January 6, 2026 • 59 mins
Aging Wisely: Insights from Lifelong Friends Scott Fisher and Dr. Ben Green
If we're lucky -- we'll get older. But what does it mean to age wisely? Join host Dian Griesel as she converses with lifelong friends Scott Fisher and Dr. Ben Green about what it means to age wisely. Having known each other since their freshman year at Yale, Scott and Ben share their journey of exploring successful aging after turning 70. They discuss their extensive research, including interviews with 52 elders, and the insights they've gained into the variables that contribute to aging wisely -- wile writing their book: The Aging Wisely Project. The conversation touches on topics like gratitude, resilience, purpose, and the impact of early childhood attachment on aging. Learn practical tips and hear inspiring stories from those who have embraced aging with intention and purpose. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that encourages us to view aging as a continued opportunity for growth and wisdom.
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I’m Dian Griesel and in November of 2017 I began blogging as @SilverDisobedience on my website and @SilverDisobedience on Instagram Facebook and @DianGriesel X Career-wise, I am a perception analyst, counselor, hypnotherapist, author of 16 books and a Wilhelmina model. For 30 years, via owning an investor & public relations firm, while being in private practice, I have helped my clients to achieve greater understanding as to how perceptions impact everything we do whether personally or professionally. A couple of years ago I added a podcast. Episodes are unscripted, with plenty of no-holds-barred revelations from fascinating, accomplished guests living diverse lives. Intimate stories about work, play, psychology, relationships, pop culture, trends, B.S. + more are unpacked through thought-provoking questions that spark honest revelations, pivotal moments, and unguarded insights — stunning even the boldest guests with their own “aha” truths. ✨
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diangriesel/
This episode was recorded in collaboration with The Manhattan Center, New York City, New York
SHOW RUN:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:55 The Journey to Aging Wisely
02:22 Defining Aging Wisely
05:00 Impact of Attitudes on Aging
09:11 Research Insights and Personal Stories
21:02 Healthy Habits for Aging
26:57 Finding Joy and Purpose
31:17 Happiness and Resilience in Old Age
32:25 The Challenges of Aging and Coping with Loss
34:34 Elder Identity Revision and Continued Growth
35:34 Personal Stories of Resilience and Purpose
36:31 The Importance of Community and Connection
39:09 Viktor Frankl and Tragic Optimism
42:55 Creating a Life Narrative
55:01 Final Thoughts on Aging Wisely
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Hello, everybody. I don't know about you, but I've
wondered about this for years. What does it mean to age wisely?
You know we're all going to get older if we're lucky, but it
doesn't mean we're going to get wise along the way.
Today my guests are Scott Fischer and Doctor Ben Green.
These guys are lifelong friends who's at some point when they
(00:27):
approach their 70th year, they decided to explore how others
were experiencing aging and whatit meant to age wisely.
So tune into this episode because I know I have lots of
questions and I am an oldster, but I want to know how to get
wiser along the way. So thank you very much for
(00:50):
joining me, gentlemen. Thank you, Diane.
Diane. So sometime around 70 years old,
you decided to work on exploringthe topic of aging and aging
wisely. Why?
And what does that mean to you? Well, you know, I, I think, you
(01:11):
know, as you mentioned to your listeners, Ben and I have a
lifelong friendship that began freshman year in college at
Yale. And we'd supported each other
through marriages and divorces and kids and careers.
But Ben pointed out to me about 8 years ago that we've never
(01:32):
done anything together project. And after several months of
kicking ideas around, we said, well, you know, let's be totally
self-serving. It would be, it would be good to
figure out how to get old successfully.
And that's really what began theprocess of, of reviewing the
(01:54):
literature. And then we said, well, the
literature is fine, but we've learned all we can.
Let's go talk to some old people.
And that began the process of ofinterviewing 52 elders and
trying to capitalize on the factthat Ben and I have pretty
significant careers spent interviewing and listening to
(02:17):
people. And we were two old guys without
a big research budget. So what we had was time.
You know, you introduced an interesting word that I'd like
you both to opine on aging successfully.
What does that mean to you? You know, there's a lot of
(02:40):
literature out there and it getsbigger every week, it seems
like. And so a lot of theories.
But as Scott said, we ultimatelycame to feel that our intuition
was what would ultimately guide us.
So Scott has a long career in human relations in various
corporations and also as an executive coach.
(03:02):
And I've been, I've been a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
for 40 or 40 plus years. So we really trusted ourselves
to have a sense of what constituted aging wisely.
And so we came up with about 29 variables that we thought would
(03:23):
be relevant to this process of aging wisely.
But ultimately the gold standardin our mind was our intuitive
global sense about how well a person was doing.
And so we really trusted that intuition.
And then we did the statistical correlations of those 29
variables and how they correlated highly or poorly with
(03:47):
the Ultimate Global Aging Wiselyscore.
Can you define the word wise? Well, you know, I, I think it,
for me, it's about being realistic.
As you come to any stage in life, there are going to be
(04:07):
challenges and, and the challenges involve big risks and
big opportunities. And so I think this validated
all these interviews validated for me and Ben that that that
we, we're encouraging people to just shift their paradigm and
how they think about aging a bitand face old age with a
(04:33):
realistic attitude of what's going to happen and an
understanding of what this stageinvolves in terms of the
physical and mental aging processes, as well as the
opportunities to grow and learn during the last stage in life.
And, and so we want people to beintentional.
(04:55):
We want them to be forewarned and forearmed.
And Diane, correct me if I'm wrong, but the title of your
program, Silver Disobedience, really brings to mind one of our
favorite researchers and her life's work.
(05:15):
This is Becca Levy, a psychologist at Yale, and she
really illuminated the importance of implicit ageism.
So, and of course, as a psychoanalyst, I'm always
listing for implicit feelings and and conflicts, guilt,
(05:35):
impulses that a person is not aware of.
So it's certainly had a strong appeal for me, the idea that we
all have these ideas, these attitudes toward aging.
And Doctor Levy has carefully examined this and found out
that, for instance, if you assess people's attitude toward
(05:56):
aging in midlife and you check with him 3035 years later, those
attitudes have tremendous impacton, on their physical health,
their mental health, the risk ofdementia, their, their sense of
well-being, their happiness, their psychological fitness.
(06:20):
So that that has a lot to do with wisdom.
First of all, becoming more aware of your unconscious
implicit attitudes toward aging and realize you do have some
choices. It's funny, I do remember that I
have that book and I remember that research and I, and I've
shared it a few times because there are so many people that I
(06:42):
think we live in a society now where everyone's chasing youth
in, you know, biohacking or, youknow, endless surgeries or
different things. You know, every day there's some
new diet you can try that's going to, you know, the bottom
line is I think there's a lot oflet's just, I don't know if it's
(07:03):
fear of age or just, I mean, it always reminds me of that
Twilight Zone episode where the one person wanted to live
forever and then he really realized, you know, I don't know
if I want to live forever. This is not so great.
Everyone I loved is gone. Things are, you know, so I don't
really understand that way of thinking, but it it is prevalent
(07:23):
and it's being pushed on people by advertisers all over the
place. Well, I mean, our our whole
society and is focused now on this huge wealthy demographic
called the baby boomers. And you know, I you can't turn
on the TV or go online without finding ads and commercials for
(07:48):
wrinkle removers and strength improvers and sexuality
improvers and, you know, just about whatever you can spend
your money on there, somebody who wants to take it.
Take it, that's just the key point.
We, we certainly hope people will consider checking out our
book, But there's another book that just came out recently that
(08:10):
I'm very fond of. It's by a doctor, Carrie
Burnite. She's a career gerontologist and
she may her title of her book isJoy Span.
So to, to, to speak to your point, there's lifespan, how
many years we we live, there is health span, so years of
(08:31):
healthy, high functioning living.
But I think Doctor Burnite adds a a wonderful dimension to that
joy span, you know, to actually enjoy your life, to feel happy,
to have a sense of a purpose andmeaning and connection.
She has four major elements, andone of them is growth.
Do you continue to grow as you age?
(08:53):
Do you feel connected to people?Are you giving to others and do
you adapt to all the changes? And she has a number of
wonderful case examples of people doing that well or not so
well. So that all that would
constitute, again back to your earlier question, wisdom in
aging. When you were doing your
research, you spoke to how many people and where were some
(09:17):
similarities and real distinct, like, wow, I hadn't heard that
yet. Well, we interviewed 52 elders
who ranged in age from 70 to 95.And you know, basically has been
I think mentioned earlier. We, we came up with a, an
(09:39):
interview protocol because we wanted to test out these 29
variables as they affected agingwisely and successfully.
But our methodology was quite simple.
We basically said to people, look, we're sitting here.
We, we're sitting here without judgment, without any notion of
(10:03):
being critical of your choices and decisions in life.
Would you please just share yourlife story with us for two
hours? We let people take us on a
journey and you know, sometimes it was inspiring and sometimes
it was tragic. I I think where we had a clear
(10:27):
pattern quickly related to to Ben's psychoanalytic training
and he quickly made me a junior analyst by having me read deeply
about early childhood attachmentissues and.
Explain that. It was clear, well, you know,
(10:48):
the, the research has been clearnow for a long time that the,
the quality and nature of our early childhood relationships
with parents and caregivers are very significant.
As in our lives, not just duringchildhood, but they come back to
(11:09):
influence us later in life when we make decisions about who to
be friends with, who to get married to, who to have kids
with, who to work with in our careers.
And, you know, people who have what analysts call insecure
(11:29):
attachment in childhood. And some of the people we
interviewed had clearly insecureattachment for for reasons that
involve their caregivers or childhood trauma.
They almost invariably played out those traumas later in their
(11:58):
life with bad choices and bad decisions, bad marriages,
estrangement from children, problems with alcohol and drug
abuse, and. And how did how in your
interviews did you determine this impacted their ability to
(12:20):
age wisely? Well, you know, if I could just
intervene. It was fascinating to me.
I in mid career I went back to school to become a psychoanalyst
after having practice as a psychiatrist for 15 years or so.
And it was fascinating to me to learn about the history of
(12:43):
psychoanelic thought, which is for most people, pretty boring.
