Dr. Robert Waldinger

You are constantly exchanging air with the environment.

You are constantly receiving signals from other people and having emotional resonance with other human beings all day long.

You are constantly being influenced by and shaped by everything around you.

As opposed to

this fantasy of a me that's separate and goes through time.

And I'm the same me who I was 20 years ago.

I'm not the same me who I was when we started this conversation.

So, but the idea, one idea, and this is just a theory, is that that scares us in some deep way.

And so, but if you say, well, I've got this many followers, I've got this many views on my TED talk, that must mean I'm a real person, right?

There was no particular age.

I do think that...

Typically, when we are the sandwich generation, and the sandwich generation is where you've got kids you're taking care of, you may have older parents who you're taking care of, you have a lot of demands on you, you have a demanding job.

If you're in that midlife place, often that's a time of enormous stress.

So I would say that...

That's one common refrain we hear from people in midlife.

I've just got so much that I have to take care of and attend to right now, and I can't manage it all.

But hard times can come at any time.

I will say that we get happier as we get older.

Yeah.

It's trickier.