Laura Carstensen

Thank you.

Pleasure to be with you.

My priorities were dating, exploring, and thinking about future jobs and possibilities and where I would live and what I was going to do the next day, the next week, the next year.

not a lot about my future.

I didn't think at all about aging.

Yeah, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant and a bunch of us after closing decided we would go to a concert.

It was about an hour outside of town and we, you know, divided up into cars, drove out and we went to this concert.

At the end of the evening, we said, well, let's go back and play some pool.

So we divided up again into different cars and started to head back to town.

I happened to get in the car with a man I hardly knew who was very drunk.

And I caught on to that pretty quickly and asked him to stop.

I remember putting my hand out on the dashboard as he was going ever faster.

And that was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a ditch on the side of the road.

He drove off the road and rolled down an embankment.

The car turned two or three times over.

And I broke about 20-plus bones.

But my left leg was injured most badly.

My femur cracked in half, and I had many other fractures through the knee and the ankle.

And I cracked ribs.

I had a concussion, lots of facial lacerations.

Lots and lots of injuries.

Yes.

For the first couple of weeks, they couldn't do surgery because I had been injured so badly they couldn't give me anesthesia.

So those were the toughest two weeks.

And then they began a surgery, but mostly they just kept my leg open.

hanging in the air.

It's that cartoonish image, you know, you have of someone laying in a hospital bed and the leg is being held upwards and that would keep it somewhat straight.

Yes.

Certainly there was the expectation that I may not make it.

I remember at a point during that time, I wished I wouldn't make it.

In hindsight, I remember thinking there are things worse than dying.

But I kept sort of becoming unconscious, but then coming out of it again in those early days and, you know, eventually started to heal.

I, like many people who have these near-death experiences...

Completely changed how I thought about life.

And suddenly life was something I didn't take for granted anymore.

And life wasn't to be lived for fun and entertainment and exploration.

I, for the first time, really saw how valuable time was.

And for that, I felt incredible gratitude to be surrounded by people who really cared about me.

And my parents came to visit, my siblings came to visit, my dad came every day.

And I don't know what I would have done without that connection to the outside world and without

the knowledge that I was embedded in a group of people who cared.

The way I remember this, it was about a month and a half before I thought about much of anything other than my injuries and

how badly I had been hurt.

But then I started to kind of wake up, if you will, and I started to get bored.

When you lay flat on your back with your leg up in the air, strung up in the air, there's just so much you can do day to day.

And I got really bored.

He had always wanted me to go to college.

I had not gone to college up to that point.

I was 21 in this accident.

And he suggested when I complained about being bored that maybe I should take a course.

And I was kind of resistant to it.

And he said, really, just name a course.

And he would go tape the lectures and bring them to me.

So I took introductory psychology as a hospital patient laying flat on my back with my leg tied in the air.

My dad was a saint, yes.

My dad was a biophysicist, by the way, and when he first asked me what I wanted to take, I was like saying, oh, not physics.

And he said, no, anything, anything.

And so, yes, he went to every lecture of introductory psychology with a tape recorder and tape recorded the lectures and brought them to me in the hospital.

Well, I had gotten to know the nurses.

You know, again, you're with the same people day after day.

And so we had begun to talk a little bit and I complained to them about being bored.

And they said, we've got an assignment for you.

There are a lot of older women who come into the orthopedic ward, and we're going to put them in this room with you.

I was on a four-bed ward, and your job is to talk to them and keep them alert so they don't get confused and so on.

So we're giving you that job.

So two things happened.

One, I'm taking introductory psychology, and the second one is I've now been assigned to talk to older women.

Well, really, this was about helping me.

They were trying to give me a gift of a job.

So many things.

I learned so much from this experience about aging.

For one, their lives were so different from one another and their personalities and their outlooks on life were so different from one another that to the extent that I had stereotypes about what older people were like, they went quite far in challenging those stereotypes.

One woman that I shared a room with was a matriarch of her family, and these young kids would come in and sit on the bed and talk to her.

There were other women who were really...

sad, really in a tough situation.

I remember one woman in the hospital room who had to sell her home in order to pay the hospital bill before they would discharge her.

And so she had to be transferred to a nursing home instead of back to her own home.

And it was all for financial reasons.

There was another woman who just kind of laid in her bed and stared at the ceiling all day.

And, you know, the physicians would come in, they'd surround my bed, they'd be trying to do all sorts of things to help rehabilitate me, get me better, thinking about my future.