But, you know, Freud was a genius, but he focused a lot on
biology, you know, on sex and aggression, which obviously are
very powerful motives and explain a lot of our lives.
But Eric Erickson came along, fascinating guy.
He was a college dropout, but hemet Anna Freud, who said this
(13:05):
guy is a genius, I need to make him a psychoanalyst.
So he skipped college and mid school and just went straight to
psychoanalytic training. But he was one of the most
prominent and influential psychoanalysts of the 20th
century. And he focused on psychosocial
development, not just psychosexual, and even study
with anthropologists, people like Ruth Benedict and and
(13:28):
Margaret Mead. So and, and on the tails of
that, John Bolby introduced attachment theory, which
initially started out just focusing on kids, but we were I
was happy to see that in the more recent literature, they've
realized the same issues about attachment that is having
(13:49):
someone in your life you feel like you can trust someone who
knows you both your past, your present and accepts you.
That is so fundamentally important for our fundamental
sense of safety and security, which is a foundation upon so
much of what our lives are built.
And George Valiant at the Harvard, who was the primary
(14:11):
investigator for the Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult
development. He he picked having a secure
attachment relationship in laterlife is one of the most powerful
protective factors against premature aging and physical and
mental illness. Yeah, it's interesting you say
(14:31):
that. My parents were married for 50
years and then my mother had a very short second marriage,
which was very sad. Her husband died less than six
months after they got married byinvasive cancer that it was
terrible and then she married 1/3 time which I never would
have expected when she was 80 and was married for 12 years and
(14:54):
I always say he they each extended each other's lives.
Wow, that's a great you. Know and I mean you know when
your mom at like 85 says to me, you know, I'm thinking about
getting a different bra because Bernie says I have no CMS, which
one do you recommend? I love you are alive and well.
(15:16):
I'm loving this. Let me give Bernie a big smooch
next time I see him. I wish we could have interviewed
her. She would have been a character.
Pistol, Pistol. The two of them.
That's great. And there's a lot to that
because you see, with the Blue Zones, it's not just, you know,
diet or where you're living, butthat sense of community and
(15:36):
belonging. Yes.
Yes, and and and nothing that that we've said should, should
make people think that we believe that what happens to you
in childhood is set in stone or concrete.
Because we interviewed people who are really inspiring who who
got to midlife and looked at their lives and said, oh boy, I
(16:01):
got to make some changes. And the ability of people to
with intention, change their life trajectory, you know, do go
through a self reflective process, whether it's through a
12 step program or a religious community or flaw or just a
(16:25):
social group where you do trust people and you can talk and you
can think this makes a big difference.
We we interviewed people who were were just thrilling in
their ability to to change that life trajectory in their 30s,
forties, even 50s and. What were some of the
(16:48):
commonalities you found in people in what you would define
as aging wisely? Well, you know, there's some
fascinating research that comes to mind.
Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, talked about the
(17:09):
growth mindset. Now, she was initially looking
at kids who struggle with a subject like math.
Do they feel like I'm stuck? I'll never be good at it?
Or do they have a that's called a fixed mindset?
Or do they have a growth mindsetwhere they thought, you know
what? I'm not good now, but if I keep
working at it and I ask for helpfrom my teacher and maybe do a
little extra homework, I can getgood at this.
(17:32):
That kind of growth mindset is so critical for elders as well.
And you know, Alicia Crumb also at Stanford, she has makes the
distinction between when you face a challenge, do you see
this stress as something that's going to be debilitating, that's
going to weaken you, knock you down?
(17:52):
Where are you out? Or do you see stress as
enhancing and strengthening? Do you see it as a challenge
that once you take it on, it's going to make you a stronger,
better person? And I do think those those
mindsets really do play out as you move along.
And again, back to Levy's work. If you have in the back of your
mind an implicit positive stereotype about aging.
(18:16):
And Scott and I were both lucky to know elders that we really
looked up to and admired. Scott's father-in-law was a
Holocaust survivor, Grandfather Paul Stangree.
You know, he would come back from his doctor's physical exams
every year and say he thinks I'm20 years younger than my birth
certificate would suggest. And so these guys were
(18:38):
inspirational to us. We thought, you know, we also
can be strong and have a vital, engaged, purposeful lives even
in our seventies, 80s and maybe 90s.
I think, I think one of the things we should all be more
aware of is the notion that thatour, our world from a
(19:01):
demographic trend standpoint is really shifting.
We are live many more of us willlive longer and healthier
lifespans than ever before. It's not, it's not that people
didn't live into their 90s or even into their hundreds, but
now many more people, much higher percentage of the of the
(19:24):
population. We'll do that.
Actually, you know what, I recently interviewed an actuary
and lifespan is on the decline and that's pre COVID.
So that started in 2020 and it'sshowing a steady decline.
(19:45):
You know, I have read that literature, Diane, and, and it
is distressing. And I know there's a lot of talk
about deaths of despair and I, I, I do think that's a major
contribution to that decline in,in longevity.
And it's I agree with that. And it's very sad.
And I think it's very real. You talk to people and like I'm
(20:07):
a big believer of stay active inwhatever it is you love.
Figure out which whether you want to work till the day you
drop or whether you want to, youknow, make guitars or sing songs
or, you know, volunteer at your church, whatever.
Just do something. You need a sense of purpose.
Purpose is so important because when you're sitting at home and
(20:31):
you are watching television all day long and or picking up a
phone, you can't help but pick up news and news has never been
designed to cheer you up. It's the time to keep you
hooked. Like, Oh my God, like a a
thriller movie. You know what's going to happen
next, A Michael Bay movie where everything's exploding.
(20:52):
You know, you have no idea what alien race is going to take you
over. And that despair is real in a
lot of people. You know, we came up with five
healthy habits that we we thought were essential for
healthy aging, for aging wisely.And it's the acronym is GRASP.
(21:14):
So the G is gratitude. And related to gratitude, there
is research that people that areoptimistic and grateful, they
live seven years longer than people that are pessimistic.
The R is resilience, you know, how do you cope with the
stresses and the losses? And we've all had losses, losses
of bodily functioning, losses offamily and friends, losses of
(21:38):
residents and careers. The A is active practices, just
as you say, staying engaged and involved physically,
intellectually, socially. The else the S is self
acceptance so important to be able to look honestly at your
life, the good, the bad, the ugly, to forgive yourself and
(22:01):
others for mistakes and hurtful decisions, but but to also
celebrate your successes. And the final P as you just
mentioned, purpose again, peoplewith a high sense of purpose
live seven years longer than those with a low sense of
purpose. We thought those five elements
were really critically importantfor aging successfully.
(22:25):
Well, I don't know if this is how the math works, but if we
add 77777 to those five, I guessI can just add it another 35
years. All right.
Or or are they simultaneously? Yes.
Well, in spite of, in spite of the pessimism expressed by the
actuary that you just brought up, you know, I, one of the
(22:50):
outgrowths for me of the Aging Wisely project has been I've,
I've gotten involved with a low income Medicaid subsidized
senior community, independent living and assisted living
community and I serve on their board.
And one of the astounding statistics that that this
(23:11):
organization CEO came up with earlier this year was that
compared with about 20 years agowhen stays in skilled nursing
facilities, memory care and nursing home stays average seven
years, that average stay now is under six months.
(23:39):
So what might that tell us? That that goes to the notion of
health span and joy span. We may not live quite as long,
but the years we have are generally going to be healthier
and more functional than what they've been in the past because
(24:00):
of medical advances. I need to know a lot more.
I think there's a lot that couldbe broken down from that
statistic. It could be that someone's
waiting longer to go in. They have better self-care.
They're able to age in place. They're exactly, they're able to
age in place or they're going inand they're hitting ultimate
Despair. So and so they're dying quicker.
(24:22):
So I think there's too many variables.
I've studied, I've worked on studies for 35 years.
So I'm always looking for the variables that aren't included.
You know, it's kind of like Trident chewing gum. 4 out of
five dentists recommend it. Well, were those four out of
five the dentists of the son whoinvented the gum?
I don't know there. You go and, you know, I bet if
(24:46):
we broke down that number and interms of the declining lifespan,
I bet we'd see there's probably more diversity now than there
was a couple decades ago becauseI bet they're also a larger
fraction of the population that are getting to age 100.
So I think people that are making healthy choices and
frankly that have the resources to be able to act upon those
(25:09):
choices, I bet they their lifespan is actually getting
longer. We're people that are
underprivileged. I think, you know, there's a lot
of racism, there's a lot of sexism, people of immigrant
groups, minority groups. Those are all valid factors, but
(25:29):
when you speak to an actuary, I mean, it was an eye opening
experience to learn from. They don't care about any of
those factors. It's men and women.
That's how it's divided. They don't care about your race.
They don't care about anything when they do a actuarial
lifespan table. All those other things are other
(25:50):
studies, but the pure want, the pure actuarial table that any
insurance company will use is just based on men and women,
period. You know who's alive and it goes
from zero to 120 years and they take, you know, let's say 10,000
people at the end of 10th the first year, how many are left?
(26:13):
Yeah, right. At age 1, how many at age 2?
How many at age 3? And that's how they span it out.
So it was very interesting that it's super just dry analytics,
so dry. I was shocked.
Yeah. But what are you, what did you
find as things that someone could do, like action steps that
(26:35):
you learned that you would say to somebody?
You gave your the the grasp, which I love that that I love a
good acronym. So I really that's a good way to
remember things. What practical things within
someone's community would you recommend that you saw people
doing that seemed pumped up and excited about living?
(26:58):
You know, I think I, you know, my, I guess my, my general
comment to that question is thatas we interviewed people, the
diversity was astounding. You know and it and you know it
made. How do you mean that?
The diversity of the people you chose, or where?
People chose to spend their timeand their energy and what gave
(27:22):
them satisfaction and comfort and pleasure as they got older.
You know, for one person, it wasspending time in their garden
growing things and getting theirhands dirty in the soil.
For another person, it was a book club.
For another person, it was volunteer work.
For another person, it was beingthe, the town historian in this
(27:45):
little town they live lived in. And so I, you know, I think our
advice to people in general would be you got to find your
joy. I mean, our, our book was not
designed to give people a OK, dothese three things and you'll
age wisely. You know, we're all a product of
(28:05):
our genetics, our upbringing andour life experiences.
