‘All You Need Is Love’ Is Not Just a 60s Pipe Dream

We’ve gotta learn how to love one another.

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

When The Beatles released “All You Need Is Love in 1967 to explosive popularity, the cynics and naysayers had a field day calling it idealistic and oversimplified.

But I think “all you need is love” is the truth.

It’s not just putting a bumper sticker on your car, wearing a flower dress, or putting on a phony smile. It’s as real as your baby’s laugh, Aunt Molly’s apple pies, or your wedding ring.

You can’t find love on an X-ray or an MRI. The James Webb Space Telescope, orbiting the Sun 1 million miles from Earth, can see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang in detail, but it can’t see love.

Love is a feeling, an emotion that can’t be mass-produced, understood, or anticipated. Love happens when you least expect it. When you fall in love, the world opens up, and everything is perfect. At least that’s the case with romantic love.

But there’s a deeper kind of universal love that happens every so often in our lives, and if we quiet our minds, we make ourselves available for those moments, those peak experiences when we know everything is alright. Astronauts in the stillness of space experienced it.

Reflecting years later on the intense impact of looking back at our borderless planet from the lunar surface, Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke emphasized human unity:

“From the Moon, you don’t see any races. You don’t see any nations. You don’t see any borders. We’re all here down on Earth, and I said, we’ve gotta learn how to love one another.” Astronaut Charlie Duke on X

How to love one another

One of my dear readers on Medium, Shirley Willett, is 93, and always reads my articles and comments on them. And she signs off every time with, “Love to you.”

You see, as you get really old like Shirley and I, family and friends are dropping like flies, and the only thing left to sustain us is love. Love for ourselves and love for all of humanity.

John Lennon said while discussing the meaning behind the iconic Beatles hit he co-wrote, “I think if you get down to basics, whatever the problem is, it’s usually to do with love.”

Every time I read comments from my readers, I feel a great love for them because they’re going through the same things I’m experiencing in old age. Old age is a strict teacher, but we all just do the best we can.

And as we get into our 70s, 80s, and 90s, we have fewer and fewer close family and friends. But platforms like Medium and Substack are great places to find other seniors who are looking for support and information on how to navigate this fascinating life stage.

So my writing on Medium and Substack is my expression of love. The love of writing and the love of all the seniors out there reading me and commenting on my essays.

Your comments are what sustain me — let me know whether or not I’m hitting the target with my essays. And I love the comments because they’re so kind and thoughtful — some are 200–300 words long, almost articles in themselves.

I have never in my life felt this kind of community, and I’m glad I have the opportunity to contribute to the steadily growing senior communities on Medium and Substack.

Substack serves a mostly young audience. It has over 35 million monthly active subscribers and 5 million paid subscribers, most of whom are aged 22–44. I can’t find any statistics for how many are 65 and up, but since Substack has 35 million subscribers, there must be quite a lot of us.

Medium has approximately 1 million paid subscribers and over 50 million active monthly users (including both free and registered readers). Five percent are aged 65 and up on Medium.

I know I don’t have any trouble finding you. And there are a lot of seniors who are writing on Substack and Medium as well. Readers or writers, we are all playing our part in educating people on what it is like to grow old and continue to thrive in spite of our age.

We know that old age is not the end — it’s another beginning, a brand new beginning in which we can continue to change and grow as we did in our youth. My writing is my love and my message about old age.

All You Need Is Love was released 59 years ago, and we should stop thinking of it as a Summer of Love artifact — but an urgent message for us to adopt today.

Gary May 2026

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