And then they would just wave to her on the way out the door, say, hey, Sadie, you know, and just keep going.

They didn't pay much attention to her at all.

There was another insight I had from spending so much time with these older women who were also

spending all their days in bed, being cared for by other people.

And that insight was just how much we had in common.

So I was 21 and these women were, you know, in their 70s and 80s and probably 90s.

But we were all dependent on other people for everything from, you know, being fed to staying clean to having any social interaction.

I mean, everything we were dependent on.

So suddenly I shared these characteristics that I would have thought of as characteristics of old people or sick people.

But now it was me too.

And so that also changed.

And it made me think about the world and how the world comes to shape who we are.

And the one insight I had about aging, or at least was at the beginnings of my thinking about aging, was that aging is a biological process, but it's driven, shaped by the social world.

And that was the insight that led me to be interested in the science of aging.

Oh, it was grim indeed.

Aging was considered to be a serious threat to virtually everyone's mental health.

There was a clinical psychology textbook that I had when I was in graduate school.

So this was a textbook on psychopathology.

They had a chapter on anxiety, a chapter on depression, a chapter on drug abuse, and then they end a chapter on old age.

So old age itself was considered pathological.

The whole range.

And, you know, at the time, people also believed that Alzheimer's disease was the inevitable consequence of aging.

So that cognitive impairment would begin and would eventually progress to dementia and

So that that was the fate of people who lived very long lives.

Yes, this was an epidemiological catchment area study of mental health.

conducted in the early 1980s.

And it was not a study designed about old age at all.

It was a study that was designed so that the researchers could get a better estimate of different forms of psychopathology in the community.

And so what they did was to have trained clinicians go out into the communities

and interview a representative sample of people in a number of different geographical areas around the country.

So it was the best epidemiological study of mental health that had been done in this country, probably anywhere at the time.

The results of it were to give them pretty good estimates of the prevalence of anxiety, depression, phobias, etc., etc.,

And one of the findings that was embedded in this set of findings about prevalence was that the prevalence of every form of psychopathology, with the exception of the dementias, was observed at lower rates in older people than middle-aged or younger people.

And this really turned on its head, the idea that psychopathology, mental health problems, depression, anxiety, were part and parcel of growing old.

We studied a whole range of positive emotions and negative emotions.

We wanted to understand what emotional experience in day-to-day life was like.

So we knew from this large study of mental health problems that they had lower rates of that, but we didn't know a lot about what day-to-day emotional experience

Life was like an old age.

And so at the time, we designed a study using what was then the gold standard, probably still is, of studying emotional experience in day-to-day life.

And we gave people pagers, electronic pagers, and they carried them for a week.

And at random times during each of seven days, we paged them and asked them to tell us the extent to which they were feeling each of 19 different emotions.

Some were positive emotions like joy, happiness, calm.

Some were negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear.

And so we had this detailed process.

record now for individuals about their emotional lives.

We found that

increasingly older people had fewer negative emotions, less anger reported, less fear, less disgust, and just as much happiness, joy, calm.

And so this was consistent with these findings about psychopathology as well, right?

Now we had a normal, healthy population from the community, and we were observing something similar.

It wasn't just us who worried about it.

It was the whole field that was in disbelief.

So the general public kind of didn't buy it.

More importantly, the scientific community was very eager to scrutinize these findings and figure out what was wrong.

And in science, nothing better can happen than that.

Having a finding that lots of other laboratories, lots of other investigators say, I don't quite believe it.

I'm going to look at it this way.

Maybe X explains it.

Maybe Y explains it.

So there was one alternative that people were reporting that they were happy because they didn't have the cognitive ability to really ruminate and generate lots of negative emotions.

If you can't remember how upset you were yesterday and how people treated you, then you're not going to feel bad about it.

So one was that cognitive impairment was actually leading to more happiness.

Lots of studies have looked at the relationship between everything from executive functioning and education to intelligence and this positive outlook on life.

And it's the reverse.

So people with the highest levels of executive function and cognitive abilities and education, those are the ones showing this effect the strongest.

So we ruled that one out.

Then there was a hypothesis generated by many in the field of psychiatry that was called masked depression.

That is, really older people were terribly depressed, but they were covering that up because it was a way of keeping it from others, but more importantly, fooling themselves.

So we did studies and others did studies where we would have people

experience different kinds of emotions while they were in brain scanners and be able to look at activation of different regions of the brain.