And so how can anybody else makethose decisions for you?
I'm going to tell you the three things you should do to live to
100 and be happy. I can't.
Just out of curiosity, when someone says to you, well how do
I find my passion or purpose? I mean I write A blog every day.
(28:26):
I've been writing it since November of 2016, never missed a
day. I have a humongous community and
I get asked that question every day.
How would you answer it? How do you find your passion or
purpose? You know, we did write a chapter
on gratitude and that's a good place to start.
(28:48):
And it seems simple minded, but maybe you're already doing this,
but just journaling every day and trying to notice something
in the day. Three things that you're
grateful for. They could be something trivial,
like seeing a Maple tree with a scarlet canopy in the fall.
(29:10):
It could be a friend who says something nice to you that
compliments you, goes out of their way to do a favor for you.
Could be an exchange you had with a a barista.
But to, to look for things to begrateful for, as trivial as that
seems, it becomes kind of a of abackground task in your mind
(29:33):
throughout the day. You're looking for something to
be grateful for. That's a kind of a subtle but a
significant shift in the way youlook at the world.
So cultivating gratitude, that'sso critically important.
And part of that and and we talkabout this in our book is
noticing yourself. What gives you joy, what gives
you pleasure during the day. And don't just rush past that.
(29:56):
Our lives are so busy to say, wait a minute.
That really felt good. That was wonderful.
Dasher Keltner wrote this book called Awe AWE.
You know what things are amazingto you?
Is it visual beauty? Is it music?
Is it someone's example of of moral courage?
But look for things that give you that little twinge of
(30:18):
pleasure and build on that. Say, wow, that was wonderful.
How could I have more of that? How do what I, I need to take
this part of myself very seriously and honor it.
So it is a kind of a whole attitude again, of, of growing
this sense of, of gratitude and engagement in the world.
When you were interviewing people, were there any times
(30:39):
during an interview or in the aftermath when you did a
download where you said, oh, I don't see that person living a
long time. And I don't mean because of,
let's say, a health issue. We're talking about a meant, a
state of mind. Absolutely.
(31:00):
It was there. As Scott said, more often than
not, we were inspired by the courage.
We thought about a subtitle for our book, you know, profiles and
courage because there are a lot of very courageous people,
quietly courageous out there. John Leland wrote a wonderful
book called Happiness is a Choice You Make, and he was
(31:21):
following these, he's a New YorkTimes reporter, The fall, these
six people over age 85 and five of the six woke up happy to have
another day of life over and over again.
And they had very tough lives, terrible arthritic pain and
losses, etcetera. So that was inspiring.
But we did see, we did talk to acouple people that really seemed
down and out. And frankly, we are amazed they
(31:43):
had lived as long as they had, you know, histories of alcohol
abuse. No one in their life 1 fellow
said. The only significant people in
his life were his psychologist, his psychiatrist and his doctor.
And what a sad life that was. And he'd had a series of losses
and and terrible decisions over and over again.
(32:05):
Alcohol and substance abuse is is certainly one very high risk
of behavior that contributed to a lot of sadness, whether it was
the cause or the effect of it, but that that was often a part
of of these very sad lines. If you want to add to that,
Scott. Well, I, I guess I would add
(32:28):
that I, I mean, if this might bea good time to sort of bring in
what I think is the other is another significant insight
from, from our interviews and, and rolling around in this data.
And that's this notion that thatold age, what starts maybe
somewhere in, in the 70s, seventy 5 to 85 is really more
(32:54):
than than just a sitting around exercise waiting to die.
And when we look at look at EricErickson and what he did in
terms of identifying life stagesand the challenges within each
of those stages, you know, life expectancy was maybe mid to late
60s, not significantly longer, even though it may be short.
(33:21):
So, you know, I think, I think this was really an insight that
Ben had that that as in Ericsson's model, they're sort
of, I don't know, it's almost it's you can call it a dialectic
or you can say there's a tensionbetween one end of the seesaw
and the other end. And on one end, old age is about
(33:45):
coping with loss and dealing with the fact that inevitably we
all fall apart and we all peoplethat are important to each other
and we're all going to die. I'm going to lose connections
that are that are dear to. US.
Dear to us. So at the same time, though, if
we can figure out a way to manage that loss and that
(34:11):
deterioration, then we also havean opportunity to enrich our
lives with, with insight and growth and development, even
even as we get older and older. It's, it's not a time to stop
learning. It's a time to, to, to lean in.
(34:35):
And we came, we decided that if we were going to amend
Ericsson's model of, of psychosocial development, we
would add a ninth stage called elder identity revision.
And we tried to capture the the losses that people have to deal
with and, and, and the challenges that are there for us
(34:59):
to take on if we're willing. That that's a great point
because the, the losses are real.
I mean, in, in my community, just in my blogging community,
which is about 250,300 thousand people, I could tell you a lot
of them have lost a child, you know, they've lost a long time
(35:20):
spouse and those are serious. And then, you know, they've
dealt with loss of limbs or, youknow, different, you know, heart
problems and different setbacks that are very real.
And at the same time, I always juxtapose that my mom lived a
wildlife till she was 92, you know, and it was only the last
(35:44):
six months that she was like, OK, this is it, I'm going out,
you know. But my closest friend, who I've
been best of friends with for over 40 years, is 20 years older
than me. So she's 85 and she has just
finished writing her 55th book that she ghost writes for
people. So, and she's like always like,
(36:05):
you know, I'm going out to this event tonight because there
might be somebody who needs a good book there, you know, and
that's 85 S. Always, always opportunities for
business development, you know. Yeah.
So it's very interesting when you talk about, you know, that
desire to get up and go and connect.
(36:26):
In spite of. Whatever.
The accumulating losses that we're all going to suffer.
You know, Ben and I have joked with each other for for 20
years. Ben is losing his sight to
macular degeneration. I'm suffering some pretty
significant hearing loss. Hearing aids help that, but
(36:49):
they're not the answer either. And, you know, we used to just
say, well, we'll sit on the porch in our rockers and and.
And. We'll see no evil and I'll hear
no evil. But I think this, this endeavor
that we call the Aging Wisely Project has really energized us
(37:11):
and it it's gotten us involved in teaching and presentations
and nonprofit work. And, you know, for my
standpoint, it's been a pretty good run for eight years.
And if it goes on for another eight years, that would be a
good thing. I think it's fantastic.
(37:32):
I think it's fantastic and I cantotally understand why you say
it's invigorating. When you do something different,
whatever it is, and you know, you really immerse yourself,
it's invigorating and you're getting a great response.
And look at you, Diane. I mean, this wonderful silver
disobedience. I mean, this is a heck of a
(37:53):
project. You know it, it's, it's fun.
It's, it's, I get to speak to great people, I get to write
every day, I get to talk to different companies, but it's
all, and you know, you talked about the only time in my life,
I think I actually felt old was I woke up three years ago with
no hearing on my right side. And I always had limited hearing
(38:15):
on my left side. So I woke up, you know, and all
of a sudden I have 30% hearing and hearing aids don't work.
And it's like, whoa, that's, that's a life changer.
And when we talk about community, you know, one of the
first things was I didn't want to go out.
And I'm somebody who said I'm going to spend my 60s or going
(38:38):
to my 70s. I'm going to be the Grand Dom in
New York. I'm going to be throwing parties
every night. I'm going to be the old lady who
invites everybody to party. And I didn't want to be a new
crowd anymore because the sound drove me nuts.
And so it became forcing myself to go out saying no matter what,
you're going out, suck it up, Diane, deal with it.
(39:00):
And then I have a great time even if I can't hear 90% of what
people are saying to me, but I meet them and say can we have a
call later when I can talk on a phone?
Good for you. You know one one person we found
inspirational over and over again was Viktor Frankel.
Oh. And and, you know, a Holocaust
survive. Up a lot in these podcasts.
(39:21):
How about that? He's a general theme.
His book, you know, Man's Searchfor Meaning is just such a key
iconic book. But you know, for him to realize
that the people that survived the camps, we're not just trying
to survive, they had to have something outside themself to
(39:42):
motivate them. They had to have someone that
needed them to to survive and and help them or they needed to
have make some contribution to the world.
And he came up with a notion of tragic optimism.
Again, back to Scott's notion about this dialectic.
We we all know how the story ends.
(40:02):
But how do we sustain optimism and engagement and wish to help
people? Burnite's notion, you know, of
giving to others such a fundamental attitude.
And of course, when we give, it's in our fundamental nature.
It's our hard wired in our mindsand in our brains to reciprocate
(40:24):
a giving to others elicits them giving back to us.
And all that really lights up your dopamine circuits in a way
that keeps your brain moving along.
I love that. I know that.
I know that when I when my father-in-law was still alive,
he's been gone for 05 years now,but he had one of those lives
(40:50):
where you just marvel that somebody can keep going.
You know, he survived the camps and well, he said it.
The only way he survived was because of blind and dumb luck.
When you listen to his listen tohis stories more than that, you
know that it was more than that.He had this burning desire to,
(41:12):
to, to, to find his sisters and to make sure that they were OK
and, and that propelled him through the war and, and, and
post war and then come to this country.
And then he, he marries, you know, the love of his life.
And they have three kids and, and she dies at 37 from
(41:38):
untreatable leukemia. You know, he, he picks up his,
his three kids. He goes to Israel for five years
because his sisters want to takecare of him.
He did find them and and then hecame back and he lived the rest
of his life just focused on people and relationships and
(41:58):
helping people. And everybody's got to find that
purpose. And I think, you know, we're Ben
and I are not not being Pollyannaish about this.
You know, old age is tough, but every stage of life is tough.
(42:23):
It was it was tough learning to walk and get yourself toilet
trained. And it was tough making friends
in school and dealing with peer pressure.
It's hard finding the right person to marry and have kids
with. Every stage is fraught with risk
and opportunity and we we want people to to be aware of the
(42:46):
risk and try to prepare themselves and at the same time
take advantage of the opportunities.
