Laura Carstensen

And we do this subconsciously most of the time.

And then every once in a while, events occur.

that prime mortality, it could be the death of a friend or a terrorist attack, you know, a war, something happens that reminds us that we're mortal and we're not going to live forever.

We don't have all the time in the world.

And as we get older, we increasingly experience those kinds of reminders.

And so we come to take account of time and remember

Value time differently.

Goals change systematically as our time horizons change.

It's an interesting question because when we began this, we thought younger people think about their futures a lot and they envision their futures as very, very long.

It turns out the more we've studied this that a clearer answer, a more accurate answer is that younger people don't think there are any constraints on time.

So they don't think about the future so much in terms of how much left there is.

It's that it's just vast.

It's abundant.

They don't need to think about time.

And it's really the shift as we grow older where we come to think about time more, how much time we have left.

But for young people, they have all the time in the world, essentially.

Social networks get smaller as people get older.

And I should note that this was part of the thinking about the paradox of aging.

Because social relationships are what bring us our greatest happiness, there was thinking that if networks in older people were smaller than they were in younger people, then older people must not be as happy.

That was basically the thinking there.