The Best Years of Your Life
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In one of the movie versions of the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the actor Hurd Hatfield stares longingly at a painting of himself. The picture shows a young man bursting with health and vitality. As Dorian Gray reflects on how he is going to change with age while his picture will stay the same, a strange wish passes through his head.
If only the picture could change. And I could be always what I am now. For that I would give everything. There's nothing in the whole world I would not give. I'd give my soul for that.
In the story, Dorian Gray makes a pact with the devil. The painting starts to age in his place. The physical degradation of the picture isn't only about the passing years. The picture takes on the corruption of the character's many misdeeds. Meanwhile, Dorian Gray himself stays eternally youthful. Oscar Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century. The movie came out in the middle of the 20th century. The 21st century is not that different in its preoccupations from its predecessors. Movies, TV shows, and the fashion industry still worship at the altar of youth. People around the world spend billions of dollars on potions and injections and surgical interventions to keep the signs of age at bay. Clickbait ads on many websites show you what the youthful stars of yesteryears look like today.
The message couldn't be clearer. Aging is a terrible thing. Growing old is a horror show. This week on Hidden Brain, astonishing new research about aging that could change the way everyone thinks about life.
If you're short, you don't know what it feels like to be tall. If you're white, you won't know what it's like to be black. Lots of aspects of identity are like this. They are fixed. But there is one form of identity that is certain to change with time. Young people today will become old people tomorrow. But while growing old is inevitable, it comes with so much psychological and cultural baggage that lots of us avoid thinking about it. In popular culture, getting old means getting kicked out. Lots of elderly people discover that aging makes them invisible to others. At Stanford University, psychologist Laura Karstensen has focused her attention on the topic of aging. She has discovered some astonishing things.
Laura Karstensen, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you. Pleasure to be with you.
Laura, I want to take you back to 1974 when you were 21 years old. Like many young people on the cusp of adulthood, you didn't give much thought to aging. What would you say your priorities were at this time of your life?
My priorities were dating, exploring, and thinking about future jobs and possibilities and where I would live and what I was going to do the next day, the next week, the next year. not a lot about my future. I didn't think at all about aging.
Your life changed very dramatically one night that year. I understand that you and some friends were going to a concert. Tell me what happened, Laura.
Yeah, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant and a bunch of us after closing decided we would go to a concert. It was about an hour outside of town and we, you know, divided up into cars, drove out and we went to this concert. At the end of the evening, we said, well, let's go back and play some pool. So we divided up again into different cars and started to head back to town. I happened to get in the car with a man I hardly knew who was very drunk. And I caught on to that pretty quickly and asked him to stop. I remember putting my hand out on the dashboard as he was going ever faster. And that was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a ditch on the side of the road. He drove off the road and rolled down an embankment.
The car turned two or three times over. And I broke about 20-plus bones. But my left leg was injured most badly. My femur cracked in half, and I had many other fractures through the knee and the ankle. And I cracked ribs. I had a concussion, lots of facial lacerations. Lots and lots of injuries.
I'm assuming there were a bunch of surgeries that must have followed this and sort of very intense hospitalization here.
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