Dr. Karl Pillemer

What about that?

But when you get to be 70 and beyond—

Just about everybody, and no, body hacking is not gonna fix this, just about everybody bears some burden of chronic disease, and sometimes crippling chronic disease, and just about everybody has experienced loss.

You've certainly lost your parents, you may have lost siblings, you may have lost your partner.

So you have a whole group of people who have experienced many of the things that young people worry about.

Second, we have a fascinating finding from hundreds of studies

that on average, older people are happier than younger people.

So if you ask a survey item like, how happy are you on a scale of one to 10?

Have the past five years been some of the best of your life?

People over 60, especially over 65, are happier than younger people.

So you've got those two things.

How can people who are experiencing an accumulation of loss and negative life events

still be happier than younger people are.

How would that occur?

And one of the things that we found, and it's supported by other research, is this conscious choice to be happy, not because of all circumstances aligning perfectly, but choosing to be happy directly

given the current circumstances in which you now exist.

And there are various techniques they employ, which do map on to other ones that people do use in psychology, but these are their own indigenous ones.

They would argue that it involves things like waking up and saying, I'm going to make this as good a day as it can be.

It's waking up and saying, as one of my interviewees did, basically,

This can be a good day.