Dr. Karl Pillemer

We've gotten to the end of this journey.

And one of the things they really know about

is how to use this extremely limited lifetime that we have.

Sure.

I'd been a gerontologist for around 25 years.

I was in my early 50s, and I had a powerful revelation that all I was studying was the problems of older people, and older people as problems.

So I really had the idea...

What do older people know that younger people don't?

And could I find that information and distill it in a usable form?

The one thing people don't realize, and one thing that we've lost in our age segregated society, which is one of the most age segregated now that's ever existed,

is that it's only been in about the last 150 years or so that people have gone to anyone other than the oldest person they knew for advice about life.

And we know from anthropological studies that older people were absolutely critical to human survival.

If you were in your 50s and everybody else was dying in their 20s and 30s and you knew what to do in a drought or what to do in a famine or where better land was, people have found that older individuals were key to human survival.

We're at the risk of losing what is honestly an extremely natural human process, which is not asking older people for their stories or their anecdotes, but asking them for their practical advice for living.

If I can tell one story, I can say that there was a moment in which this revelation occurred.

I was starting to think about, you know, that I was on the wrong track.

Because also we scientists get funding for solving human problems.

So you don't get so much money for trying to figure out why people are happy.

So I had that problem focus.

And I was doing research in a nursing home.