You know, our basic theory was that there are tasks and tools,
and the tasks basically have to do with the developmental stages
(43:06):
of life and Erickson's final twostages, something that Freud
never really got into. Freud thought, you know, once
you hit adulthood, you were basically on this plateau until
you fell off the far end into senescence.
Erickson said no, that there arediscreet and identifiable stages
even during adulthood. So intimacy versus isolation,
(43:28):
you know, do you do you find as a life partner?
And you may not stick with the same one, but are you looking
for that kind of intimate relationship?
Valiant added, you know, career consolidation.
But Erickson's final two stages were generativity, that is,
investment in the world. I think Confucius talked about
planting trees under whose shadeyou will never sit.
(43:52):
But do you do things to benefit the world, to benefit the next
generation? Of course, that's naturally
taking place with kids and grandkids, but you can also do
it as a teacher, as a mentor, asa lecture, as a podcast creator,
as a manager. And that kind of investment is,
(44:13):
is a win win both for the personyou give to, but also to
yourself. And Ericsson's final stage was
basically self integrity. Do you, can you look over your
life honestly? Can you create a life review, a
life narrative that hangs together, that makes sense?
Sure, there are ups and downs, things you might regret, but
does it fit together in a way that feels meaningful to you?
(44:36):
That's so critically important? We talk a lot about that in our
book and encourage people to really think about creating a
life narrative for themselves. There are programs like a Story
worth. They will send you a prompt
every week you write about it, and end of the year they pull it
together in a book. Now, some people don't need that
externally imposed structure, but the and of course, this is
(45:00):
what happens in a psychoanalysisover years and years.
Sometimes people really go through their life over and over
and over again. People say, oh, I don't need to
know that. Of course I remember my life.
But if you get someone to sit down and talk about it, they'll
quickly realize there are parts of their life that they've kind
of skipped over. Maybe they just don't even want
to think about being an adolescent or maybe a midlife
(45:21):
period, or they're embarrassed or ashamed about certain things.
But to be able to look honestly at all of it and we've put it
together into a coherent autobiographical narrative,
that's a very healthy and and holistic thing to do, which we
heartily encourage. And I'll just, I'll just add
(45:43):
that that was one of the things that differentiated our
interviews with people. When we were meeting with people
who had done the work, even unconsciously or to pull their
lives together, we heard a storythat had a beginning and a
middle and an end, and it was cold and the narrative was
relatively smooth. And when that work hadn't taken
(46:09):
place, people were just all overthe place.
And you know, it's, it's really an interesting point that you
both just made and I love your thoughts on it.
It's because when I speak to people, I worked a lot with
people dying in the 80s. I was in private practice.
They heavy AIDS and lupus we, you know, when they were trying
to figure out what was falling under acquired immune deficiency
(46:33):
syndrome. So it was this cluster of all
kinds of things and but people were dying and then and now when
people talk to me, the ones thathave the biggest fear of dying,
I say, listen, you can have hellon earth.
You don't need to die to find out if there's hell.
(46:55):
So how about we focus on what ismaking you feel like you could
go to hell and let's resolve it now, because then you'll feel
like you're living in heaven because that's the best way you
can approach life. You know, you've got to get
through those things that are making you feel guilty or wrong
or bad. I think you can.
(47:17):
I think you can have a pretty peaceful life at any stage.
Thoughts. That sounds like great therapy,
Diane, and good for you. You know, there's a lot of
unfinished business that people are walking around with.
And you can try to change the subject and forget about it and
repress it and dissociate from it.
But that stuff is still in thereand it's dragging you down.
(47:38):
And but to have the courage to turn around and face it and
acknowledge it as you were trying to help these people do
and deal with it, boy, that is that is such a gift to them to
challenge them to take that on. And I, I, I think the people who
really resist aging, I think a lot of it is that.
(48:05):
Avoidance. What else?
Let's let's come up with some words here because I'm at loss,
which is rare. And, well, it's a, it's a
disavow too, of who they are, you know, dissociation.
Some people say, oh, yeah, this thing just kind of happened or I
don't know what I was doing. It wasn't really me that did
(48:25):
that, but it was you. And, you know, and can you be
honest with yourself about that?Forgive yourself and also
forgive others for what they've done to you?
I love the Buddhist notion that,you know, carrying anger around
towards someone is like holding hot coals looking for a chance
to throw it. The person you burn most is
yourself. You know, I would just add that
(48:49):
I, you know, I think you've hit on something, Diane, because
there was something about the experience of, of asking people
to tell us their life stories that was, it was exhilarating.
And I would encourage your audience, if you've not sat down
(49:13):
with a parent or a grandparent or a beloved aunt or uncle and
just said, look, it's just the two of us in the room.
I'm not here to judge you, but Iwant to know your story and, and
just ask those open-ended probing questions to to help
them. We, we actually in our in the
(49:35):
appendix of our book, have an outline of our interview and,
and how how someone might be begin to conduct that kind of
life story conversation with somebody.
And we found, and we had a significant number of our elders
who at the end of two hours, in many cases, they could have gone
(49:59):
on for another hour. It was, it was Ben and I who are
exhausted. You know, they would say, you
know, thank you, guys. Nobody's ever asked me to do
that before. And in trying to pull together
the threads of my life for you, I learned some things and had
(50:20):
some insights in the last two hours that I've never had
before. I believe it.
What a gift you can give to people and a gift for yourself
that they give to you. You know, it, It's such an
important request that and I, I tell people this all the time,
if your parents are alive, sit down and talk to them because,
(50:42):
you know, my father died a monthafter September 11th and I had
a, we were in New York at the time.
Life was chaos. We had just had a great family
reunion a month prior to September 11th and then he died
on October 11th. But I had a little kid, you
know, a couple of years married life was chaotic, and I really
(51:03):
never had time to sit down and talk to him.
When my mother was dying, which I knew about 18 months before
she was dying, I said, OK, I'm probably going to blow up my
business, which I did, but I'm going to spend as much time with
my mother as possible. And I was driving to New
Hampshire, you know, and stayingfor five or six days at a time,
(51:26):
then coming back to New York fortwo days.
Then when she was in Florida, I was flying to Florida for six or
seven days, then coming back to for two days.
And it was the best 18 months ofmy life.
And I think her life. And when she died, I didn't cry
at all. When my father died, I couldn't
stop crying. There were so many things I had
(51:48):
not worked out or had wanted to know or wished I had asked or
wished I understood. When my mother died, it was pure
peace. And I know she had that same
kind of peace because I'd say, Mom, what the hell were you
thinking when you did this or that?
You know? And she'd say, well, what were
you thinking when you did this? It was cathartic.
(52:09):
It's so good. I encourage everyone to do have
those conversations. Yeah, it's beautiful.
And as you said, what you learned about yourself in the
process. And it's just fascinating.
It's just fascinating. It is so interesting, you know,
(52:32):
we live our lives, but I keep thinking of the metaphor during
the psychotherapy session that life happens to us so fast.
It's like gobbling down a huge meal, but you barely have time
to digest it before the next meal comes along.
So there's a lot of undigested, unformulated, unappreciated
(52:53):
experience. You know, Carl Rogers, who was
one of the founders of modern psychotherapy, he would
encourage beginning therapist tomore or less repeat back to the
person what they had just said, which sounds stupid, but, you
know, I had someone in my Med school class who thought
psychiatry was just BS. So after the Carl Rogers
(53:15):
lecture, I was saying something like, yeah, I'm really depressed
and this is going on. This is going on.
So he he thought he would play ajoke on me.
And so play a little Carl Rogersand says, oh, I think you're
feeling really depressed. And I suddenly felt wonderful.
I felt like this guy really understood me until I realized
he was making fun of me. What are friends for?
(53:38):
Exactly. But to me, it was a great
example, the fact that people don't even listen to what
they're saying, and if you just repeat it back to them,
sometimes they hear something init coming from you that they did
not hear coming from themselves.Or they say with.
A client, they sent me this longe-mail and it was all about
(54:01):
someone in their life. And I took the e-mail and I
substituted I every time he spoke about the other person and
I sent it back because it's one of my clients that I work with.
Only via e-mail. Yeah.
And all I got back was touché. OK, I got message.
(54:22):
Yeah, Yeah. That's great.
But it was so funny to do. What were you going to say,
Scott? I'm sorry.
I. Well, I was just going to say or
or or. When you repeat back to
somebody, they say, no, that wasn't what I meant at all.
Well, that's only what you really meant.
(54:44):
Oh my gosh. We don't have to have the
crystal ball here. We just we just have to be
opening open to listening and and asking questions.
So it's. I could keep talking to you for,
you know, another hour easily, just like one of your
interviewees. But we're close to the end of
the show. But I want a parting thought
(55:06):
from both of you. I would just emphasize, want to
emphasize that, that we, we needto approach old age with, with
focus and intention and with goals that we that help us
(55:27):
maintain purpose, which in turn feeds the gratitude and the
resilience and and the other factors that we found so
important. So you don't have to do it all
at once, you just have to start somewhere and and we encourage
people to take the journey with eyes open.
(55:52):
One of the books that I came across was called The Gift of
Years, and I really, I love thattitle to really see these
additional years. It's Scott and I've been talking
about as a gift, and John Leland's book over and over
again focuses on that. Each day is a gift.
It's so easy to take our lives for granted.
(56:13):
I mean, if you think about the likelihood of being on the right
planet with an atmosphere and, you know, DNA and our brains and
all the things we have availableto us, it's extraordinary we're
here at all. And how do you make the most of
every day and not be weighed down by all the losses, all the
(56:33):
regrets, all the guilt? How do you make the most of the
gift of your life going forward?Those were great answers, and
I'm going to blow my own time frame here because I have one
more question that I have to askyou both At what point this is a
(56:57):
philosophical question? At what point does someone get
old? I'd like to say, you know, the
day before they die, you know? Oh, I.
Like that answer, I didn't expect that.
I like it. I say that because I had the
(57:20):
experience with both my father and with my father-in-law where
the day before they each died, we had a conversation and in
some ways, I suppose with hindsight, I was giving them
permission to pack it in. But they both just said I'm sort
(57:45):
of done, and the next day they quietly died.
I would wish that for every. We all want that.
You know, I think of that old cliche in business, you know,
grow or die. And I think there's a lot of
truth to that. You know, continue to grow.
