Sari Botton

I mean, youth is pretty great.

Young people are really beautiful.

You know, they've got a lot of energy.

But so are old people, older people, you know,

I really have come to learn and believe that.

I also think sexism, patriarchy, that contributes to it.

And another factor is that we didn't used to live as long as we're living now.

So the narrative about what a 60-year-old is like doesn't match what

now what it did before we're living so much longer there are so many centenarians is that the word centenarians centenarians either one works for me i'm probably going to need to really learn that word because there are more and more of them and everybody wants me to give the oldster questionnaire to every one of them in their lives um but you know now that we're living so much longer i'm

What we thought a 60-year-old was like, a 70-year-old was like, is not the same as what those ages represented years ago when we were growing up.

I know I went to a book launch a few summers ago for someone who wrote a novel about a guy in his 30s who encounters a guy in his 60s.

And the guy in his 60s is portrayed as what I would think of as like someone in their 90s.

And I was like six months away from 60 and I just kept cracking up and I had like I got the giggles and I was at it like, you know, in a bookstore at a book reading.

And I was like, what?

What?

That's no, that's not how that is.

But a person in their 30s might think that, you know, surrounds themselves.

So I was an editor at a magazine called Long Reads, an online, a digital magazine.

And I left thinking that I would sort of slide into another job.

Like I knew of a couple that were that had just opened up that were like right up my alley that people were calling me and saying like, oh, you got to apply for that.