This morning, while listening to the Who play “My Generation,” it brought me back to when I was growing up, when 45 seemed pretty old and 65 seemed absolutely ancient. This is not just the view of a kid looking up at the world around him; the abilities and aspirations of people that age back then were manifestly different from those of people of that age today. Excepting Covid and the opioid crisis, people are living longer healthier. This is a trend that seems to be accelerating and, if you believe the people on the scientific board at the Cleveland Clinic, there is an 80% chance we are about to live significantly longer. It seems to me that one of the consequences of this extended health span, or belief in an extended health span, is that all human developmental stages are being extended like a slinky being pulled wide.

An oft-heard comment from people our age concerning younger people is that they just need to grow up, meaning: need to grow up like we grew up. But now is not then, and they are not us. The economics are vastly different, and the expectation of future life is different. If you were a young person in 1965, you had a very different view of your future self than someone of similar age in 2023. It only makes sense that if one is expecting a longer, healthier life, that one’s developmental phases can become elongated. If we look back to the American Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette was 19 when he was commissioned as a Major General. People regularly married back then in their early to mid-teens, while life expectancies were half what they are now. 

The point is that there is a trend that seems to correlate life expectancy with developmental phases, and that trend is elongating. We focus a lot here on the middle and longer parts of the age column, but the effects are also felt by younger people. To say it is great to be a vital, fully engaged mid-sixty-year-old and to, at the same time, throw shade on young people, is to misunderstand the effect of increased longevity on everyone’s worldview. The one causes the other. These are the same reasons many people our age can enjoy current pop culture in a way that our parents could not — we feel younger at our current age than most of our parents did. AGEIST is very interested in science and medical advancements partially because of our own interest in delayed mortality, but also because of the enormous effects these will have on the social, political and economic systems in the future.  So when we see people in their 20s living in ways that we did not at that age, we need to understand that is just one of the many changes happening because of increased health spans. It's not just affecting us; it is affecting everyone. 

We live in tremendously exciting times which are also extremely dynamic, a big part of which is that elongating age slinky. Curious empathy is a good road map to navigating differences of all kinds.

Onward and upward,
David

There are people who have a very clear sense of where they are meant to be; they are of a place. Perhaps they feel bound by birth, culture, or some other clear sense that this is their place. They could be die-hard New Yorkers, or people on a farm in Iowa. Their identity is one with where they are living.  Then there are those of us who are forever wondering: Is this the best place for me? Maybe over there is somewhere better? I envy the first group, as their sense of certainty opens up resources to explore other questions. Opening up the question of where to live, when one’s situation allows for that question, is fraught with projection. As a friend recently told me, we can really never know what it will be like there. Living in a foreign country because you like the way the locals live is not really transferable. I can assure you, having done that a couple of times, that for all the upsides of experiencing a new culture, even if it seems familiar, there will be untold cultural miscues and troublesome disorientations. This, of course, can be part of the joy of the experience, but there will be a learning curve, sometimes infinitely longer than expected.

For the last 3 years, I have been living, sort of accidentally, in the mountain town of Park City, Utah. A nice place, beautiful, reasonably well run, convenient to a major airport, and terrific snow, if that is your jam. This is a state of just 3 million people, which means visiting the DMV is a lovely experience, but our area could be said to be lacking in culture. Can you name the Utah style of architecture, of art, music or food? Maybe they exist, but I am unaware of them. This is all fine, until I throw a fit at the appalling lack of good restaurants here, which does not seem to be an issue in nearby Colorado, Wyoming or Idaho. There is a distinct reason for this, which I will let you guess. Should this even be a rational complaint? No single place has everything. Am I asking too much? New York has an incredible culture, but there are some serious negatives to living there. Paris is tremendous, but the time zone, language, and culture will be daunting. You will overcome some of this, but you will never be a Parisian, as the locals will forever joyfully bring to your attention. 

The best solution I can come up with is a doctrine of impermanence. No place is forever. I realize this flies in the face of the forever home movement but, the truth is, we all change, our needs change and our ambitions change. If I can convince myself that wherever I am is just a stop on the road to the next place, although it may very well be a decades-long stop, it eases up my quest to find the perfect place — which doesn’t exist no matter how much googling I do. All those Top 10 Cities guides? Amusing, and perfect for some imaginary generic person, but essentially useless. For you late-night geography obsessives, I have some suggestions. Number one: make sure there is a great medical center within 45 minutes of you. Bad stuff happens, just saying, and you don’t want B-level care when it does. Number two: views are nice, but what really counts are your neighbors. Spend more time understanding them than cost per square foot. Number 3: We think we can make a space adapt to us. Wrong. The space will force adaption on us. Architecture and spacial design counts more than you may think. 

