A large Gallup poll of more than has found that “by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older.” The tone is skeptical: “[Getting old] sounds miserable, but apparently it is not.” The methodology is impeccable: researchers surveyed 340,000 Americans aged 18 to 85. The conclusion is clear: “good news for old people, and for those who are getting old.”  In other words, for everyone.

Did anyone miss Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8th?  Now 88, which prompted her quip that there were a number of reasons to be glad to be on stage, the “Golden Girls” television veteran was superb, and garnered SNL its highest overnight ratings in 18 months.

I’d have thought studly heart surgeons or trendy neuroscientists would love roaring off to work in their Porsches. But a recent UC Davis study of more than 6,500 physicians showed guess who to “have the highest job satisfaction of any subspecialty?” Geriatricians.

I met the incomparable Eddie Mae Holmes, a barber in Eddie Mae HolmesRichmond, California, through my friend Silver Rose. So I followed right up on her email suggestion to get in touch with a psychotherapist-turned-filmmaker named Laurie Schur. Schur is at work on a documentary called “The Beauty of Aging” about women 80 and up who’ve aged well.  Schur’s engaging short, “Greedy for Life,” highlights two of them.

Given my new tack, I thought it would be handy to understand the terms “geriatrics” and “gerontology” clearly. I knew that geriatricians were medical doctors, and Wikipedia puts the distinction clearly: “Geriatrics is a subspecialty of medicine that focuses on health care of the elderly. … The term geriatrics differs from gerontology, which is the study of the aging process itself.”   But check out the how Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, 11th Ed., defines “geriatrics”

Realizing that this project isn’t about work solved a big ethical problem, of which I've been aware since the get-go: the inference that if you can't work or don't want to, you aren't a valuable member of society. That’s the last message I want to throw my weight behind, especially in our hyper-capitalist, work-ethic-driven society. Work turned out to be my safe entrée into distinctly unsafe territory – my “way in” to thinking about old age.

This weekend I presented my work for the first time, at the annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of social scientists and practitioners whose work I greatly respect. The title of the talk was “The Value of Work in Late Life,” but I pulled a slight bait-and-switch, because it turns out that this project isn’t about work any more. It's about ageism, starting with our own internalized biases.  Here’s the ten-minute talk I gave:

It wasn’t the well-worn topic of a recent New York Times lifestyle article  that struck me.  (White-collar baby boomers, dubbed the “Encore Generation” by Marc Freedman, are staking out do-gooder second careers.) It was the matter-of-fact way this trend was presented within a radically new demographic, biological, and cultural landscape.

A lovely piece in the Science section of this week’s New York Times talks about what William James called the psychologist’s fallacy: “assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencing.” Meeting a woman who had just lost her husband of 70 years, Dr. Marc Agronin presumed that she would be grief-stricken.  Just the opposite, in fact.  

In his op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, David Brooks points out that conceiving of old people as detached, depressed, and ineducable is not just outdated but wrong. “The research paints a comforting picture,” he writes. Then the editorial runs into trouble, starting with its title, “The Geezers’ Crusade” — and not the geezer part.