Conventional wisdom holds that we become “more” who we are — virtues, vices and all — in old age. Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam, who’s been studying the aging process for over 25 years, has observed a very different phenomenon. “The mistake we make in middle age is thinking that good aging means continuing to be the way we were at 50. Maybe it’s not,” Tornstam told the Paula Span in The New Old Age blog.

Reporter Pamela Paul kicked off a story in today’s New York Times Style section with the declaration that “most young people would prefer to be older and most old people yearn to be young.”  Actually, that’s not the case.  Aspects of youth do indeed appeal, but these are pangs, not ongoing yearnings.

During my first interview with gerontologist Robert Butler, he quoted Schopenhauer, “who always said midlife is that point in time of life when you begin to think backwards from death instead of forward from birth, which I thought was a pretty shrewd observation.”  It’s certainly true of my peers.

That was the title of a really excellent piece in the Sunday New York Times the week that Ringo Starr celebrated turning 70 on stage at Radio City (and that gerontologist Robert Butler died) . Mercifully, the point of the article was that boomers need not aspire to rocking and rolling their way though old age — “a stereotype almost as enduring as ageism itself.”

From health to home ownership, here’s a one-page statistical snapshot of what it’s like to be an American in your 70’s. Overall, a far brighter picture than a few decades ago, according to Dr. Marie Butler, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging.

When I told my brother Jarratt that I was starting to write about aging, he said, “I know this guy Bob Butler.  Want an introduction?”  I sure did.  The pioneering gerontologist died yesterday.  Butler was generous with preliminary advice, illuminating in a formal interview (he qualified, after all, as an octogenarian hard at work), magnanimous despite my lack of formal credentials, and unfailingly kind.

I took an instant liking to Claudia Fine, the Executive Vice President of SeniorBridge, a national organization that provides health and care management. We met in her midtown office, following up on a connection I’d made through a journalism seminar. She was warm, candid, and impatient with institutional dumbness.

The heart of the matter, concisely put by the ILC-USA’s Executive Director Everette Dennis in his opening remarks at this annual journalism seminar, is the “perception of aging as a social problem versus as a great human achievement.”

At an afternoon session of this year’s Age Boom Academy for journalists there was a critical mass of geriatricians at the table: Robert Butler and Harrison Bloom, both of the International Longevity Institute (which co-sponsors the Academy along with the New York Times), and Rosanne Leipzig of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.  I took advantage of this to pop a question I’d written about a few weeks earlier: what makes geriatrics so satisfying?