In other news, our Instagram @weareageist now has over 100k followers and reaches nearly 10M accounts a month. Seems like age has a following. 

Onward and upward,
David

Age is our thing here, thus our name. The meaning of age is very likely going to be radically different in the near future. Already a 60-year-old today can be shockingly different from what I knew to be 60 when I was young. I have several friends in their 80s whom even I, as someone who is deep into this stuff, would never have guessed their age. This is not an argument for youthism; it is simply an observation that one at 80 can be sharp as a whip, highly mobile, and fully engaged in the culture. I deeply value my octogenarian friends; they have a wisdom and knowledge I don't. This does not mean they are always right, or that their wisdom is applicable in every situation: age does not confer infallibility. They are simply people like me who have had a larger and different set of experiences from which they draw.

I also have friends in their early twenties whom I also value tremendously. They see things differently than I do, can do things that astound me, and I am constantly learning from them. At 64, I sit towards the older end of this continuum, but in the not-so-distant future, this age may be a midpoint. Having a significant number of people with a century of experience is something we as a species have never had. Preserving the amount of collected wisdom will be quite remarkable, but it will also be extraordinarily disruptive. If current trends continue, health spans may closely track income and education levels. Age will tend to increase income disparity as time compounds wealth. Healthier people will be producing longer, paying taxes longer, and consuming longer; a huge plus for the economy. However, exactly what percentage of the population that is remains to be seen and, because the other segment with their escalating health care costs will be on the reverse side of the economic coin, the overall math of this is uncertain. To be sure, not all 80-year-olds are the same, and parsing those varying needs will be a Gordian knot for our leaders.

What fascinates me is the effect all this will have on younger people and relationships up and down this increasingly long age column. I believe what is going to be critically important is a decided effort to link the generations, as the last thing we want are generational hostilities, the edges of which I can already feel. A diverse ecosystem is a robust ecosystem; everyone has something we can learn from. Older people dismissing younger people as snowflakes or younger people dissing older people as relics is not going to get us where we need to be. We are rapidly moving from a two-generation workforce to a three, four, and five-generation one. If HR people think they have diversity integration issues now, just wait till this starts happening. There will be upsides and downsides to all this as there is with any major change. The thing to know is this transformation is not some far-in-the-future flying-car promised land; it is happening right now. 

A gerontocracy is not a good thing, nor is the cult of youth. We need everyone. The massive difference between age and any other diversity is that we see versions of ourselves in others like us of different ages, a bit of the Ghost of Christmas Past and Future effect. We see younger versions of ourselves and recall our youth, and older versions that remind and possibly scare us of our mortality; something entirely different and possibly more powerful than race or gender issues. It is the nature of all groups to see the "other" as less than others, but that is easier to overcome if that other group is not some past or future version of one's self. On the whole, I am wildly optimistic for the future. We will have some bumps and scrapes, of course. This is big stuff we have never had to deal with. The great thing about having a brain is that we can change our minds about things and adapt. 

Onward and upward,
David

There is a saying that feelings are not facts. I was reminded of this the other day when looking at some videos of one of my first attempts at skiing race gates. In the moment, I thought I was amazing, a natural at this sport.  Why have I not been competing at this for decades? Think of all the medals I could have won. Then I saw the video of me: clearly a novice, sliding and skidding between gates at what was obviously an embarrassingly low speed. That is not at all how it felt when the gates were rushing at me at what my body considered incredible velocity. A hero in my own mind.

A mental health professional with considerable experience once told me that we all carry with us three core delusions about ourselves. These are things that we are absolutely convinced to be immutable truths, but they are not; they are delusions. The problem is two fold. Firstly, they are delusions, and secondly, they are core to our being. This means we are completely incapable of seeing things as they truly are; we need an outside source to inform us, and even then, we are not apt to quickly assimilate the news. The good news is that we can change our minds about even our most closely held beliefs. It is one of the benefits of having a brain: we can adjust to new information. On this theme, you may want to listen to this week's podcast on psychedelic medicine. 

One of the dangers of shrinking social and family groups is that we need people around us to keep us on track; not social media “friends,” but actual people. We humans can self-regulate, but it is very hard to do all by oneself.  We need to see ourselves reflected in the faces of the important people in our lives.  Although they may be inclined to frost the mirror somewhat in order to keep us as friends, it is certainly better than isolation when we can convince ourselves of all manner of silliness. In general, our delusions tend towards the self-limiting variety; however, as seen in my recent video evidence of ski mediocrity, we can also be deluded in the other direction. This holiday season, I am sending you all wishes to be with good friends and family, to cherish the love, camaraderie, and mental health they contribute to our lives.

