Long Bright Future : An Action Plan for a Lifetime of Happiness, Health, and Financial Security

by CARSTENSEN, LAURA L. PHD

• ISBN13: 9780767930123
• ISBN10: 0767930126
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-04
• Publisher: Harmony

Summary

Scientific advances mean that you're likely to live longer and more healthily than any generation before you.

Author Biography

LAURA L. CARSTENSEN, Ph.D., is one of the world's leading authorities on longevity and aging.  A professor of psychology at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, she has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her research has been supported for more than twenty years by the National Institute on Aging.  Dr. Carstensen lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Five Myths About Aging You Can't Afford to Believe	p. 13
What is Aging?	p. 43
Reenvisioning Long Life	p. 65
The Social Side of Aging	p. 97
Collective Supports: Social Security and Medicare	p. 137
Investing in Our Future: The Case for Science and Technology	p. 175
What Might Go Wrong?	p. 219
Ensuring a Long Bright Future	p. 253
Endnotes	p. 285
Index	p. 307
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter 1
Five Myths About Aging You Can't Afford to Believe
 
If we're going to develop a clear-eyed view of our futures, as a prelude to making old age better and longer-lasting, we're going to have to get rid of as many myths about aging as we can--and there are plenty. In fact, there is a very good chance that much of what you think you know about aging is wrong.
The entire aging process is fraught with unappealing stereotypes and discouraging myths, probably because few of us see aging up close until we're fully immersed in it ourselves. American society is so age segregated that the few older people we do know are usually our grandparents or elder relatives--a small and decidedly unrepresentative sample whose very status as close family often blurs the nuances of their personalities and their lives. We often appreciate just the roles they fill, not the people they are.
After all, how many of us have subtle and complex understandings of the older people in our families until we're older ourselves? I certainly didn't ask a lot of questions of my older relatives when I was young. I loved them, but didn't really try to get to know them as individuals. For their part, older relatives may not spend much time disclosing the details of their personal lives to the younger generation; a family's focus is usually on the young ones. Until my Aunt Mabel was in her nineties, I assumed she had been single all of her life. In fact, she had had a short and turbulent marriage when she was young woman. Until I was middle-aged, I didn't know her sister had been found dead in a hotel room, and I still don't know the circumstances that surrounded her death. I didn't know that my grandfather was the person in his small Nebraska town to whom everyone turned whenever they needed any sort of appliance or radio repaired. The man apparently had an instinct for electricity. Maybe it is no coincidence that his son, my father, grew up to study electromagnetic fields. But I didn't make these connections until I was aging myself.
In the absence of personal knowledge, we may expect all older people to be cut from the same cloth as the few we happen to know. I suspect that this is why aging stereotypes tend to run to one-dimensional polar opposites, either based on happy times at holidays with beloved older family members, or on negative interactions with people who seem extremely irritable or sick. Worse, when we imagine what we'll be like ourselves when we're older, we tend to extrapolate from our limited family experiences, and that's not always a pretty picture--it depends on whether your particular Aunt Betty baked cookies or had dementia. Time after time, I've given talks about aging and people in the audience tell me either that they believe a particular finding because their grandmothers are just like that, or they refuse to believe it, because their grandmothers aren't like that at all.
Few of us see the scope, the range, or the complexities of older lives. For purely selfish reasons, this is problematic because it makes it hard to know where we're headed ourselves, and to consider the vast range of possibilities ahead. The truth of it is that older people's life paths are anything but binary; there's a good deal of shading between saintly granny and sour grump. Their lives are also anything but bland. In fact, in terms of personality and life experience, older people are the most diverse part of the population. My dad likes to say that all babies are alike--as infants, they have little opportunity to differentiate. But with every decade of life, every twist in the life path makes people more individual, less likely to have been shaped by the exact same set of experiences as anyone else. Consequently, as a person grows older, chronological age tells us less and less about what they will be like. It makes no sense to embark on discussions about aging societies by reducing older populations to their lowest co

---

Excerpted from A Long Bright Future: An Action Plan for a Lifetime of Happiness, Health, and Financial Security by Laura L. Carstensen
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.