Emily Gould

Can I do any incremental changes that will make 44 go more smoothly?

I was more interested ultimately in talking to people who seemed really at home in themselves as older people and also who had a spirit of youthfulness.

And I would always chalk that up to age.

Nothing that is visible on the exterior and nothing that comes from, you know, a cream that you can smear on your skin or like a pill that you can take or an injection that you can take.

More than anything else, just open mindedness and being willing to be wrong about things, being willing to change your mind even as you get older is the key thing to remaining like youthful in spirit.

Part of it was just psychologically.

I wanted to get my mind around the idea that our culture feeds us, which is that aging is a problem to be solved.

And it's something, you know, the anti-aging industry is a billion dollar industry.

They're constantly selling us products that are going to, like, fix everything.

the problem of aging.

Visibly improve lines and wrinkles after seven days with high performance retinol technology.

And I knew I didn't want to think about it like that.

I wanted to think about, like, how do I get to a place where, like, I'm an old person who's happy with my life rather than a young person trapped in an old person's body.

And I think just, you know, talking to people who are much older than me was one of the most important ways that I ended up getting there.

I'm going to contradict myself because I was just talking about staying youthful, you know, as something aspirational.

But something else that I think is aspirational is accepting the age that you are and being grateful for the good things that come with aging.

One of them, ultimately, I mean, this really resonated with me was when one of the women who I interviewed toward the end of the piece, Kim France, talked about how...

When you're younger and you've experienced a big trauma, whether it's a, you know, grief or loss or just a crisis in your life, something really life altering, something where there's a clear before and after in your life.

Not everyone is going to have shared that experience.

But then as you get older, everyone has had that experience.