Does the thought of growing old fill you with dread? If so, have you thought about why? In episode 6 of Thread the Needle, discover what the internal experience of old age is really like. The closer you look at the research, the more contradictions you’ll find.
Episode Guests:
Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks
Alan Castel, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at UCLA, author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging
Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and Contributing Writer for the Atlantic, author of The Happiness Curve
Pat Taub, former journalist and family therapist who founded the blog Women's Older Wisdom (wowblog.me).
Relevant Links:
“Negative beliefs about aging predict Alzheimer’s disease in Yale-led study,” News.Yale.edu
“Why People Get Happier as They Get Older,” The Economist
“Why You Can Look Forward to Being Happier in Old Age,” TIME Magazine
How We Learn As We Age, TEDx Talk by Alan Castel
"The Straight Facts on Women in Poverty,” AmericanProgress.org
Thanks for listening to Thread the Needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. If you have a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email podcast@theneedle.co.
Follow Thread the Needle on Instagram @theneedlepod.
Thanks to Molly Bloom of American Public Radio for mentoring this project!
Host and Executive Producer: Donna Cleveland
Theme song by: Meara Oberdieck
Original music by: Taylor Ross
Episode artwork by: Chosie Titus
Audio mastering by: Nicholas Naioti
Episode 6 transcript:
DONNA CLEVELAND [HOST]: You know how there are certain things that are normal and predictable, and yet they somehow feel surprising when they happen to you? Well, that's how I felt when I found my first gray hair in my twenties. Let me set the scene for you. It was fall and I was doing some yard work at my dad's business with my family. I think I was carrying a big pile of cardboard boxes out to the curb with my older sister. And I remember her stopping, pointing at my head and saying gleefully, as sisters do, “Oh my God, there's a gray hair on your head.” My parents and other sister gathered around to admire the white hair growing in a spiral out of my crown. I'm pretty sure I tried to act nonchalant, but later that day, I ran upstairs to the mirror and flattened my hair into a series of little parts.
Sure enough. I'd catch the occasional glint of white—a course, wiry reminder of my mortality. At a recent family birthday party, one of my younger cousins announced that she just spotted her first patch of white hairs. My aunt who's in her seventies started laughing at us as we compared notes about plucking them out. “Oh, I used to do that,” She said, “but at some point I wanted to have some hair left on my head.” It dawned on me then that, like all of us, I'd have to come to terms with the prospect of getting older, sooner or later.
You are listening to Thread the Needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the reality is of women's lives. I'm Donna Cleveland, host and producer of Thread the Needle. I'm 33 years old. And like many of us I've picked up some pretty negative ideas about aging from our society. In this episode, I'll share two narratives that run contrary to one another about aging on the one hand there’s society and its very negative messaging about aging, which is especially rough for women. And on the other side is research on aging and wellbeing and a surprising trend that turns up in data from countries around the world. The goal will be to get a view inside of what the internal experience of growing old is really like.
Before I try to answer this question, I figured we should take a look at what the cultural narrative actually is. If you look at the media, it's not hard to find examples. Take last year for instance, when I saw a headline announcing that Keanu Reeves had what reporters were calling an age-appropriate girlfriend. When I clicked through to the article, it turned out that his girlfriend and artist named Alexandra Gray is in her mid-forties while he's in his mid-fifties. I'm pretty sure the main reason people were so shocked is because she has white hair. It blew everyone's mind that she wasn't trying to conceal her age. People even started posting on Twitter, joking that he was dating Helen Mirren, who for the record is in her seventies and is a total babe. In general, women's treatment in Hollywood is pretty dismal as they age. A study of last year's a hundred top-grossing films found that a record high of 43 of them started women, which still isn't equitable by the way, but only three of those movies starred women over the age of 45. If you want a great parody of the situation, just go look up Amy Schumer's skit called last fuckable day in the scene. Amy stumbles across a bunch of actresses picnicking in a meadow. They quickly explained that they're celebrating Julia Louis Dreyfus's last fuckable day.
