The Best Years of Your Life  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: The Best Years of Your Life - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/58d66a26-9011-4b0b-9ef5-f22a96db6c8e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Near-Death Crash That Changed Her Path** - Laura Carstensen survived a car crash that broke over 20 bones and left her hospitalized for months. - The experience shifted her priorities and led her to study aging. Transcript: Laura Carstensen 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. Shankar Vendantam I'm assuming there were a bunch of surgeries that must have followed this and sort of very intense hospitalization here. Laura Carstensen 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 hanging in the air. ([Time 0:04:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4847a0d3-411e-4a0f-b93e-377a53fa06be)) - **Hospital Assignment Sparked Interest In Aging** - Nurses assigned Laura Carstensen to engage older patients while she recuperated. - That contact revealed shared dependency and launched her interest in the science of aging. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam So while you were in the hospital, the nurses assigned you a task, which was also in some ways perhaps a psychology workshop, of talking with some of the elderly patients who were in the Same ward as you. Why did they ask you to do that, Laura? Laura Carstensen 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. Shankar Vendantam Now, I can't tell whether this was a psychological intervention to help you or a psychological intervention to help the people you were talking with, but perhaps it was both at the same Time. Laura Carstensen Well, really, this was about helping me. They were trying to give me a gift of a job. Shankar Vendantam Is there anything you glean from the time you spent with these elderly patients in the ward? Laura Carstensen 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. ([Time 0:10:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a3bccfce-8bea-49fe-8b14-cc4102e436ac)) - **Time Left, Not Clock Time, Drives Goals** - Laura Carstensen realized older people's shorter time horizons shift goals toward meaning and close relationships. - Perceived time left, not clock time, reshapes social priorities and emotional focus. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Yes. Laura Carstensen One day I interviewed two sisters who lived together in an apartment in San Francisco. 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'd gotten older. And I said to them, what about new friends? There are a lot of people who live here in this building. And 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, you know, 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. ([Time 0:27:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68234f43-05d9-4b4c-8fa0-2966c4e7de2c)) - **Older Adults Prefer Positive Information** - Experiments show older adults recall positive images far more than negative or neutral ones. - The 'positivity effect' reflects goal-directed attention and memory as time horizons shrink. Transcript: Laura Carstensen 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, 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 and 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 and 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. ([Time 0:37:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/efce59d9-1eac-4844-8666-a667d1af8b92)) - **Shorten Future To Change Choices** - Try imagining limited time left to reprioritize toward close relationships and meaningful experiences. - Use brief mortality or ending imagery to shift attention toward positive, present-focused choices. Transcript: Laura Carstensen 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. And 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 in attention and memory. 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 sense of a future that affect the goals that we pursue in everyday life. Shankar Vendantam I'm wondering on a college campus whether you can see interesting differences between people who are freshmen and people who are seniors, because in some ways you almost have a natural Experiment that's unfolding of people who have a sense of a long time horizon and people who have a sense of a short time horizon, at least on campus. Yes. Laura Carstensen 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. Does the effect run in reverse as well? Shankar Vendantam What happens when older people are asked to imagine that they have more time left to live? Laura Carstensen 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 in relatively good health. Who do you choose? ([Time 0:43:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b93047d-ef2e-4bd2-847f-d19af1dc2ddf)) - **Use The Last-Month Question To Reframe Worries** - Ask yourself, 'If this were my last month, would I care?' to deflate petty rumination. - Use the prompt to step into the present and release small grievances. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Do you try and apply this? Do you actually catch yourself at various points in your day saying, you know, here's how my time horizons are shaping how I think. And maybe I want to make that choice more mindfully. Laura Carstensen I try to take the findings to heart. And there are a couple of 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 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, just love that experience, and then quickly go back and begin to think about what I have to do next and what paper Is due and what email I need to return, and I can go back to that. ([Time 0:48:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/935d4db2-dfcc-40c5-b3bc-87cb367d74e9)) - **Longevity Rise Is Historically Sudden** - The 20th century added more life-years to humans than all prior millennia combined. - Cultural norms and institutions still reflect shorter lifespans, creating mismatches for century-long lives. Transcript: Laura Carstensen You know, 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. ([Time 0:51:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44a61d16-e0a2-4e92-8b9e-98f921739f2a)) - **Trade Early Retirement For Flexible Work** - Consider trading some early retirement for flexible, shorter workweeks across a longer career. - Push for four-day weeks or phased hours to sustain income and wellbeing over decades. Transcript: Laura Carstensen 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 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. ([Time 1:11:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0c412ee5-e7c8-4e81-975f-3e4a647373d9)) - **Prioritize Meaning Over Control In Care Talks** - Acknowledge your parents' emphasis on meaning and autonomy when discussing care and housing. - Avoid forcing safety-first moves and instead support ways they can stay in meaningful settings. Transcript: Laura Carstensen Thank you. Shankar Vendantam This might be a bit of a broad question, Laura, but perhaps a narrower framing might be, should your research findings into aging change the way younger people think about and speak To their older parents? Laura Carstensen 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 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. ([Time 1:16:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/59ed12e0-2346-488c-b2a0-fff2e5cff7cc))