(58:07):
It sounds like your mother. It was a great example of that
until, you know, close to the end.
But what do you love? Who do you love?
It's when you give up a loving the world and the people around
you and you give up the hope of learning something new, a
satisfying, A curiosity, doing something you enjoy doing,
(58:28):
eating something that tastes great to you, that's meaningful
to you. That's that's when you basically
beginning to let go. Well, I have to say, I think my
life got extended from this episode because I loved the
conversation. I love what you're both saying.
I love what you're doing. So a lot of love was in this
(58:50):
conversation and I thank you both so very much.
Really, Thank you. I'm Diane Brucelle.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
podcast, and my guests have beenDoctor Ben Green and Scott
Fischer, and they are the authors of a book on aging, The
(59:12):
Aging Project Correct is the title.
Aging wisely. Project Aging wisely project
very important because we want to do it wisely.
We just don't want to age, we want to do it wisely.
So the Aging Wisely project, andthere will be all kinds of links
so you can find them both, follow them, get their book,
learn more Age Wisely. And while you're doing all that,
(59:33):
do me a favor, hit subscribe. Talk to you soon, guys.
We're moving over to the green Room.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I don't know about you, but I've
wondered about this for years. What does it mean to age wisely?
You know we're all going to get older if we're lucky, but it
doesn't mean we're going to get wise along the way.
Today my guests are Scott Fischer and Doctor Ben Green.
These guys are lifelong friends who's at some point when they
(00:27):
approach their 70th year, they decided to explore how others
were experiencing aging and whatit meant to age wisely.
So tune into this episode because I know I have lots of
questions and I am an oldster, but I want to know how to get
wiser along the way. So thank you very much for
(00:50):
joining me, gentlemen. Thank you, Diane.
Diane. So sometime around 70 years old,
you decided to work on exploringthe topic of aging and aging
wisely. Why?
And what does that mean to you? Well, you know, I, I think, you
(01:11):
know, as you mentioned to your listeners, Ben and I have a
lifelong friendship that began freshman year in college at
Yale. And we'd supported each other
through marriages and divorces and kids and careers.
But Ben pointed out to me about 8 years ago that we've never
(01:32):
done anything together project. And after several months of
kicking ideas around, we said, well, you know, let's be totally
self-serving. It would be, it would be good to
figure out how to get old successfully.
And that's really what began theprocess of, of reviewing the
(01:54):
literature. And then we said, well, the
literature is fine, but we've learned all we can.
Let's go talk to some old people.
And that began the process of ofinterviewing 52 elders and
trying to capitalize on the factthat Ben and I have pretty
significant careers spent interviewing and listening to
(02:17):
people. And we were two old guys without
a big research budget. So what we had was time.
You know, you introduced an interesting word that I'd like
you both to opine on aging successfully.
What does that mean to you? You know, there's a lot of
(02:40):
literature out there and it getsbigger every week, it seems
like. And so a lot of theories.
But as Scott said, we ultimatelycame to feel that our intuition
was what would ultimately guide us.
So Scott has a long career in human relations in various
corporations and also as an executive coach.
(03:02):
And I've been, I've been a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst
for 40 or 40 plus years. So we really trusted ourselves
to have a sense of what constituted aging wisely.
And so we came up with about 29 variables that we thought would
(03:23):
be relevant to this process of aging wisely.
But ultimately the gold standardin our mind was our intuitive
global sense about how well a person was doing.
And so we really trusted that intuition.
And then we did the statistical correlations of those 29
variables and how they correlated highly or poorly with
(03:47):
the Ultimate Global Aging Wiselyscore.
Can you define the word wise? Well, you know, I, I think it,
for me, it's about being realistic.
As you come to any stage in life, there are going to be
(04:07):
challenges and, and the challenges involve big risks and
big opportunities. And so I think this validated
all these interviews validated for me and Ben that that that
we, we're encouraging people to just shift their paradigm and
how they think about aging a bitand face old age with a
(04:33):
realistic attitude of what's going to happen and an
understanding of what this stageinvolves in terms of the
physical and mental aging processes, as well as the
opportunities to grow and learn during the last stage in life.
And, and so we want people to beintentional.
(04:55):
We want them to be forewarned and forearmed.
And Diane, correct me if I'm wrong, but the title of your
program, Silver Disobedience, really brings to mind one of our
favorite researchers and her life's work.
(05:15):
This is Becca Levy, a psychologist at Yale, and she
really illuminated the importance of implicit ageism.
So, and of course, as a psychoanalyst, I'm always
listing for implicit feelings and and conflicts, guilt,
(05:35):
impulses that a person is not aware of.
So it's certainly had a strong appeal for me, the idea that we
all have these ideas, these attitudes toward aging.
And Doctor Levy has carefully examined this and found out
that, for instance, if you assess people's attitude toward
(05:56):
aging in midlife and you check with him 3035 years later, those
attitudes have tremendous impacton, on their physical health,
their mental health, the risk ofdementia, their, their sense of
well-being, their happiness, their psychological fitness.
(06:20):
So that that has a lot to do with wisdom.
First of all, becoming more aware of your unconscious
implicit attitudes toward aging and realize you do have some
choices. It's funny, I do remember that I
have that book and I remember that research and I, and I've
shared it a few times because there are so many people that I
(06:42):
think we live in a society now where everyone's chasing youth
in, you know, biohacking or, youknow, endless surgeries or
different things. You know, every day there's some
new diet you can try that's going to, you know, the bottom
line is I think there's a lot oflet's just, I don't know if it's
(07:03):
fear of age or just, I mean, it always reminds me of that
Twilight Zone episode where the one person wanted to live
forever and then he really realized, you know, I don't know
if I want to live forever. This is not so great.
Everyone I loved is gone. Things are, you know, so I don't
really understand that way of thinking, but it it is prevalent
(07:23):
and it's being pushed on people by advertisers all over the
place. Well, I mean, our our whole
society and is focused now on this huge wealthy demographic
called the baby boomers. And you know, I you can't turn
on the TV or go online without finding ads and commercials for
(07:48):
wrinkle removers and strength improvers and sexuality
improvers and, you know, just about whatever you can spend
your money on there, somebody who wants to take it.
Take it, that's just the key point.
We, we certainly hope people will consider checking out our
book, But there's another book that just came out recently that
(08:10):
I'm very fond of. It's by a doctor, Carrie
Burnite. She's a career gerontologist and
she may her title of her book isJoy Span.
So to, to, to speak to your point, there's lifespan, how
many years we we live, there is health span, so years of
(08:31):
healthy, high functioning living.
But I think Doctor Burnite adds a a wonderful dimension to that
joy span, you know, to actually enjoy your life, to feel happy,
to have a sense of a purpose andmeaning and connection.
She has four major elements, andone of them is growth.
Do you continue to grow as you age?
(08:53):
Do you feel connected to people?Are you giving to others and do
you adapt to all the changes? And she has a number of
wonderful case examples of people doing that well or not so
well. So that all that would
constitute, again back to your earlier question, wisdom in
aging. When you were doing your
research, you spoke to how many people and where were some
(09:17):
similarities and real distinct, like, wow, I hadn't heard that
yet. Well, we interviewed 52 elders
who ranged in age from 70 to 95.And you know, basically has been
I think mentioned earlier. We, we came up with a, an
(09:39):
interview protocol because we wanted to test out these 29
variables as they affected agingwisely and successfully.
But our methodology was quite simple.
We basically said to people, look, we're sitting here.
We, we're sitting here without judgment, without any notion of
(10:03):
being critical of your choices and decisions in life.
Would you please just share yourlife story with us for two
hours? We let people take us on a
journey and you know, sometimes it was inspiring and sometimes
it was tragic. I I think where we had a clear
(10:27):
pattern quickly related to to Ben's psychoanalytic training
and he quickly made me a junior analyst by having me read deeply
about early childhood attachmentissues and.
Explain that. It was clear, well, you know,
(10:48):
the, the research has been clearnow for a long time that the,
the quality and nature of our early childhood relationships
with parents and caregivers are very significant.
As in our lives, not just duringchildhood, but they come back to
(11:09):
influence us later in life when we make decisions about who to
be friends with, who to get married to, who to have kids
with, who to work with in our careers.
And, you know, people who have what analysts call insecure
(11:29):
attachment in childhood. And some of the people we
interviewed had clearly insecureattachment for for reasons that
involve their caregivers or childhood trauma.
They almost invariably played out those traumas later in their
(11:58):
life with bad choices and bad decisions, bad marriages,
estrangement from children, problems with alcohol and drug
abuse, and. And how did how in your
interviews did you determine this impacted their ability to
(12:20):
age wisely? Well, you know, if I could just
intervene. It was fascinating to me.
I in mid career I went back to school to become a psychoanalyst
after having practice as a psychiatrist for 15 years or so.
And it was fascinating to me to learn about the history of
(12:43):
psychoanelic thought, which is for most people, pretty boring.
But, you know, Freud was a genius, but he focused a lot on
biology, you know, on sex and aggression, which obviously are
very powerful motives and explain a lot of our lives.
But Eric Erickson came along, fascinating guy.
He was a college dropout, but hemet Anna Freud, who said this
(13:05):
guy is a genius, I need to make him a psychoanalyst.
So he skipped college and mid school and just went straight to
psychoanalytic training. But he was one of the most
prominent and influential psychoanalysts of the 20th
century. And he focused on psychosocial
development, not just psychosexual, and even study
with anthropologists, people like Ruth Benedict and and
(13:28):
Margaret Mead. So and, and on the tails of
that, John Bolby introduced attachment theory, which
initially started out just focusing on kids, but we were I
was happy to see that in the more recent literature, they've
realized the same issues about attachment that is having
(13:49):
someone in your life you feel like you can trust someone who
knows you both your past, your present and accepts you.
That is so fundamentally important for our fundamental
sense of safety and security, which is a foundation upon so
much of what our lives are built.
