Laura Carstensen

And the answer is always no.

And so being able to do that, I do think helps.

And then there are moments where I can get lost in staring out the window of my office at home where there are a number of trees and goldfinches and bush tits and blue jays and they're always out there and I can just stop and really just love them.

You know, just love that experience and then quickly go back and begin to think about what I have to do next and what papers do and what email I need to return.

And I can go back to that.

But, yeah, it's good to be able to step out of the future demands occasionally.

Thank you.

Pleased to be back.

My analysis of why this aging thing seems so difficult for so many of us is that in historical sense, it's brand new.

Through most of human evolution, our lives were short, really short, like 18 to 20 through most of the years we were evolving on the African plains.

And then

In a single century, the 20th century, we added more years to life expectancy than had been added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined.

Wow.

So it's just this sudden, sudden change.

And humans are creatures of culture.

We have...

physical infrastructures, social norms, expectations that help guide us through life.

And the world today with all of those infrastructures and norms was one that evolved around lives half as long as the ones we're living today.

And so I think that's what makes a lot of this feel awkward, tense.

We have notions about old age, but today