Exploring the New Map of Life: Challenging Stereotypes and Embracing Abundant Aging

Michael Hughes  00:04

Hello, and this is Mike. I’m one of the hosts of the abundant aging podcast.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  00:08

And this is Beth on the other host for the podcast. And I think this is the first time, Mike, that you and I have appeared together on the podcast.

Michael Hughes  00:16

But it’s certainly not the last time, Beth, and we’re looking forward to some upcoming shows where you and I can really unpack some of the foundational tropes of ageism. And I think hopefully use that as a great foundation leading into our symposium in October, right?

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  00:30

Absolutely. It’ll be October 4 2020 For this year, and more information and teasing about that, in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, we’re taking a little bit of a summer break here, and I’m going to invite you to revisit some of the fantastic conversations that we’ve had over the course of the past year or so.

Michael Hughes  00:51

That’s right. So absolutely, make sure to stay tuned and listen to more of great content that you’ve already enjoyed. And please send us your ideas for future guests, future episodes, whatever you need to share or whatever you’d like to share at abundant ag podcast.com Looking

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  01:07

forward to hearing from you and to providing new episodes coming a little bit later this summer. Thanks all for participating and, and listening and being with us here on the abundant aging podcast.

Michael Hughes  01:22

Thanks for listening. I’ll look forward to seeing you guys back in the fall. So I don’t know if you knew this LoRa but we always had our guests ask frequently, we always ask them three questions about their own personal experience with aging, I assume it’s okay to ask you those questions. But first of all, I want to solve everything. I want to solve everything that we just talked about. And so if we, because there’s a lot, there’s a lot here, and kind of the fabric, what you’re describing, by the way, I’m going to pinch myself because I have been using the word fabric too much. I don’t know why I want to use it again. But there’s a lot, there’s a lot of hope in aging, there’s things to look forward to there’s things to, you know, you know, it’s not there’s not all doom and gloom. And again, it just seems to me that you’ve outlined a pathway where that’s very hopeful. But yet, we still need to convince people that that’s there. So what stops it, what do we need to do to kind of drive the societal mindset into the right place of just accepting this and or looking forward? I don’t know, I’m watching this up. But hopefully, you get a sense of what I mean. Yeah,

Laura Carstensen  02:33

I think about this a lot, you know, sort of what’s the most important thing we need to do? You know, and, and for a lot of my colleagues would say, well, we need to invest in science and technology, I absolutely believe that. But I also believe that the potentials of science and technology today are breathtaking. So I have quite a bit of confidence that we’re going to solve a whole lot of the problems we have with our joints and different kinds of diseases and fatigue ability all the we’re going to figure that out. I am confident we will. What worries me more is that our views of aging will be so negative that we won’t try hard enough. Yeah. And so in some ways, I think, I think what might be most important is to do just what you’re doing. And that is talking about different possibilities. And telling stories, we are social creatures. And when the stories that we tell one another are negative, we come to remember those negative stories, we need to begin to have richer stories, a richer set of stories, we don’t want to be in denial about problems that many people face, on the one hand, but we want to get a representation of the range of it. And we just don’t do that very much for aging. And it’s back to things you have said. It’s a stereotype of what an older person is like, we have a clearer idea about what old people are like than any other age group. And the same very same age group, older people are more variable than any other age group. So it’s just the flip. You know, I like to think my dad used to say that six month old babies, he thought babies were pretty boring. Actually. He thought they were cute, but he said they’re all the same, you know? And I started thinking, Yeah, we could bring two six month old babies into the studio and make good predictions about what they could do, what they would like, what would make them cry, what would make them laugh, we could do that, you know, bring 280 year olds into the studio. All bets are off, right, what they’re like, what they care about, how healthy they are, and So we become increasingly different from one another. The older we get, we need to begin to represent that in our minds, so that we have a good sense of who it is we’re talking about when we refer to older people. Well,

Michael Hughes  05:14

I very, very well said, and I think the perfect thing to lead us into are three questions about your own personal experience with aging. But first, where can we find you? Where can people learn more about the map of life

Laura Carstensen  05:29

longevity.stanford.edu. And you can also put a new map of life fellows into your search engine, and you’ll come to us also and, and get to meet these postdoctoral fellows that I brag about every chance I get. They’re terrific, and you can read about them and the work that they’re doing longevity.stanford.edu

Michael Hughes  05:50

And I bet you some of them would be amazing guests on this show so far away. Search synonym ROA

Laura Carstensen  05:56

Oh, yes, yes, that would be great. And they’d love it. They’d love it.

Michael Hughes  06:02

Okay, so these three questions, okay, here we go. So question number one, LoRa LoRa, when you think about how you yourself have aged, what do you think has changed about you or grown with you that you really like about yourself?