And George Valiant at the Harvard, who was the primary
(14:11):
investigator for the Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult
development. He he picked having a secure
attachment relationship in laterlife is one of the most powerful
protective factors against premature aging and physical and
mental illness. Yeah, it's interesting you say
(14:31):
that. My parents were married for 50
years and then my mother had a very short second marriage,
which was very sad. Her husband died less than six
months after they got married byinvasive cancer that it was
terrible and then she married 1/3 time which I never would
have expected when she was 80 and was married for 12 years and
(14:54):
I always say he they each extended each other's lives.
Wow, that's a great you. Know and I mean you know when
your mom at like 85 says to me, you know, I'm thinking about
getting a different bra because Bernie says I have no CMS, which
one do you recommend? I love you are alive and well.
(15:16):
I'm loving this. Let me give Bernie a big smooch
next time I see him. I wish we could have interviewed
her. She would have been a character.
Pistol, Pistol. The two of them.
That's great. And there's a lot to that
because you see, with the Blue Zones, it's not just, you know,
diet or where you're living, butthat sense of community and
(15:36):
belonging. Yes.
Yes, and and and nothing that that we've said should, should
make people think that we believe that what happens to you
in childhood is set in stone or concrete.
Because we interviewed people who are really inspiring who who
got to midlife and looked at their lives and said, oh boy, I
(16:01):
got to make some changes. And the ability of people to
with intention, change their life trajectory, you know, do go
through a self reflective process, whether it's through a
12 step program or a religious community or flaw or just a
(16:25):
social group where you do trust people and you can talk and you
can think this makes a big difference.
We we interviewed people who were were just thrilling in
their ability to to change that life trajectory in their 30s,
forties, even 50s and. What were some of the
(16:48):
commonalities you found in people in what you would define
as aging wisely? Well, you know, there's some
fascinating research that comes to mind.
Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, talked about the
(17:09):
growth mindset. Now, she was initially looking
at kids who struggle with a subject like math.
Do they feel like I'm stuck? I'll never be good at it?
Or do they have a that's called a fixed mindset?
Or do they have a growth mindsetwhere they thought, you know
what? I'm not good now, but if I keep
working at it and I ask for helpfrom my teacher and maybe do a
little extra homework, I can getgood at this.
(17:32):
That kind of growth mindset is so critical for elders as well.
And you know, Alicia Crumb also at Stanford, she has makes the
distinction between when you face a challenge, do you see
this stress as something that's going to be debilitating, that's
going to weaken you, knock you down?
(17:52):
Where are you out? Or do you see stress as
enhancing and strengthening? Do you see it as a challenge
that once you take it on, it's going to make you a stronger,
better person? And I do think those those
mindsets really do play out as you move along.
And again, back to Levy's work. If you have in the back of your
mind an implicit positive stereotype about aging.
(18:16):
And Scott and I were both lucky to know elders that we really
looked up to and admired. Scott's father-in-law was a
Holocaust survivor, Grandfather Paul Stangree.
You know, he would come back from his doctor's physical exams
every year and say he thinks I'm20 years younger than my birth
certificate would suggest. And so these guys were
(18:38):
inspirational to us. We thought, you know, we also
can be strong and have a vital, engaged, purposeful lives even
in our seventies, 80s and maybe 90s.
I think, I think one of the things we should all be more
aware of is the notion that thatour, our world from a
(19:01):
demographic trend standpoint is really shifting.
We are live many more of us willlive longer and healthier
lifespans than ever before. It's not, it's not that people
didn't live into their 90s or even into their hundreds, but
now many more people, much higher percentage of the of the
(19:24):
population. We'll do that.
Actually, you know what, I recently interviewed an actuary
and lifespan is on the decline and that's pre COVID.
So that started in 2020 and it'sshowing a steady decline.
(19:45):
You know, I have read that literature, Diane, and, and it
is distressing. And I know there's a lot of talk
about deaths of despair and I, I, I do think that's a major
contribution to that decline in,in longevity.
And it's I agree with that. And it's very sad.
And I think it's very real. You talk to people and like I'm
(20:07):
a big believer of stay active inwhatever it is you love.
Figure out which whether you want to work till the day you
drop or whether you want to, youknow, make guitars or sing songs
or, you know, volunteer at your church, whatever.
Just do something. You need a sense of purpose.
Purpose is so important because when you're sitting at home and
(20:31):
you are watching television all day long and or picking up a
phone, you can't help but pick up news and news has never been
designed to cheer you up. It's the time to keep you
hooked. Like, Oh my God, like a a
thriller movie. You know what's going to happen
next, A Michael Bay movie where everything's exploding.
(20:52):
You know, you have no idea what alien race is going to take you
over. And that despair is real in a
lot of people. You know, we came up with five
healthy habits that we we thought were essential for
healthy aging, for aging wisely.And it's the acronym is GRASP.
(21:14):
So the G is gratitude. And related to gratitude, there
is research that people that areoptimistic and grateful, they
live seven years longer than people that are pessimistic.
The R is resilience, you know, how do you cope with the
stresses and the losses? And we've all had losses, losses
of bodily functioning, losses offamily and friends, losses of
(21:38):
residents and careers. The A is active practices, just
as you say, staying engaged and involved physically,
intellectually, socially. The else the S is self
acceptance so important to be able to look honestly at your
life, the good, the bad, the ugly, to forgive yourself and
(22:01):
others for mistakes and hurtful decisions, but but to also
celebrate your successes. And the final P as you just
mentioned, purpose again, peoplewith a high sense of purpose
live seven years longer than those with a low sense of
purpose. We thought those five elements
were really critically importantfor aging successfully.
(22:25):
Well, I don't know if this is how the math works, but if we
add 77777 to those five, I guessI can just add it another 35
years. All right.
Or or are they simultaneously? Yes.
Well, in spite of, in spite of the pessimism expressed by the
actuary that you just brought up, you know, I, one of the
(22:50):
outgrowths for me of the Aging Wisely project has been I've,
I've gotten involved with a low income Medicaid subsidized
senior community, independent living and assisted living
community and I serve on their board.
And one of the astounding statistics that that this
(23:11):
organization CEO came up with earlier this year was that
compared with about 20 years agowhen stays in skilled nursing
facilities, memory care and nursing home stays average seven
years, that average stay now is under six months.
(23:39):
So what might that tell us? That that goes to the notion of
health span and joy span. We may not live quite as long,
but the years we have are generally going to be healthier
and more functional than what they've been in the past because
(24:00):
of medical advances. I need to know a lot more.
I think there's a lot that couldbe broken down from that
statistic. It could be that someone's
waiting longer to go in. They have better self-care.
They're able to age in place. They're exactly, they're able to
age in place or they're going inand they're hitting ultimate
Despair. So and so they're dying quicker.
(24:22):
So I think there's too many variables.
I've studied, I've worked on studies for 35 years.
So I'm always looking for the variables that aren't included.
You know, it's kind of like Trident chewing gum. 4 out of
five dentists recommend it. Well, were those four out of
five the dentists of the son whoinvented the gum?
I don't know there. You go and, you know, I bet if
(24:46):
we broke down that number and interms of the declining lifespan,
I bet we'd see there's probably more diversity now than there
was a couple decades ago becauseI bet they're also a larger
fraction of the population that are getting to age 100.
So I think people that are making healthy choices and
frankly that have the resources to be able to act upon those
(25:09):
choices, I bet they their lifespan is actually getting
longer. We're people that are
underprivileged. I think, you know, there's a lot
of racism, there's a lot of sexism, people of immigrant
groups, minority groups. Those are all valid factors, but
(25:29):
when you speak to an actuary, I mean, it was an eye opening
experience to learn from. They don't care about any of
those factors. It's men and women.
That's how it's divided. They don't care about your race.
They don't care about anything when they do a actuarial
lifespan table. All those other things are other
(25:50):
studies, but the pure want, the pure actuarial table that any
insurance company will use is just based on men and women,
period. You know who's alive and it goes
from zero to 120 years and they take, you know, let's say 10,000
people at the end of 10th the first year, how many are left?
(26:13):
Yeah, right. At age 1, how many at age 2?
How many at age 3? And that's how they span it out.
So it was very interesting that it's super just dry analytics,
so dry. I was shocked.
Yeah. But what are you, what did you
find as things that someone could do, like action steps that
(26:35):
you learned that you would say to somebody?
You gave your the the grasp, which I love that that I love a
good acronym. So I really that's a good way to
remember things. What practical things within
someone's community would you recommend that you saw people
doing that seemed pumped up and excited about living?
(26:58):
You know, I think I, you know, my, I guess my, my general
comment to that question is thatas we interviewed people, the
diversity was astounding. You know and it and you know it
made. How do you mean that?
The diversity of the people you chose, or where?
People chose to spend their timeand their energy and what gave
(27:22):
them satisfaction and comfort and pleasure as they got older.
You know, for one person, it wasspending time in their garden
growing things and getting theirhands dirty in the soil.
For another person, it was a book club.
For another person, it was volunteer work.
For another person, it was beingthe, the town historian in this
(27:45):
little town they live lived in. And so I, you know, I think our
advice to people in general would be you got to find your
joy. I mean, our, our book was not
designed to give people a OK, dothese three things and you'll
age wisely. You know, we're all a product of
(28:05):
our genetics, our upbringing andour life experiences.
And so how can anybody else makethose decisions for you?
I'm going to tell you the three things you should do to live to
100 and be happy. I can't.
Just out of curiosity, when someone says to you, well how do
I find my passion or purpose? I mean I write A blog every day.
(28:26):
I've been writing it since November of 2016, never missed a
day. I have a humongous community and
I get asked that question every day.
How would you answer it? How do you find your passion or
purpose? You know, we did write a chapter
on gratitude and that's a good place to start.
(28:48):
And it seems simple minded, but maybe you're already doing this,
but just journaling every day and trying to notice something
in the day. Three things that you're
grateful for. They could be something trivial,
like seeing a Maple tree with a scarlet canopy in the fall.
(29:10):
It could be a friend who says something nice to you that
compliments you, goes out of their way to do a favor for you.
Could be an exchange you had with a a barista.
But to, to look for things to begrateful for, as trivial as that
seems, it becomes kind of a of abackground task in your mind
(29:33):
throughout the day. You're looking for something to
be grateful for. That's a kind of a subtle but a
significant shift in the way youlook at the world.