And again, you couldn't explain it through a lack of activation.

And a lot of research was done to try to explain or reconcile that this was really just cognitive impairment or brain impairment.

It was really about something else.

But with every study, it became clear that this was a highly reliable finding.

Older people were happier in their day-to-day lives on balance than younger people were.

Well, the paradox really was that aging entails a lot of bad things.

You know, cognitively, people often do change, feel that memory isn't as good, attention is tougher to keep in focus.

Not to mention the physical changes with age.

Most of us experience more aches and pains.

So all these things are changing.

And then we're in the societal context again.

People aren't taking us as seriously as they used to.

You know, there's an invisibility people talk about when they get old that people walk almost right through them and they're just not noticed.

And so if all of that's happening with aging and there it is.

How could it be that older people are emotionally doing well?

Yeah, it challenged all of our basic assumptions about what gives us happiness, right?

It's having a lot of friends.

You know, it's having a bright future.

And here, you know, the older we get, the closer we are to death.

You know, how could it possibly be that people get happier?

Right.

Yes.

One day I interviewed two sisters who lived together in an apartment in San Francisco and

It was an apartment that housed a lot of older people.

And they were talking to me about how sad they were that they had lost many good friends and relatives as they had gotten older.

And I said to them, what about new friends?

There are a lot of people who live here in this building.

Do you reach out to them?

Do you want to make new friends?

And I remember them giving me this kind of blank stare like you just don't get it.

And they said, Laura, we don't have time for those people.

And I looked at them and first thought, you don't have time?

Come on, you've got a lot of time on your hands, don't you?

And then I went away and they were kind enough to send me off and be sweet to me.

But I went home and I remember sitting at my dining room table

staring out at the San Francisco skyline.

And it was this moment where I feel like I had kind of an epiphany where I said, it's about time.

And I realized that it wasn't about time in the day.

It was about time left in life.

And if our time horizons are changing, if they're getting shorter as we grow older, then our goals may systematically change.

And everything in my life and my research changed after that evening.

I didn't know that I was going to make it through those months of recuperating.

And the idea of exploring this very large world full of possibilities was of no interest to me either during that time.

But I did care about things.

It wasn't a flattening of emotions.

It was a very sharp focus of what matters and what doesn't.

And it's very much tied to time.

Time left.

Humans, to the best of our knowledge, are the only species that appreciates our mortality throughout most of our lives.

So there are other species like elephants, lions, they probably know when they are dying.

But we anticipate how much time we have left throughout the course of our lives.

And we do this subconsciously most of the time.

And then every once in a while, events occur.

that prime mortality, it could be the death of a friend or a terrorist attack, you know, a war, something happens that reminds us that we're mortal and we're not going to live forever.

We don't have all the time in the world.

And as we get older, we increasingly experience those kinds of reminders.

And so we come to take account of time and remember

Value time differently.

Goals change systematically as our time horizons change.

It's an interesting question because when we began this, we thought younger people think about their futures a lot and they envision their futures as very, very long.

It turns out the more we've studied this that a clearer answer, a more accurate answer is that younger people don't think there are any constraints on time.

So they don't think about the future so much in terms of how much left there is.

It's that it's just vast.

It's abundant.

They don't need to think about time.

And it's really the shift as we grow older where we come to think about time more, how much time we have left.

But for young people, they have all the time in the world, essentially.

Social networks get smaller as people get older.

And I should note that this was part of the thinking about the paradox of aging.

Because social relationships are what bring us our greatest happiness, there was thinking that if networks in older people were smaller than they were in younger people, then older people must not be as happy.

That was basically the thinking there.

Instead, it appears that what happens is that over time, social networks get smaller, but they're very well honed.

And so the people who are retained in the networks are those that are most important, the people who are most predictable, most valuable individuals.

in our lives.

And those are the relationships that stay.

And we let these other more distant acquaintance-like relationships fade away.

But what it means then is that our social networks, as we get older, are more emotionally dense.

They're people who we really care about.

And so there's a real benefit to that kind of a social network.

Exactly.

I try to explain this to undergraduates who are having a hard time grasping that.

Like I say, imagine that you only had one week left in a city that you'd been exploring.

Do you want to try another new restaurant or do you want to go to your favorite restaurant in that last time out?

And I think that's some of what's happening with age.

exploration is extremely adaptive when time horizons are long.