Laura Carstensen  06:16

I’m more comfortable in my own skin. I’m more comfortable with who I am. And that’s both my faults and strengths. I guess, I spent many years of my life just worrying about not being this way. I wasn’t, was I good enough? Was I kind enough? Was I stern enough was I ever, you know, everything and I was constantly second guessing myself, I was constantly worried about having maybe said the wrong thing, or done the wrong thing. And, and as I’ve gotten older, I accept myself more, I think, and I am surprised by that. But I know that I’m not good at a lot of things. And I kind of feel better now that I know what they are. And I think I’m pretty good at some things. And so I tried to use my time doing the things I’m better at the worst that

Michael Hughes  07:17

That’s awesome. You know, we said before I remember I think they actually heard this from like an Ann Landers column or something, you know, where she said, yeah, so somebody wrote in so you know, in your 20s, you’re, you’re constantly worried about what people think about you, and then you’re in your 40s. You know, you care about what people were thinking about you then in your 60s, you realize they were never even thinking about you at all. You know, it’s

Laura Carstensen  07:37

really true. Really, really true. Yes. Who hasn’t suffered, I’m forgetting who to source this quote to. But I heard, I’ve worried about a lot of things in my life, most of which never happened. That might have been Mark Twain, but it’s a great, great, great quote.

Michael Hughes  07:56

Well, question number two, though, is LoRa What has surprised you the most about you, as you’ve aged?

Laura Carstensen  08:05

One of the great gifts of aging is that we reach a point in life where we can give to others and give back. And in my experience, hands down. That is so much more gratifying than being on the receiving end and taking from others. It’s wonderful when people do things for us, and we can feel very grateful for it. But wow, it feels so good to be able to help somebody who needs a helping hand and to be able to have the experience, sometimes a bad experience. But an experience you had that might now be useful, even if it was negative at the time to another person who’s struggling. And so being able to do that is, you know, I don’t see that in the literature. I don’t see that, you know, it’s, it’s, um, it’s a great joy. And I don’t know if people anticipated as much as they did. And

Michael Hughes  09:05

this is another part of the hope that we’re talking about LoRa because, you know, again, lived experiences as you age, you know, and, you know, it’s like, I can imagine, you know, older people like people their 80s and 90s going to weddings, and looking up at the couple getting married. And so yeah, you don’t know anything yet. Yeah, yes. But just being able to have that wisdom. I mean, just to bring that out into the world and more of that, and that gratification. I bet you it’s, it’s a through line with everybody, you know, so thank you for saying that. Okay, last question for you. Is there someone that you have met or has been in your life that has set a good example for you and aging like somebody like we embrace this concept of abundant life and abundant aging? Is there someone that’s inspired you to say, oh, that person is aging abundantly? I want to be like that person when I grow up, you know?

Laura Carstensen  09:56

Well, there’s no question that the person in my life that affected me the most was my dad. And, he taught me an awful lot about aging. He was a biophysicist. And I’m, you know, as you’ve told your listeners, a psychologist, but we were both professors, and we talked a lot about our work. I didn’t understand most of what his work was about, but he understood mine, and he would read my papers, and we would talk about aging a lot. And then as he got older, he died when he was 97. And as he got older, he was ever more interested in the literature and what we were finding and findings about emotion and findings about cognition. And, and so we talked and talked and talked about aging, as scientists, who loved each other and cared about each other, both from a personal perspective and the perspective of the literature. And what was that telling us? And what were hunches and so on. So I learned so much from him that I can’t really capture in words what that experience was like. My dad died when he was walking from his study at home, where he was writing a paper for a scientific journal. He was walking from his office to the bathroom upstairs and fell and hit his head and had a slow bleed. And so but my point is, he was writing a paper on his computer, which was later published, he had papers published posthumously, yes. But he was incredibly active and productive as a scientist to his last days of life. He even said, as a scientist, I remember talking to what he thought that the older you got the better positioned you were to challenge the big assumptions in a field. And he was beginning to think that some of the assumptions in physics were actually wrong. But he said, you can’t really do that. When you’re younger. You’ve got to get a grant, you’ve got to do this. But when you’re kind of got some distance from it, you can begin to see some things that might be off. So it was when we were talking a few minutes ago about creativity. Wow. That’s an opportunity for creativity.

Michael Hughes  12:25

Yeah, I want to be like him when I grow up. I thank you so much for sharing that story. Laura, and we’re just so thankful that you made time to be on the show today. It was a terrific conversation. Our guest today, Laura Carstensen, who is the founder, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity talking about the new map of life, please check that out longevity.stanford.edu And most of all, thanks to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. And thank you for giving your time and listening to this episode of The Art of Aging, which is part of the abundant agent podcast series from United Church homes and we want to hear from you what hope do you see in aging? Who is your aging hero? How do you think you will use your more healthy years of life? Talk to us at abundant aging podcast.com You can also visit us at the Ruth prosper Docker website website, which is United Church homes.org/parker-center. Thank you very much for listening. We’ll see you next time.