So cultivating gratitude, that'sso critically important.
And part of that and and we talkabout this in our book is
noticing yourself. What gives you joy, what gives
you pleasure during the day. And don't just rush past that.
(29:56):
Our lives are so busy to say, wait a minute.
That really felt good. That was wonderful.
Dasher Keltner wrote this book called Awe AWE.
You know what things are amazingto you?
Is it visual beauty? Is it music?
Is it someone's example of of moral courage?
But look for things that give you that little twinge of
(30:18):
pleasure and build on that. Say, wow, that was wonderful.
How could I have more of that? How do what I, I need to take
this part of myself very seriously and honor it.
So it is a kind of a whole attitude again, of, of growing
this sense of, of gratitude and engagement in the world.
When you were interviewing people, were there any times
(30:39):
during an interview or in the aftermath when you did a
download where you said, oh, I don't see that person living a
long time. And I don't mean because of,
let's say, a health issue. We're talking about a meant, a
state of mind. Absolutely.
(31:00):
It was there. As Scott said, more often than
not, we were inspired by the courage.
We thought about a subtitle for our book, you know, profiles and
courage because there are a lot of very courageous people,
quietly courageous out there. John Leland wrote a wonderful
book called Happiness is a Choice You Make, and he was
(31:21):
following these, he's a New YorkTimes reporter, The fall, these
six people over age 85 and five of the six woke up happy to have
another day of life over and over again.
And they had very tough lives, terrible arthritic pain and
losses, etcetera. So that was inspiring.
But we did see, we did talk to acouple people that really seemed
down and out. And frankly, we are amazed they
(31:43):
had lived as long as they had, you know, histories of alcohol
abuse. No one in their life 1 fellow
said. The only significant people in
his life were his psychologist, his psychiatrist and his doctor.
And what a sad life that was. And he'd had a series of losses
and and terrible decisions over and over again.
(32:05):
Alcohol and substance abuse is is certainly one very high risk
of behavior that contributed to a lot of sadness, whether it was
the cause or the effect of it, but that that was often a part
of of these very sad lines. If you want to add to that,
Scott. Well, I, I guess I would add
(32:28):
that I, I mean, if this might bea good time to sort of bring in
what I think is the other is another significant insight
from, from our interviews and, and rolling around in this data.
And that's this notion that thatold age, what starts maybe
somewhere in, in the 70s, seventy 5 to 85 is really more
(32:54):
than than just a sitting around exercise waiting to die.
And when we look at look at EricErickson and what he did in
terms of identifying life stagesand the challenges within each
of those stages, you know, life expectancy was maybe mid to late
60s, not significantly longer, even though it may be short.
(33:21):
So, you know, I think, I think this was really an insight that
Ben had that that as in Ericsson's model, they're sort
of, I don't know, it's almost it's you can call it a dialectic
or you can say there's a tensionbetween one end of the seesaw
and the other end. And on one end, old age is about
(33:45):
coping with loss and dealing with the fact that inevitably we
all fall apart and we all peoplethat are important to each other
and we're all going to die. I'm going to lose connections
that are that are dear to. US.
Dear to us. So at the same time, though, if
we can figure out a way to manage that loss and that
(34:11):
deterioration, then we also havean opportunity to enrich our
lives with, with insight and growth and development, even
even as we get older and older. It's, it's not a time to stop
learning. It's a time to, to, to lean in.
(34:35):
And we came, we decided that if we were going to amend
Ericsson's model of, of psychosocial development, we
would add a ninth stage called elder identity revision.
And we tried to capture the the losses that people have to deal
with and, and, and the challenges that are there for us
(34:59):
to take on if we're willing. That that's a great point
because the, the losses are real.
I mean, in, in my community, just in my blogging community,
which is about 250,300 thousand people, I could tell you a lot
of them have lost a child, you know, they've lost a long time
(35:20):
spouse and those are serious. And then, you know, they've
dealt with loss of limbs or, youknow, different, you know, heart
problems and different setbacks that are very real.
And at the same time, I always juxtapose that my mom lived a
wildlife till she was 92, you know, and it was only the last
(35:44):
six months that she was like, OK, this is it, I'm going out,
you know. But my closest friend, who I've
been best of friends with for over 40 years, is 20 years older
than me. So she's 85 and she has just
finished writing her 55th book that she ghost writes for
people. So, and she's like always like,
(36:05):
you know, I'm going out to this event tonight because there
might be somebody who needs a good book there, you know, and
that's 85 S. Always, always opportunities for
business development, you know. Yeah.
So it's very interesting when you talk about, you know, that
desire to get up and go and connect.
(36:26):
In spite of. Whatever.
The accumulating losses that we're all going to suffer.
You know, Ben and I have joked with each other for for 20
years. Ben is losing his sight to
macular degeneration. I'm suffering some pretty
significant hearing loss. Hearing aids help that, but
(36:49):
they're not the answer either. And, you know, we used to just
say, well, we'll sit on the porch in our rockers and and.
And. We'll see no evil and I'll hear
no evil. But I think this, this endeavor
that we call the Aging Wisely Project has really energized us
(37:11):
and it it's gotten us involved in teaching and presentations
and nonprofit work. And, you know, for my
standpoint, it's been a pretty good run for eight years.
And if it goes on for another eight years, that would be a
good thing. I think it's fantastic.
(37:32):
I think it's fantastic and I cantotally understand why you say
it's invigorating. When you do something different,
whatever it is, and you know, you really immerse yourself,
it's invigorating and you're getting a great response.
And look at you, Diane. I mean, this wonderful silver
disobedience. I mean, this is a heck of a
(37:53):
project. You know it, it's, it's fun.
It's, it's, I get to speak to great people, I get to write
every day, I get to talk to different companies, but it's
all, and you know, you talked about the only time in my life,
I think I actually felt old was I woke up three years ago with
no hearing on my right side. And I always had limited hearing
(38:15):
on my left side. So I woke up, you know, and all
of a sudden I have 30% hearing and hearing aids don't work.
And it's like, whoa, that's, that's a life changer.
And when we talk about community, you know, one of the
first things was I didn't want to go out.
And I'm somebody who said I'm going to spend my 60s or going
(38:38):
to my 70s. I'm going to be the Grand Dom in
New York. I'm going to be throwing parties
every night. I'm going to be the old lady who
invites everybody to party. And I didn't want to be a new
crowd anymore because the sound drove me nuts.
And so it became forcing myself to go out saying no matter what,
you're going out, suck it up, Diane, deal with it.
(39:00):
And then I have a great time even if I can't hear 90% of what
people are saying to me, but I meet them and say can we have a
call later when I can talk on a phone?
Good for you. You know one one person we found
inspirational over and over again was Viktor Frankel.
Oh. And and, you know, a Holocaust
survive. Up a lot in these podcasts.
(39:21):
How about that? He's a general theme.
His book, you know, Man's Searchfor Meaning is just such a key
iconic book. But you know, for him to realize
that the people that survived the camps, we're not just trying
to survive, they had to have something outside themself to
(39:42):
motivate them. They had to have someone that
needed them to to survive and and help them or they needed to
have make some contribution to the world.
And he came up with a notion of tragic optimism.
Again, back to Scott's notion about this dialectic.
We we all know how the story ends.
(40:02):
But how do we sustain optimism and engagement and wish to help
people? Burnite's notion, you know, of
giving to others such a fundamental attitude.
And of course, when we give, it's in our fundamental nature.
It's our hard wired in our mindsand in our brains to reciprocate
(40:24):
a giving to others elicits them giving back to us.
And all that really lights up your dopamine circuits in a way
that keeps your brain moving along.
I love that. I know that.
I know that when I when my father-in-law was still alive,
he's been gone for 05 years now,but he had one of those lives
(40:50):
where you just marvel that somebody can keep going.
You know, he survived the camps and well, he said it.
The only way he survived was because of blind and dumb luck.
When you listen to his listen tohis stories more than that, you
know that it was more than that.He had this burning desire to,
(41:12):
to, to, to find his sisters and to make sure that they were OK
and, and that propelled him through the war and, and, and
post war and then come to this country.
And then he, he marries, you know, the love of his life.
And they have three kids and, and she dies at 37 from
(41:38):
untreatable leukemia. You know, he, he picks up his,
his three kids. He goes to Israel for five years
because his sisters want to takecare of him.
He did find them and and then hecame back and he lived the rest
of his life just focused on people and relationships and
(41:58):
helping people. And everybody's got to find that
purpose. And I think, you know, we're Ben
and I are not not being Pollyannaish about this.
You know, old age is tough, but every stage of life is tough.
(42:23):
It was it was tough learning to walk and get yourself toilet
trained. And it was tough making friends
in school and dealing with peer pressure.
It's hard finding the right person to marry and have kids
with. Every stage is fraught with risk
and opportunity and we we want people to to be aware of the
(42:46):
risk and try to prepare themselves and at the same time
take advantage of the opportunities.
You know, our basic theory was that there are tasks and tools,
and the tasks basically have to do with the developmental stages
(43:06):
of life and Erickson's final twostages, something that Freud
never really got into. Freud thought, you know, once
you hit adulthood, you were basically on this plateau until
you fell off the far end into senescence.
Erickson said no, that there arediscreet and identifiable stages
even during adulthood. So intimacy versus isolation,
(43:28):
you know, do you do you find as a life partner?
And you may not stick with the same one, but are you looking
for that kind of intimate relationship?
Valiant added, you know, career consolidation.
But Erickson's final two stages were generativity, that is,
investment in the world. I think Confucius talked about
planting trees under whose shadeyou will never sit.
(43:52):
But do you do things to benefit the world, to benefit the next
generation? Of course, that's naturally
taking place with kids and grandkids, but you can also do
it as a teacher, as a mentor, asa lecture, as a podcast creator,
as a manager. And that kind of investment is,
(44:13):
is a win win both for the personyou give to, but also to
yourself. And Ericsson's final stage was
basically self integrity. Do you, can you look over your
life honestly? Can you create a life review, a
life narrative that hangs together, that makes sense?
Sure, there are ups and downs, things you might regret, but
does it fit together in a way that feels meaningful to you?
