Laura Carstensen

And then they would just wave to her on the way out the door, say, hey, Sadie, you know, and just keep going.

They didn't pay much attention to her at all.

There was another insight I had from spending so much time with these older women who were also

spending all their days in bed, being cared for by other people.

And that insight was just how much we had in common.

So I was 21 and these women were, you know, in their 70s and 80s and probably 90s.

But we were all dependent on other people for everything from, you know, being fed to staying clean to having any social interaction.

I mean, everything we were dependent on.

So suddenly I shared these characteristics that I would have thought of as characteristics of old people or sick people.

But now it was me too.

And so that also changed.

And it made me think about the world and how the world comes to shape who we are.

And the one insight I had about aging, or at least was at the beginnings of my thinking about aging, was that aging is a biological process, but it's driven, shaped by the social world.

And that was the insight that led me to be interested in the science of aging.

Oh, it was grim indeed.

Aging was considered to be a serious threat to virtually everyone's mental health.

There was a clinical psychology textbook that I had when I was in graduate school.

So this was a textbook on psychopathology.

They had a chapter on anxiety, a chapter on depression, a chapter on drug abuse, and then they end a chapter on old age.

So old age itself was considered pathological.