We need to learn.

We need to explore.

We need to collect.

Because those kinds of things could be useful.

And especially if your time horizon is so vast, right?

Anything could happen.

So meeting somebody at a party, even somebody you may not particularly like, right?

could end up being an important contact five years from now when you're looking for a job.

So people are collecting, and they're very open to that.

But as time horizons are shorter, we focus.

We focus, we savor, we see better what's important and what's not.

I think this is one of the most interesting findings.

Brains do not take in information evenly, but rather goals direct our attention, goals direct our memories, goals direct cognitive resources.

And so with colleagues of mine,

Mara Mather and Susan Charles, we began to think one day about whether these changes and goals that we had documented widely in social preferences and social networks would be represented in fundamental aspects of cognitive processing.

And we began to run a study, which since has become widely replicated, called

But it was a study where we presented positive, negative, and neutral stimuli to younger, middle-aged, and older adults.

And we had them sit in front of a computer screen, and they would go through the images.

And then after they've done this viewing, tell us all the images you remember.

And what we find is that younger people remember almost the same numbers of positive and negative images.

By middle age, we see a preference in memory for the positive images, and in old age, that preference is whopping.

That is, older people are remembering almost exclusively the positive images, and they're not recalling the negative, nor the neutral ones.

And so that was the first time we'd seen this.

It was a little surprising to us because we weren't

exactly clear why people would selectively attend to positive and not negative too, because negative could be emotionally meaningful.

And we thought this was super interesting.

We then ran a study of autobiographical memory, again, same finding, using neuroimaging, where you look at amygdala activation in response to the negative, the neutral, the positive.

And again, what we see is more amygdala activation in response to positive viewings,

than the viewing of negative images in older people.

And again, let me loop this back to some of the thinking about how negative aging was years ago.

Prior to the study we did, and this was a study published in the early 2000s, but prior to that, there'd only been one study where they looked at amygdala activation in response to emotional stimuli, but the researchers had only used negative stimuli

And older people didn't remember them as well.

And so the conclusion was that the amygdala is broken.

I mean, there's some neural impairment.

But what we showed is the amygdala is activated just fine in response to positive stimuli.

And many people, by the way, think of the amygdala as more of a salience indicator than emotion per se, right?

So it's what is

capturing attention, what's valuable in attention.

And since then, as I say, there are now hundreds of studies showing the positivity effect.

Exactly.

So people have long believed that negative stimuli have powerful, adaptive, evolutionarily based value.

And so, of course, people, and that was the way these studies were described, people will pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.

However, people, as it turns out, were young college students in virtually all of these studies.

So we were generalizing from what younger people were observed to do to humans writ large.

And actually what we see now, if we look at the body of research that has emerged since we first identified the positivity effect in cognitive processing, is that there's a gradual age effect in it.

And yes, younger people pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive.

And then gradually that not only diminishes, but heightened attention to positive emerges.

There is a stereotype of older people that they live in the past and think largely about the past.

There's also a literature in clinical psychology showing that when people think about the past, they're more likely to be depressed.

So that kind of pattern was long believed to capture the obvious depression we would see in older people.

But of course, they're not depressed.

And here's the finding.

They also don't think about the past any more than younger people do.

but they don't think about the future as much as younger people do.

So younger people are rarely in a present focus mode.

They're almost always thinking about the future.

Older people can actually be in the present.

And that tends to be very good for mental health.

There are lots of meditations now, Buddhist meditations that are intended to

help people get to that present focus because living in the moment tends to take people's attention to positive aspects of the world.

Isn't that exciting?

Yes, it does.

Sarah Barber, a psychologist who works also with Mara Mather, ran a study about five years ago where they induced endings, mortality.

You're approaching the end of your life.

They did this kind of imagery induction with younger people and then presented them with stimuli, positive, negative, and neutral.

And younger people also showed this shift and a favoring, a preference for positive information.

What's most exciting, actually, about this whole line of work is we've been able, in most cases, to just lift age out of the equation and say, it's time.

It's our beliefs.

It's our perceptions.

It's our ideas.

our sense of a future that affect the goals that we pursue in everyday life.

Yes.

You can compare returning sophomores to graduating seniors and their social preferences for spending time with others.

And as you've anticipated, the returning sophomores are interested in meeting new people and the graduating seniors are not interested in meeting new people.

They're interested in spending time with their very good friends.

We ran an experiment where we asked exactly that question.