CLIP:
Sorry. Did you see Julia's last fuckable day? What is that in every actress's lights, a media decides when you finally reached the point where you're not believably fuckable anymore, Patricia Arquette chimes in, you know how Sally field was Tom Hanks, his love interest in punchline. And then like 20 minutes later, she was his mom and Forrest Gump. Or you might get offered a romcom with Jack Nicholson, where you're competing with another woman to fuck him
CLEVELAND:
For the punchline. Amy asks Tina Fey when men have their last fuckable day,
CLIP:
They don't have that day. Never. Well they're fuckable forever. They could be a hundred and like nothing but white spiders coming out, but they're still fuckable.
CLEVELAND:
I wanted to understand this intersection of ageism and sexism. So I called up author and activist, Ashton Applewhite, who wrote This Chair Rocks, a manifesto calling for an end to age discrimination. I also called Pat Taub, who's a former journalist and family therapist who founded a blog called Women's Older Wisdom and also teaches classes on women and aging to get us started. I had Applewhite break down for me why it is that women have it harder than men when it comes to aging.
ASHTON APPLEWHITE:
We face the double whammy of ageism and sexism and the implications ,ount up over time and intersect with race and class. And this is why the poorest of the poor everywhere in the world are old women of color. We are judged more harshly for our appearance. In other words, if you make the hideous mistake of getting wrinkles, you know, it is held against you. And then there's plain old sexism. Women start being promoted at lower rates in their thirties because we might have children. And you know, you can't have a uterus and a brain functioning at the same time. Another piece of this not related to age is that when working women have a baby, their pay goes down. When working men have a baby, their pay goes up
CLEVELAND:
Applewhite is the first to admit that aging comes along with certain challenges. Physical and mental decline can and do happen and are difficult to deal with. But feeling that you're no longer worthwhile is not a built in part of aging she argues.
APPLEWHITE:
One of the many irritating things people assume about ageism is that it is somehow natural because we fear dying. Therefore it's natural and acceptable to distance ourselves from old people because they make us think about dying in all stereotypes. Of course, there is an element of truth I think, it's always complicated. We older people are reminders of mortality. That is true, but you were aging from the minute you are born and dying is a discrete biological event that happens only at the end of all that living. So I think the conflation of aging and dying is a function of living in an ageist world. It is homophobia that makes life harder for gay men. It is not loving a guy. It's not being a woman that makes life harder for women. It is sexism and it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be, it is ageism.
CLEVELAND:
Applewhite and Taub said that when they began researching aging, the information they found was disturbingly negative. That led Taub to create her blog, to introduce positive information and representation online and in the media.
PAT TAUB:
When I Google older women where they came up with or tips on how to dress younger, how to attract a younger man, it was very superficial.
CLEVELAND:
I asked Taub what inspired her to create this safe Haven of sorts for women?
TAUB:
There's an old saying, we teach what we need to learn. And as I became an older woman in her sixties and now I'm in my seventies, I knew that I had to find a way to be more comfortable and positive about getting older. There's so much ageism in this culture and so much age shaming of the older woman, because our culture is so youth obsessed. You know, it has this sort of notion that when a woman becomes old she's passe or no longer valid.
CLEVELAND:
In the group, Taub helps women work through the different ways they're discriminated against, from their appearance to the value of their mind.
TAUB:
Men are revered when they get older, we have the elder statesman. We don't do a lot in terms of honoring women of wisdom. The average woman doesn't feel this kind of worth that I think an older man might feel. And of course men are concerned about their physical change, but I think they don't feel as marginalized they're as much of an outcast in this culture, older men who have made a contribution to society and politics. The arts whenever are often called upon as experts. When people are thinking about a certain topic related to them, I'm not sure we're so quick to turn to an older woman for her expertise. We have these kind of pejorative images of the older woman, the witch, the hag. I mean, that's still kind of with us. It's still, I think in people's subconscious. From the time a woman has been a girl and a teen and a young woman, the first thing people see is her appearance and her outward appearance is how people make a judgment about her. But we're so much more than that. You know, we have inner beauty and inner worth. So it's just, it's just harder for a woman because her currency has been on how she looks.
CLEVELAND:
Applewhite, went through her own reckoning with aging in her fifties. And that propelled her to write her book where she made some pretty radical discoveries.
APPLEWHITE:
Everything I thought I knew about what it would be like to be really old was flat out wrong, way too negative, way off base, or simply not nuanced enough. And I set out to explore why there was this discrepancy between the lived reality all around us, which is that most older people continue to be in the world in all kinds of interesting ways, and this disproportionate sense of dread and fear. Where did that negative narrative come from and what purposes does it serve?
