happiness

I’m putting a flyer together for my upcoming talk at the KGB Bar, and ran it past a colleague who’s a designer. She got halfway through the headline—“a monologue about why Americans are so ambivalent about growing old”—and blurted, “I’m not ambivalent about it!”

 “How do you feel about getting old?” I asked.

 “I’m terrified!”

 “Do you want to die young?” Stephanie shook her head. 

 “Then you’re ambivalent.” D’oh. 

One more for my "greying of the cover girl" series—cross-cultural and cross-dressing this time around. A 72-year-old grandfather, Liu Xianping, has become something of an internet sensation after he began modeling for his granddaughter's online clothing store. Turns out he's a natural.

At 50, Karl Pillemer had a revelation about his career.  After 25 years as gerontologist, he found himself focused almost entirely on problems like elder abuse and isolation: “the Book of Job for older people,” as he put it at the 2012 Age Boom seminar for journalists. This conformed to the general portrayal of olders as frail and debilitated, and was reinforced by researchers “because focusing on problems is how we get funding.” But not only had this stopped feeling fulfilling, it didn’t jibe with his actual experience, and so an outreach project was born.

By way of swag, everyone attending last week’s five-day Columbia Journalism School Age Boom Academy on “Covering the myths and realities of aging in America” received a canvas tote packed with print hand-outs. I was struck by a juxtaposition between two that I read the first night.

“There’s an interesting story in the paper today about aging,” said my partner yesterday morning.  He and I and I are inveterate fans of the Sunday New York Times Style section, where the lead story was that of Bob Bergeron, a therapist in New York whose suicide at 47 had taken everyone by surprise.  

Imagine a bunch of 35 year olds and a bunch of 85 year olds.  Which is happier? The 35-year-olds, right? That’s what each group answers.  But ask each to assess its own well-being and the older people come out ahead. This fact surprises (even me! even though I’ve written about it a lot!) because we’re so deeply conditioned to envision life after youth as decline.  Yet it turns out that “Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.”

Somewhere along the way, it becomes painfully obvious that youth is indeed wasted on the young.  “If only we’d known then what we know now,” we muse.  We’d have taken that job overseas, dumped that creep sooner, flossed nightly . . . and things would have turned out better.