We thought, wow, we can make young people old.

Can we make old people young?

And so in one study before we asked people to choose from among an array of social partners, we said, now imagine that you just received a phone call from your physician who told you about a new medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 20 years longer than you expected and relatively good health.

Who do you choose?

And now older people were no longer expressing preferences for these very well-known friends and loved ones.

They were interested in exploration and novelty too.

I believe that there are.

So occasionally I'll give a talk to a largely young audience about these findings and somebody inevitably comes up to me after the talk and says, how do I get to be more like an old person?

I'd really like to be that.

And then what I say is it's not a good idea.

that it's adaptive to explore, to learn, and it entails taking risks, including emotional risks.

But it's good to do that when you're preparing for a long future.

And when you don't have to prepare for a long future, then you can focus on what really matters.

So in some ways, aging relieves us of the burden of the future.

We can be in the moment, and it's adaptive to do that.

Now, that said...

It will be great if we can find ways to have younger people step out of that future-oriented mode occasionally and really experience the present, see what's positive in the world.

This would be really good for them, I believe.

And just the same, there are context occasions where it's really good for older people to think about the future, the long-term future, and not just the present.

Think of a climate change, for example.

Probably not going to affect somebody too much who's very old today, but good to pay attention to it.

And so, yes, we should be able to time travel so we can step into the future or step into the present.

I try to take the findings to heart.

And there are a couple things I do.

One is something will happen to me during the day as these things happen to all of us, right?

That's just really irritating.

Or something where I just keep going over it and over it in my head again.

Like, I wish I said this to so-and-so, you know, and what.

And it really helps to put it in perspective.

Like, if this were the last month of your life, would you care?

And the answer is always no.

And so being able to do that, I do think helps.

And then there are moments where I can get lost in staring out the window of my office at home where there are a number of trees and goldfinches and bush tits and blue jays and they're always out there and I can just stop and really just love them.

You know, just love that experience and then quickly go back and begin to think about what I have to do next and what papers do and what email I need to return.

And I can go back to that.

But, yeah, it's good to be able to step out of the future demands occasionally.

Thank you.

Pleased to be back.

My analysis of why this aging thing seems so difficult for so many of us is that in historical sense, it's brand new.

Through most of human evolution, our lives were short, really short, like 18 to 20 through most of the years we were evolving on the African plains.

And then

In a single century, the 20th century, we added more years to life expectancy than had been added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.

Wow.

So it's just this sudden, sudden change.

And humans are creatures of culture.

We have...

physical infrastructures, social norms, expectations that help guide us through life.

And the world today with all of those infrastructures and norms was one that evolved around lives half as long as the ones we're living today.

And so I think that's what makes a lot of this feel awkward, tense.

We have notions about old age, but today

If you reach 65, you've got a good chance of making it to 90.

So things have shifted very quickly in terms of length of life, but our expectations are old.

Absolutely.

I mean, today, 65-year-olds in my book are not old.

And in fact, a lot of the emails I got after our conversations

comprised messages of people telling me I'm not old.

I'm happy, but I'm not old.

Right.

That's a great question.

And so when these findings first appeared, people asked this question exactly.

Is it a selection effect?

Are these people who have always been happy?

Which is part of the motivation for a longitudinal study that my colleagues and I ran where we followed people over time.

And

We found that there was this change in people from being more negative when they were young within individual change to more positive when they were older.

So we don't think that a selection effect accounts for the full finding.

However, it is the case that happiness contributes to life expectancy.

That's a fairly modest contribution.

So both are true, but selection doesn't account for everything.

Well, the data suggests it's driven more by less sadness than an increase in happiness.

The main drivers of this improvement in what I would call emotional balance, so the ratio of positive to negative, the main driver is a reduction in negative emotions.

Not so much an increase in positive, but because there's no decline in positive, on balance we experience more positive than negative in everyday life.

I do think there's merit to the theory that the comparative strength of pain weakens the more experiences we've had.

However, when we first began this line of research and found that older people were doing better emotionally and experiencing less sadness, there was some question about a physiological basis grounded in a kind of a deficit in the ability to feel.

So can we not experience intense anything?

And that makes us feel better emotionally.

And so with Paul Ekman and Bob Levinson and Wally Friesen, we ran a study where we induced strong negative emotions and strong positive emotions in younger and older people in the laboratory, measuring facial expression, physiological responding, and so on, as well as subjective response to memories.