CLEVELAND:
Applewhite pointed out that this fear and dread is easy to monetize for one.
APPLEWHITE:
Because no one makes money off self-acceptance and contentment.
CLEVELAND:
In her book, she researched industries that target women like self-help and beauty
APPLEWHITE:
Women buy 80% of self help books. We are barraged with messages that we are not blank enough, right? And if we just worked harder on XYZ on ourselves, everything would be okay. And of course, it's not going to be OK until we challenge those broader systems of oppression on a mass level.
CLEVELAND:
While living a healthy lifestyle and wanting to feel good longer are positive things, Applewhite says the anti-aging industry has a different mission altogether.
APPLEWHITE:
Here's something to keep in mind about aging, that it is not just something annoying that old people and your parents and celebrities do. It is a process on which we embark the day we are born. Aging is living and living is aging. So think about that when you think about what anti-aging products promise. Aging is not the enemy, ageism is the enemy, not the process of moving through life, which is beautiful and fascinating and incredibly enriching in countless ways.
CLEVELAND:
Instead of focusing on the positives that come with age, Applewhite says the anti aging industry sends women into a losing battle.
APPLEWHITE:
You can't stop aging. So buying into this anti-aging ideology sets us up to fail. It pits us against each other, because you know, when, when someone says you look good for your age, it might be hard not to be complimented, but it reinforces this notion that to age is to fail and a huge class bias. These anti-aging remedies, remedies in quotes, are expensive. They're costly. The anti-aging piece of the skincare industry is a multibillion dollar industry. Nothing works. Sunscreen is the only actual anti-wrinkle product that works, and we women make less money yet we spend far more on these products. So it's another way that we're economically disadvantaged. So again, zoom out, the problem is not that you somehow, “Oh my God, how did you allow this to happen?” Got wrinkles. The problem is that we live in a society that discriminates against us on that basis.
You know, Francis McDormand has a beautiful line about how the wrinkle between her nose and the corner of the mouth on one, on one side of her face is dedicated to her son for every time she, you know, held in delight and glee or terror at something he had done or said. And you know, if you think of wrinkles as the map of our lives, we think antique furniture is beautiful. We think antique China is beautiful. We think a flower that has exploded is beautiful. Those are subjective choices. We can choose where we see beauty.
CLEVELAND:
Applewhite has taken some flak over the years for calling on women to stop doing things like lie about their age, dye their hair, or buy expensive anti-aging products. She's backpedaled on some of these statements, but she still believes older women will become more powerful when they're more visible.
APPLEWHITE:
When we lie about our age, or leave early accomplishments off our resumes, or dye our hair just to cover the gray, we give a pass to the discrimination that makes those behaviors necessary. And that is a problem. However, we each need to do these things, you know, in our own way and at our own time. So I never want to say another person, let alone women, who are filled with shoulds and how we should behave from the day we're born—are we pretty enough, thin enough, feminine enough, too aggressive, too loud, too this, too that—If you like dying your hair, more power to you. If you dye your hair purple, keep dying it purple, or try green. Whatever. If you feel that you will not be able to move in the world in the way in which you want to if you have gray hair, dye your hair. But until we allow ourselves to go gray and stop lying about our age and so on, the world will not see how many of us there are, how powerful we are, how gorgeous we are, how skilled we are, et cetera, et cetera.
CLEVELAND:
This is a lot of doom and gloom. And this is the part that's not surprising. We're used to our conversations around aging being pretty depressing, but here's the part that may surprise you. Applewhite and Taub have found that despite a sexist and ageist culture, as they age, their life satisfaction has actually continued to grow. Here's what Applewhite has to say about it.
APPLEWHITE:
One way women put it is I give fewer fucks. You know, we are liberated from the prison of the male gaze from certain structure. And I think there are ways we can and need to push back against that representation of old age for women, but for many women, it is the best time of life. It is a time of power and freedom. I find myself more confident. I know myself better, and I feel full of a power and self knowledge that was completely unacceptable to me when I was younger.
CLEVELAND:
Pat Taub has had a similar experience.