(44:36):
That's so critically important? We talk a lot about that in our
book and encourage people to really think about creating a
life narrative for themselves. There are programs like a Story
worth. They will send you a prompt
every week you write about it, and end of the year they pull it
together in a book. Now, some people don't need that
externally imposed structure, but the and of course, this is
(45:00):
what happens in a psychoanalysisover years and years.
Sometimes people really go through their life over and over
and over again. People say, oh, I don't need to
know that. Of course I remember my life.
But if you get someone to sit down and talk about it, they'll
quickly realize there are parts of their life that they've kind
of skipped over. Maybe they just don't even want
to think about being an adolescent or maybe a midlife
(45:21):
period, or they're embarrassed or ashamed about certain things.
But to be able to look honestly at all of it and we've put it
together into a coherent autobiographical narrative,
that's a very healthy and and holistic thing to do, which we
heartily encourage. And I'll just, I'll just add
(45:43):
that that was one of the things that differentiated our
interviews with people. When we were meeting with people
who had done the work, even unconsciously or to pull their
lives together, we heard a storythat had a beginning and a
middle and an end, and it was cold and the narrative was
relatively smooth. And when that work hadn't taken
(46:09):
place, people were just all overthe place.
And you know, it's, it's really an interesting point that you
both just made and I love your thoughts on it.
It's because when I speak to people, I worked a lot with
people dying in the 80s. I was in private practice.
They heavy AIDS and lupus we, you know, when they were trying
to figure out what was falling under acquired immune deficiency
(46:33):
syndrome. So it was this cluster of all
kinds of things and but people were dying and then and now when
people talk to me, the ones thathave the biggest fear of dying,
I say, listen, you can have hellon earth.
You don't need to die to find out if there's hell.
(46:55):
So how about we focus on what ismaking you feel like you could
go to hell and let's resolve it now, because then you'll feel
like you're living in heaven because that's the best way you
can approach life. You know, you've got to get
through those things that are making you feel guilty or wrong
or bad. I think you can.
(47:17):
I think you can have a pretty peaceful life at any stage.
Thoughts. That sounds like great therapy,
Diane, and good for you. You know, there's a lot of
unfinished business that people are walking around with.
And you can try to change the subject and forget about it and
repress it and dissociate from it.
But that stuff is still in thereand it's dragging you down.
(47:38):
And but to have the courage to turn around and face it and
acknowledge it as you were trying to help these people do
and deal with it, boy, that is that is such a gift to them to
challenge them to take that on. And I, I, I think the people who
really resist aging, I think a lot of it is that.
(48:05):
Avoidance. What else?
Let's let's come up with some words here because I'm at loss,
which is rare. And, well, it's a, it's a
disavow too, of who they are, you know, dissociation.
Some people say, oh, yeah, this thing just kind of happened or I
don't know what I was doing. It wasn't really me that did
(48:25):
that, but it was you. And, you know, and can you be
honest with yourself about that?Forgive yourself and also
forgive others for what they've done to you?
I love the Buddhist notion that,you know, carrying anger around
towards someone is like holding hot coals looking for a chance
to throw it. The person you burn most is
yourself. You know, I would just add that
(48:49):
I, you know, I think you've hit on something, Diane, because
there was something about the experience of, of asking people
to tell us their life stories that was, it was exhilarating.
And I would encourage your audience, if you've not sat down
(49:13):
with a parent or a grandparent or a beloved aunt or uncle and
just said, look, it's just the two of us in the room.
I'm not here to judge you, but Iwant to know your story and, and
just ask those open-ended probing questions to to help
them. We, we actually in our in the
(49:35):
appendix of our book, have an outline of our interview and,
and how how someone might be begin to conduct that kind of
life story conversation with somebody.
And we found, and we had a significant number of our elders
who at the end of two hours, in many cases, they could have gone
(49:59):
on for another hour. It was, it was Ben and I who are
exhausted. You know, they would say, you
know, thank you, guys. Nobody's ever asked me to do
that before. And in trying to pull together
the threads of my life for you, I learned some things and had
(50:20):
some insights in the last two hours that I've never had
before. I believe it.
What a gift you can give to people and a gift for yourself
that they give to you. You know, it, It's such an
important request that and I, I tell people this all the time,
if your parents are alive, sit down and talk to them because,
(50:42):
you know, my father died a monthafter September 11th and I had
a, we were in New York at the time.
Life was chaos. We had just had a great family
reunion a month prior to September 11th and then he died
on October 11th. But I had a little kid, you
know, a couple of years married life was chaotic, and I really
(51:03):
never had time to sit down and talk to him.
When my mother was dying, which I knew about 18 months before
she was dying, I said, OK, I'm probably going to blow up my
business, which I did, but I'm going to spend as much time with
my mother as possible. And I was driving to New
Hampshire, you know, and stayingfor five or six days at a time,
(51:26):
then coming back to New York fortwo days.
Then when she was in Florida, I was flying to Florida for six or
seven days, then coming back to for two days.
And it was the best 18 months ofmy life.
And I think her life. And when she died, I didn't cry
at all. When my father died, I couldn't
stop crying. There were so many things I had
(51:48):
not worked out or had wanted to know or wished I had asked or
wished I understood. When my mother died, it was pure
peace. And I know she had that same
kind of peace because I'd say, Mom, what the hell were you
thinking when you did this or that?
You know? And she'd say, well, what were
you thinking when you did this? It was cathartic.
(52:09):
It's so good. I encourage everyone to do have
those conversations. Yeah, it's beautiful.
And as you said, what you learned about yourself in the
process. And it's just fascinating.
It's just fascinating. It is so interesting, you know,
(52:32):
we live our lives, but I keep thinking of the metaphor during
the psychotherapy session that life happens to us so fast.
It's like gobbling down a huge meal, but you barely have time
to digest it before the next meal comes along.
So there's a lot of undigested, unformulated, unappreciated
(52:53):
experience. You know, Carl Rogers, who was
one of the founders of modern psychotherapy, he would
encourage beginning therapist tomore or less repeat back to the
person what they had just said, which sounds stupid, but, you
know, I had someone in my Med school class who thought
psychiatry was just BS. So after the Carl Rogers
(53:15):
lecture, I was saying something like, yeah, I'm really depressed
and this is going on. This is going on.
So he he thought he would play ajoke on me.
And so play a little Carl Rogersand says, oh, I think you're
feeling really depressed. And I suddenly felt wonderful.
I felt like this guy really understood me until I realized
he was making fun of me. What are friends for?
(53:38):
Exactly. But to me, it was a great
example, the fact that people don't even listen to what
they're saying, and if you just repeat it back to them,
sometimes they hear something init coming from you that they did
not hear coming from themselves.Or they say with.
A client, they sent me this longe-mail and it was all about
(54:01):
someone in their life. And I took the e-mail and I
substituted I every time he spoke about the other person and
I sent it back because it's one of my clients that I work with.
Only via e-mail. Yeah.
And all I got back was touché. OK, I got message.
(54:22):
Yeah, Yeah. That's great.
But it was so funny to do. What were you going to say,
Scott? I'm sorry.
I. Well, I was just going to say or
or or. When you repeat back to
somebody, they say, no, that wasn't what I meant at all.
Well, that's only what you really meant.
(54:44):
Oh my gosh. We don't have to have the
crystal ball here. We just we just have to be
opening open to listening and and asking questions.
So it's. I could keep talking to you for,
you know, another hour easily, just like one of your
interviewees. But we're close to the end of
the show. But I want a parting thought
(55:06):
from both of you. I would just emphasize, want to
emphasize that, that we, we needto approach old age with, with
focus and intention and with goals that we that help us
(55:27):
maintain purpose, which in turn feeds the gratitude and the
resilience and and the other factors that we found so
important. So you don't have to do it all
at once, you just have to start somewhere and and we encourage
people to take the journey with eyes open.
(55:52):
One of the books that I came across was called The Gift of
Years, and I really, I love thattitle to really see these
additional years. It's Scott and I've been talking
about as a gift, and John Leland's book over and over
again focuses on that. Each day is a gift.
It's so easy to take our lives for granted.
(56:13):
I mean, if you think about the likelihood of being on the right
planet with an atmosphere and, you know, DNA and our brains and
all the things we have availableto us, it's extraordinary we're
here at all. And how do you make the most of
every day and not be weighed down by all the losses, all the
(56:33):
regrets, all the guilt? How do you make the most of the
gift of your life going forward?Those were great answers, and
I'm going to blow my own time frame here because I have one
more question that I have to askyou both At what point this is a
(56:57):
philosophical question? At what point does someone get
old? I'd like to say, you know, the
day before they die, you know? Oh, I.
Like that answer, I didn't expect that.
I like it. I say that because I had the
(57:20):
experience with both my father and with my father-in-law where
the day before they each died, we had a conversation and in
some ways, I suppose with hindsight, I was giving them
permission to pack it in. But they both just said I'm sort
(57:45):
of done, and the next day they quietly died.
I would wish that for every. We all want that.
You know, I think of that old cliche in business, you know,
grow or die. And I think there's a lot of
truth to that. You know, continue to grow.
(58:07):
It sounds like your mother. It was a great example of that
until, you know, close to the end.
But what do you love? Who do you love?
It's when you give up a loving the world and the people around
you and you give up the hope of learning something new, a
satisfying, A curiosity, doing something you enjoy doing,
(58:28):
eating something that tastes great to you, that's meaningful
to you. That's that's when you basically
beginning to let go. Well, I have to say, I think my
life got extended from this episode because I loved the
conversation. I love what you're both saying.
I love what you're doing. So a lot of love was in this
(58:50):
conversation and I thank you both so very much.
Really, Thank you. I'm Diane Brucelle.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
podcast, and my guests have beenDoctor Ben Green and Scott
Fischer, and they are the authors of a book on aging, The
(59:12):
Aging Project Correct is the title.
Aging wisely. Project Aging wisely project
very important because we want to do it wisely.
We just don't want to age, we want to do it wisely.
So the Aging Wisely project, andthere will be all kinds of links
so you can find them both, follow them, get their book,
learn more Age Wisely. And while you're doing all that,
(59:33):
do me a favor, hit subscribe. Talk to you soon, guys.
We're moving over to the green Room.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
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