Laura Carstensen

And I looked at them and first thought, you don't have time?

Come on, you've got a lot of time on your hands, don't you?

And then I went away and they were kind enough to send me off and be sweet to me.

But I went home and I remember sitting at my dining room table

staring out at the San Francisco skyline.

And it was this moment where I feel like I had kind of an epiphany where I said, it's about time.

And I realized that it wasn't about time in the day.

It was about time left in life.

And if our time horizons are changing, if they're getting shorter as we grow older, then our goals may systematically change.

And everything in my life and my research changed after that evening.

I didn't know that I was going to make it through those months of recuperating.

And the idea of exploring this very large world full of possibilities was of no interest to me either during that time.

But I did care about things.

It wasn't a flattening of emotions.

It was a very sharp focus of what matters and what doesn't.

And it's very much tied to time.

Time left.

Humans, to the best of our knowledge, are the only species that appreciates our mortality throughout most of our lives.

So there are other species like elephants, lions, they probably know when they are dying.

But we anticipate how much time we have left throughout the course of our lives.