TAUB:
I worry far less about what other people think of me. So there's that competence about? Like Annie Lamott said, “What I like about aging is I finally came home to me. It's like all the parts fit together. And I feel that way too. There's this kind of solidity. I'm not warring with myself. I mean, I have to deal with the culture, but I'm in my own skin now. And that feels good. Maybe it takes us this long to sort of become the people we are. And it's rather wonderful when that happens. I was talking to a friend of mine. I was saying, there's all this emphasis on how we lose our cognitive abilities as we get older. And I forget things, but I said in some way, my mind feels sharper. And she said, what do you mean? I said, it almost feels like all the anxieties and tensions I had when I was younger. My insecurities, they're not with me.
CLEVELAND:
And this is what led me to my next big discovery that people tend to be happiest later in life. We'll have more on that, right after a quick break. Are you exhausted from trying to do everything perfectly? Do you hold yourself back because you're scared of failure? Well, that's why I want to tell you about another podcast you should be tuning into. You can break away from the cult of perfection by subscribing and listening to the award. Winning Brave, Not Perfect podcast. It's hosted by Reshma Saujani she's the founder and CEO of girls who code and author of the international bestseller. Brave Not Perfect. Her TED talk about teaching girls bravery instead of perfection has over 5 million views.
CLEVELAND:
Join Reshma as she shares her secrets about bravery and success, because she wants to help you fear less, fail more and live Boulder. She'll even answer your questions and give you tips about how to get a little braver every day. Plus, she has revealing conversations with other change makers about their complex journeys and what we can take away from them to improve our own lives. If you're enjoying thread the needle, I have a feeling you're going to love Brave, not Perfect with Reshma Saujani. You can tune in and subscribed to Brave, not Perfect wherever you listen to podcasts.
CLEVELAND:
So experiencing happiness in old age, it turns out is not just anecdotal, but is a universal trend. I learned this from Jonathan Rauch. He's a journalist who spent years studying the relationship of happiness and age for his book. The happiness curve Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. And as a contributing writer for the Atlantic, he took interest in this topic after going through a period of discontent and midlife.
JONATHAN RAUCH:
I was mystified by my own dissatisfaction.
CLEVELAND:
Rauch was in a happy relationship, he'd achieved career success as a journalist, and yet he couldn't shake a sense of chronic disappointment and a voice inside that kept telling him he was a failure. The fact that nothing was actually going wrong, just gave him a sense of shame. Why did he feel unhappy? Despite all the many things he had to be grateful for. And so he kept quiet. That was until one day a colleague of his at the Brookings Institute, told him about some research that was going to change everything.
RAUCH:
I learned about this cutting edge research that was finding a natural tendency for life satisfaction to decline in midlife. And that sent me off on a journey of discovering that there's an independent relationship between life satisfaction and age. And it's actually the opposite of what most people think it should be.
CLEVELAND:
Hearing about this research sent Rauch off on a mission to understand this relationship. And it's what eventually led him to write his book early on in his research. Roush had to define what he meant by happiness. After all the emotion is very subjective and it comes in many shades and flavors for the sake of measurement, he narrowed it down to two kinds.
RAUCH:
One is called hedonic satisfaction, and that's basically your mood. Are you cheerful? Are you sad? And you would find out about that by asking people questions. Like how often did you smile today? How stressed and worried do you feel? The other kind is the kind that interests me and it's called evaluative happiness. And that's how satisfied are you with your life as a whole? And that has much more to do with your personal fulfillment and much less to do with your mood. And in fact, these things don't even map very well. You can be someone who's grouchy and unhappy and stressed while still feeling your life is very meaningful. And having a lot of satisfaction, parents will relate to that.
