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.

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:

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.  

On Veterans Day, PBS aired a documentary called "The Way We Get By."  Much of it was shot in Bangor, Maine’s tiny airport, where flights from military bases all over the U.S. and inbound from Iraq and Afghanistan stop to refuel. Filmmaker Aron Gaudet’s mother Joan is one of the Maine Troop Greeters:  a group of older men and women who’ve taken it upon themselves to shake the hands of every soldier passing through.

I’ve been steering clear of the Methuselah-minded crowd for whom the grail is the extension of the human lifespan. For one thing, the science is muddy. Secondly (and very scientifically), they give me the creeps. Thirdly, the more important  question, it seems to me, is how to improve the quality of the additional 30 years of life that refrigeration and clean water have so recently delivered to us.  

Last night I went to hear Dr. Rudi Westendorp, the head of gerontology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, speak at Mount Sinai about good health after 85.  A slight and smiling man in a red bowtie, Westendorp was introduced by International Longevity Center director Robert Butler and opened with a zinger: “There is no biological limit to human age. Mortality is plastic, as the biologists say.”