe the masks aren't entirely fake. They're just protective, necessary costumes for living among others. The freedom at the end isn't about finally being "real"—it's about accepting that you've been doing your best all along, and that's enough.