CLEVELAND:
This sense of wellbeing is what Roush was lacking in his middle years. Early on Rosh wondered if what he was experiencing was a midlife crisis. He wasn't about to go out and buy a red sports car though, or have an affair. The symptoms didn't really match when Rauch started researching,
RAUCH:
I was surprised to find that the idea of midlife crisis is as recent as 1965. It was coined by a Freudian psychiatrist named Elliot Jaques in an article on of all things, the creative lives of famous artists. And he claimed that had midlife people suddenly have to grapple with the onset of death and that this kicks up a kind of crisis. What Jaques got right, is that something happens in midlife. What he got wrong is that it's not a crisis. In fact, it's the opposite of a crisis. It's a normal, natural, and usually healthy transition. We're very ambitious when we're young, and we think that achieving all our goals will make us super satisfied, you know, status and material things. Well, we're wrong about that. Ambition just keeps moving the goalposts. So by about our forties, we start to feel like, well, I've accomplished all this stuff and I'm still not satisfied that leads to disappointment and pessimism. And that's what I felt. But other things were also going on our values start to change. As we get older, as, as lifespan gets shorter, we start to question, maybe I don't need to worry so much about, you know, the house or the car or the status. Maybe I should be thinking more about the people and relationships and pursuits that matter most. And that turns out is very good for happiness, but it's a gradual transition.
CLEVELAND:
Even though we've debunked the midlife crisis, the stereotypes around middle-age, haven't gone away. And we have even more negative stereotypes around old age. And here Rauch again, found that our ideas don't reflect reality, starting in the nineties, economist David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald began studying human happiness.
RAUCH:
Starting in the seventies. And then on into the nineties, pollsters Gallup, for example, begin to accumulate these huge databases of questions about life satisfaction, which they're asking all over the world. And, you know, people like economists love big data. So they start mining all this stuff to try to figure out, is there a relationship between say wealth and happiness? And so they plow through this data and they apply a lot of statistical analysis the way they do. And they want to see what matters to happiness as well. Education, employment, marriage, children, health income, all of those things. And then because they're statisticians, they can correct for all of those things. They can just take all of that stuff out of the equation using statistical regressions. And they did that. And then this weird thing shows up, which is even after you remove the effects of all these other important variables, there's still this pattern of happiness decreasing until about age 47 and then increasing after that. Well, at first, you know, they're economists, right? They're not psychologists. They don't know what to make about. So they just throw that result away, but it keeps coming up again and again, and the early two thousands, it begins to dawn on people, Hey, wait a minute. We should look at this. There does seem to be an independent effect of the aging process on happiness. So starting in the two thousands people really begin to dive in. And in 2008, first big article was published saying, we can really confirm this pattern with lots of countries. And that's how it was discovered by economists.
CLEVELAND:
Let's pause and go over what we've learned so far contrary to popular belief. Happiness over time is not a downward slope to death analysis of data collected from around the world on life satisfaction in age has found a U shaped curve of happiness over the course of the human lifespan. Number two, our peak year of misery is 47. So sorry, any 47 year olds listening, it'll get better soon. Number three, we become happier after 50 with our happiness levels, reaching all time highs in our seventies and early eighties actually surpassing levels in our twenties and thirties. Number four, even when controlling for things like education, employment, marriage, children, health, and income, the happiness curve still showed up. When Rauch was slogging his way through midlife. What made it harder was the fact that he was convinced his feelings of unhappiness would only get worse with time.
RAUCH:
I thought what everyone thinks, because it's ubiquitous in the culture, that aging is a process of decline and despair and depression and relinquishment of all the things we care about and then death. All of these things are completely wrong. They're just backwards, but I believed all that because everyone believed that. I was very startled to find when I did my research, the most robustly supported element of this entire literature on happiness in age found over many years in study after study, is that people get happier as they get older after a midlife.
CLEVELAND:
The u-curve of happiness is undeniable. In fact, it's so universal that even shows up in monkeys.
RAUCH:
Andrew Oswald, who's an economist at university work kind of on a Lark, gets in touch with primatologists and says, can I see this data and unsure enough that you curve pops right out the U shaped curve is both biological and cultural. We know it's biological to some extent because it appears in so many places and even in other species, but we also know it's cultural because the shape and level of this U shaped curve, how happy people are, how steeply they decline as they go into middle age on average and where the turning point is, especially at what point the curve bottoms out. And they start to feel better instead of worse. All of those vary between cultures and countries, to some extent. So we don't have solid confirmed explanations of what's going on here, but it is clear that it's an interaction of biology and culture, both working together.