And older people look very much like younger people there.

So it didn't look like the emotion system was broken in that sense, right?

It wasn't that we're unable to feel things deeply or strongly.

But older people tend not to.

So I think what I would guess is that we're navigating that.

those intense emotions better, being able to pull ourselves away from them better than younger people do.

Even looking back without more maturity, we tend to remember the past more positively than it was actually experienced.

We ran a study years ago with an order of Catholic nuns.

And this was actually the initial data collection was now probably 4%.

40 years ago, close to it.

But we asked them a series of questions about their day-to-day lives and how they felt about many aspects of their life.

And then we were able to go back to these sisters who very graciously completed the same questionnaire from the perspective of how they would have completed it then.

And it turns out that they remembered the past more positively than they had actually reported it to us.

It's very hard to get those kinds of studies done because we usually don't have that kind of data to do it.

She makes a profound observation.

Older people overall, on balance, are reporting more positive emotions, fewer negative emotions, right, in day-to-day life.

But there is a feeling of loss that comes with the deaths of loved ones over the years, the deaths of friends and relatives.

And the research suggests that people don't fully recover from those really important relationships when they end.

they continue to feel a longing, an absence in their lives.

Apparently, again, if we look at the larger picture there, people then go on and enjoy a dinner with friends, find a way to feel good and calm and serene in addition to having those kinds of negative emotions.

It reminds me of another line of research we've done on mixed emotions, and emotions not only become on balance less negative, more positive, but they're more mixed, they're more complex.

So younger people, when we ask how they're doing in a momentary experience sampling, are more likely to give us kind of unidimensional reports.

They say they're happy, they're excited, they're joyful.

When you ask older people,

they're more likely to give you a mix of positive and negative emotions.

So they might say, I'm happy, I'm appreciative, I'm sad, I'm longing.

So they'll give you this complex state, which I think is really, really important.

And sometimes when I talk about emotion and aging, I feel like I am really oversimplifying it and making it sound like older people are

happy in a happy-go-lucky sense.

And that isn't the state.

It's much richer than that.

It's more interesting.

I think the changing patterns of divorce are telling us something about time horizons.

If we went back 20 years, even though life expectancy was going up, there wasn't as much of an awareness of it.

So you go back 20 years and when people were in their 60s and life they felt was kind of winding down, they were less likely to strike out on their own, to do something different.

I think today, as people are realizing just how long lives are getting,

Somebody in their 50s, somebody in their 60s looks across the breakfast table at somebody they're not particularly enamored with and say, you know, I got a long future ahead of me.

Is this really how I want to spend it?

And so we're seeing more divorces, I think in part because people are seeing their time horizons as much longer.

I think you're less likely to see somebody start a brand new chapter if they think they're in the last chapter already.

But as people look forward more positively and longer, I think we'll see more of that.

Oh, that's a great question.

And I do not know the answer to that.

If it will come to change soon,

levels of happiness.

In general, when people divorce, we see them come back to their sort of baseline levels of happiness after a period of a year or two.

So it may be a struggle, but most people will come back to that kind of equilibrium.

How this affects older people when they divorce in the long term or the short term is a question I think we don't know the answer to.

It is a fascinating question.

I agree with her.

And a researcher at Yale, Becca Levy, has shown that when you prime these negative images of aging, people respond behaviorally.

You actually walk more slowly as they're leaving the laboratory environment.

than if they were primed with positive images.

And so the broader environment, the milieu in which we live and age signals us that we should be happy or we should be fragile or we should, and it does have an effect.

We need to change it.

I agree.

And some of it is just knowing what the research says.

If the expectations are really negative and then you hear about a study saying, no, actually people are happier.

Sometimes that makes people pay attention more.

I've had people come to me after talks that I've given on emotion and aging who will say, interestingly, with a surprise, that they are happier.

You'd think they would know that, but that's not always the case.

And so I think we do need to present a better mosaic of what old age is like.

You know, every stage in life has positive aspects to it and negative aspects to it, and we need to focus on the full picture.

Yeah, financial security influences a subjective sense of well-being, clearly.

However, older people...

While as a group in the United States, they hold more wealth than any other age group, there is great diversity within the older group and many people today.

who are older are struggling financially.

Our work has included people at the low, relatively low levels of income to relatively high levels of income.

And we don't see differences in the trajectory.

So we're still seeing people getting better relative to younger, right, older.

But I don't mean to be dismissive of this.