CLEVELAND:
Basically we can't positive think our way out of experiencing the slump, but how a culture thinks about aging does matter. It's also important to remember that there are a lot of factors that affect a person's happiness. So there will be plenty of people's lives that don't follow this specific trajectory. Someone with a traumatic childhood, for instance, may experience life as only getting better and better as they get older or someone who happily remarries in their forties may find that the happiest time of their life is in the middle years. Nevertheless, age is a factor and you can see it in the fact that our brains change over time,
RAUCH:
We actually get less emotionally volatile. We get better at coping with stress. We react more to positive stimuli relative to negative stimuli. We even are less likely to get depressed as we get older. So all of these things kick in and they lead to this natural pattern where life satisfaction tends to drop in midlife and then tends to rise steadily as we age beyond midlife and on into the eighties.
CLEVELAND:
Alan Castel is a professor of cognitive psychology at UCLA, and he studies memory learning and aging, and he's uncovered an interesting finding. We become more selective about what we remember as we age or another way of putting that is we get good at tuning. Most things out.
ALAN CASTEL:
I was a graduate student and we are testing older adults memory. And a lot of these older adults would come into the lab and we'd show them faces or words on a computer screen and ask them to memorize them for a later memory test. And I remember one older adult, you know, the words were going by fairly rapidly, there are 80 or a hundred of them. And she just turned to me and said, well, I can't remember all of them. And of course, by that time, a few more words had whizzed passed. And I realized that that is what we call metacognition or an awareness of how our memory works and how limited it is. And so sh you know, we designed then based on that tasks that look at this selectivity, the ability to selectively, remember things that are important. And then we developed experiments that, that manipulated or built in importance.
So some things might be more important to remember than others. And we've used things like trivia questions and to examine how curiosity might influence memory. So if I gave you a question that you were very curious to learn the answer so if I said, what, what was the country to first give women the right to vote? It might take you a, you know, kind of a, some time to think about that, and you might provide some guesses. And if I really were to hold you to this, I'd have you guess first, before I tell you the, the, the answer, but we ask people how curious they were to learn the answer. And we found that if you were curious to learn the answer to the question, you were more likely to remember that information a week later, compared to other questions, like what was the first product to have a barcode. And so that, you know, the answer is Wrigley's chewing gum. And so when we test people a week later, if that's not interesting to you, you'll quickly forget it. But the first one, the first country to give women the right to vote was in fact, New Zealand and people are sometimes surprised to hear that. But if that's something you're interested in and curious about, you'll remember that for a much longer period of time. And that that's especially the case for older adults. We didn't find that relationship for younger adults.
CLEVELAND:
According to Castel, a lot of studies of memory, miss the point,
CASTEL:
A lot of this research has motivated on prior work that shows, you know, for the last 30 years, 40 years, that older adults get slower, have memory impairments. And all of these findings are certainly relevant and true, but they don't test memory in the context that it's used in the real world. And so even though older adults might experience more challenges, remembering names, or have more of these tip of the tongue effects like in, you know, you know, it, you can't just retrieve it at that moment. So taking this lifespan approach, that memory changes with age, not simply declines suggests that while some forms of memory might decline, other forms might adapt or might get better with age. And I think my research is unique in that we found that older adults, and as we get older, we become more selective and focus on what think is important.
It's not that we don't care about the rest. Sometimes that might be the case, but we know that if we can't remember everything, we certainly want to focus on the most important thing.
CLEVELAND:
This Castel found was in stark contrast to how younger people tried to remember everything.
CLEVELAND:
My mom recently turned 70, and when she talks about getting older, she'll say funny things like, “Who's that,” when she looks in the mirror or talk about, “back when she was young and gorgeous.” Which by the way, mom, you still are. Overall, I can tell my mom's comfortable with who she is. And one thing I've heard her focus on when talking about getting older is that you gain wisdom. I've heard people say before age is inevitable, wisdom is optional. Rauch said we actually can increase our wellbeing throughout life by increasing our wisdom.
RAUCH:
Wisdom is a real thing. It's actually been scientifically defined. It can be measured. It can be inculcated there. Studies on how to get people to be wiser. It's been determined that wisdom is not just the sum of intelligence experience, skill it's its own thing. Actually, it's tremendously valuable to individuals and a society. So if you're asking it, can you ensure that someone gets wise as they age? The answer is no. Can you help yourself get wiser? The answer is yes, focus more on others, keep things in perspective, reach out, do mentoring and focus on the most important things in life. The people pursuits you really care about. Those are all helpful to being wise. Try to take yourself out of the equation. When you think about what happens day to day, try to think about yourself, transcending yourself as a big part of wisdom. Looking at the world, looking at yourself as others might see you.
CLEVELAND:
Wisdom is good for aging. And so Applewhite discovered is having a generally positive attitude.
RAUCH:
Oeople with more realistic attitudes towards aging, right, which means more positive, are less likely to develop Alzheimer's even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease.
CLEVELAND:
Pat Taub’s whole mission with her blog is to cultivate wisdom and a positive attitude about aging in older women. Part of this positivity is about helping women shift their attention away from focusing on what they've lost.
TAUB:
I think there is this tendency for a lot of older women to what I call romancing the past the saying, Oh, things are so much better. When I was younger, I was happier. I was pretty, I was married, blah blah. But when we do that, we will often overlook the struggles that were inherent there.
CLEVELAND:
A personal fear that I have about old age is the thought of reaching the end of my life and being filled with regrets. She didn't tell me that I wouldn't have regrets if I lived the right way, which is what a lot of people say instead, she said, this
TAUB:
Regrats are a part of life. You know, it's going to happen because none of us are perfect. So we're all going to make choices and think, Oh my God, why did I do that? So regrets are there. Sometimes we can revisit them and try to learn from them, but they're unavoidable. I mean, how you'd have to stay in a closet. Your whole life did not have regrets. Well then you might regret not having smelled Trish air and seeing the sunrise and all of that. And also at the same time, when we get into regret mode, then we're negative about ourselves. You know what a jerk I was who had done this or that, and balance it out by recognizing all the positive things you did or look at them as teachers, what can they teach me about my life?
CLEVELAND:
Tom is very proactive about having a positive experience of aging. She has made a pact to surround herself with positive people. She's volunteering in hospice care to come to peace with the end of life process. And she's still working toward her dreams, including writing her own play. Hopefully,
TAUB:
Yeah, I will keep dreaming until my last breath. We can continue to dream and contribute. And I think it's really important to be able to laugh at ourselves, to not take our self so seriously to have fun. I mean, play and whimsy never goes away. I also think we have a responsibility as elders to be part of social change in whatever way we can to make a contribution because we do have this wisdom. That's accumulated it's the wisdom years. And you know, instead of years of tearing our hair out on my God, why do I look like this? You know, my body is changing and so on, but the wisdom is really a precious gift.
CLEVELAND:
Going into this episode. I wondered if I'd come out of it more or less afraid of getting older. Now I'd say it's made me less afraid, but only by a small degree, if I'm being honest, that's because there's no really knowing what it feels like to be at a different stage of life until you're there. It's interesting and worthwhile to learn about, but I just don't think it's the same as having it be your own lived experience. For example, in my twenties, I was scared shitless of turning 30. It felt sort of like I was walking off some sort of cliff. And even though I talked to people who were in their thirties, it took having the experience for myself to really get it. Mainly though it's made me want some of that steadiness that I've learned comes with time. I feel like most of the time, if you could hear my inner dialogue, you think I was a bit of a mess. My friends do hear it. And thank you for still being my friends. In the meantime, I'll take some comfort in knowing that later in life, I can look forward to feeling more centered. I also now see women feeling good about themselves and being vocal about it at any time in life. But especially in older age, as a political act, thriving as a woman starts to shift and change the negative stories we've been fed our whole lives. I'm left with a sense that fighting against ageism and cultivating wisdom can help us live more freely. And with greater happiness simultaneously studying the happiness curve has left me feeling a bit like I'm strapped into my seat on a roller coaster ride. That's about to take off whether or not I'm ready. The ups and downs are just part of the ride, whether or not I try to have a good attitude about it. And that I suppose is called the human condition.
Thank you for listening to thread the needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women's lives. I'm Donna Cleveland, the host and producer of this show. The theme song of thread the needle is by Mira Ober dike. Original music is by Taylor Ross and episode artwork is by Chelsea Titus. Thank you to Molly, bloom of American public media for being my mentor. If you have feedback or a story you'd like to see featured in a future episode, please email me at podcast@theneedle.co. I'll be back month with the last episode of season one on racism.