This is a really important issue.

And

younger people are right to be concerned about their futures and their financial security.

I couldn't agree more.

I believe that people are going to work longer because we're living longer.

And most people, my colleague John Chauvin says every chance he gets, he's an economist at Stanford.

And he says, very few Americans can earn enough in 40 years to not work for 30 years.

It's just an impossibility.

And so I do believe, and we are seeing trends in this direction, that people will work longer.

When you ask people today over 65 who are working why, about half of them say it's because they love their work, and the other half say they need the money.

I think we need new models of financial security, however.

much more radical ones.

The ones we have today are about saving an increasingly larger pot of gold for the end.

And I think so many people struggle in their day-to-day lives that the idea that they're supposed to save millions of dollars so that they can support themselves when they're old is so out of reach that they give up altogether.

Instead, I think if we changed our models of work where we worked more...

hours at certain times during our lives, more days in the week, and then fewer at other times in life, we could have higher quality working lives for much longer.

Often when people hear me talk about financial security and retirement and how we can't afford it, I say something like, we need to work longer, and the audience moans.

It's like, oh, please.

And then I say,

Would you be willing to trade retirement in your 60s for four-day work weeks and six-hour days?

and almost everybody's ready to make that trade.

Well, we could make that trade.

And the studies that are going on now look like we could make that trade with very little change in productivity level.

So we can think about working longer if we also think creatively about how much and when we would work longer.

Because if we had an income stream

even into our 80s, we're working many fewer hours, let's say, but you have some money coming in, it's a much more manageable situation

situation financially.

So we need to really rethink how we support century-long lives.

Thank you for saying that.

And I try to argue that every chance I get.

The least happy

workers in the labor force in this country are parents of young children.

And because every day they're making a choice between being a good parent or being a good worker, and they want to be both and they need to be both, but we ask them to make that choice.

And with an additional 30 years added to life expectancy, we shouldn't have to keep making those hard choices.

If we have new models of work where people worked more and less at different phases, very often you would work fewer hours when you had very young children in the home.

And then you could increase the hours as they're being launched out of the home and going off on their own and to college and starting their own lives.

Maybe that's when we reach the peak.

And then as we get much older, we might reduce the hours again.

But we could come in and out of full and part-time work.

It would be good for individuals and certainly good for their financial security.

Over the years, I've done a fair amount of clinical work with an older population, and there were often tensions between adult children

and their older parents about where they lived and the kind of care that they got, where the older person was saying, just leave me alone, and the younger person was wanting them to do something different.

Adult children tend to be more focused on safety, and their parents tend to be more focused on living a meaningful life.

And so that's where I think we often see the conflict.

And

My personal view on this is we should appreciate that as people come close to the end of their lives, that being able to live their life in ways that give them satisfaction and joy and meaning is important.

probably more important.

I'm saying this tentatively because it's tough, but then there's safety.

Living in a home you've lived in forever is a really important goal for many people in later life.

The vast majority of older people say they want to die living in their own homes.

They don't want to move.

And so I think what we need to do as a society is to help people do that better.

But trying to talk somebody into making a very different life choice because you'll feel better is something that I think younger people should consider when they're feeling uneasy about their parents' situation.

Education is one of the best predictors of quality of life and physical functioning in later life.

And I think it's remarkable that in almost all studies, we're taking that education from decades earlier, from when people were children into maybe their early 20s, but that's stretching it, right?

And then education ends for most people in the United States.

And still, their levels of education early in life are predicting how well they're doing in later life.

Imagine if education was integrated all the way through.

This is the kind of world I believe we really need to create.

The model we have today that guides us through life suggests that the first part of life is about education and learning.

You go to school, you learn a trade.

The second part of life is about work and family.

That's when you're earning money and raising those kids.

And then the third part of life is finally about leisure.

And you didn't get much of it back when life expectancy was 50, but you might get a little bit of leisure those last couple years.

What we can do now, because of this gift of time, is to integrate education, work, and leisure together.

throughout all of our lives.

And it would solve so many of the challenges.

It would solve the challenge of finding time for leisure in the middle of life.

It would solve the financial problem of trying to save enough money in 40 years to support yourself for decades longer.

And it would allow us to continue learning throughout our lives.

To me, this is the model we need to strive for.

And it would be a model that would improve quality of life, not just for older people, but for all of us all the way through.

It is my pleasure to speak with you.

Thank you.