Onward and upward,
David

In the matrix of personality types used by Gretchen Rubin — upholder, obliger, rebel, and questioner — I am a full-on upholder. That means when I say I am going to do something either to myself or to others, I feel compelled to do it. Not doing it will cause me not insignificant internal dissonance. It also means I don't fully align with people who are not upholders, something that I still require some work on.

As I have mentioned, I have started a totally unreasonable quest: Master Ski Racing at Park City. This is a 5-days-a-week, between 2- to 4-hour commitment daily for the season. Learning new things, especially new physical things, is fantastically energizing. Surfing, skating, African dance, and martial arts have all been learned since my mid-30s. This is somewhat different, in that there is a program. With surfing, I would just show up; there was no accountability. This, however, has a schedule, a progression, and coaches who are there for me even if I don't show up. So I must show up. This means that 20 hours of my week, between driving, getting the gear on, and actual on-snow work is now gone from my week. Mental.

So far I can do it and, because of my upholder disposition, I sort of have to. It means when I am at work, time is short and I am super focused. It means that I need to be in bed by 8:15 in order to get my 8.5 hours of sleep so that I can recover from what is a highly mentally and physically demanding activity. This may seem crazy, and I can assure you that when I show up at 7 am in the dark to ski gates under the lights and the temp is 8 degrees, that is exactly how it feels: like I am a crazy person.

On the plus side, my skiing is improving at an astonishing rate, which is not so much about anything innate to me; if one does anything this much with world-class instruction, one will improve. But why? This sort of falls into the category of why people climb mountains: because they are there and, of course, because I said I was going to do it.

To all you rebels, questioners, and obligers in the world, I get that you also have issues, but now you can understand a bit of the quandary we upholders get ourselves into. 

Onward and upward,
David

Sometimes we just need to wait for a signal to act. This can be particularly hard for some of you go-get-em guys out there, me included. As the Buddhists have said, sometimes don’t just do something, sit there. Let wisdom be our guide as to when to act. Here's one way of looking at the options: Go Mode. This is when we are fully engaged in a quest. Full Stop Mode. This is the lay-on-the-sofa, gorging-on-streaming-content-and-munching-bonbons mode. Then there is Ready Mode. This is when we are waiting and preparing. We are keeping our minds sharp, our bodies fit, and our networks expanding. We are prepared to act when the moment is right. Because the moment will appear, and we want to be ready to enter Go Mode. The conundrum is that sometimes making big goals and action plans are forcing an action for the sake of acting, which may incur an “opportunity cost.” This is what happens when we arbitrarily jump into something which may not be the right thing for us, but we feel like we should be doing something.

This January, we will be flooded with can-do messages of how to make lists and goals, and carry through on them.  Sometimes the best action is not about what big life-changing project or job we will undertake, but something more subtle: preparation and readiness. When the door opens, will we be ready? If the door opens, and we are consumed in something which we are only doing for the sake of doing something, then we may not even notice the opportunity. 

Some of the biggest mistakes I have made in life have been pressing the Go Mode button just because I enjoy being Action Jackson and exerting agency in the world. Yum, feels good. Ready Mode requires restraint of action in a certain way but a lot of action in another way. It means taking responsibility for where I am, and then using time wisely. It means physical exercise; it means being smart about eating; it means getting enough sleep and working on reducing stress. It means saying yes to as many social connections as you can.  This is not the idleness of Full Stop Mode. The future favors the prepared. Doors tend to open to those who are ready for them. Those who force a door, or as that luminary of wisdom Mark Zuckerberg has said, move fast and break things, may just end up with a room of broken things. 

We have options, and sometimes the hardest one to act on is being in this waiting mode. Back when I was a photographer, one of the surefire ways to get a booking was to go on vacation. Somehow, and yes, this is deep woo woo, almost every time I would book time off, I would get a big job. I had made the space, and somehow the pixie dust wanted to fill it. Many of us are not at the jobs we had pre-COVID, having left by choice or otherwise. Now what? This is where it gets hard. Unless we know exactly what the next move is, and we should always keep exploring and reaching out, it may be wise to switch to Ready Mode for the right opportunity to appear.
 
Onward and upward,
David

This week we are introducing a couple of new regular features to our weekly dispatch. First, there is the irrepressibly hysterical Gail Forrest who has already been writing a much-loved comedy column. She is now upping the ante with "Dear Gail." Love lorn? Dating issues? Anything else you would enjoy some advice on? Gail and all her sparkly wit are here to help. She is asking for your problems and quandaries to be sent to newsletter@weareageist.com, or just reply to this newsletter. Prepare yourself.

We also have the privilege of being able to publish film/TV/movie advice and reviews from our resident Hollywood screenwriter and director David Tausik. His deep encyclopedic knowledge of what is available and, most importantly, what is worth our viewing attention, provides a much-needed guide to the massive streaming options available today. I don't know about any of you but, more often than not, I become paralyzed by the bounty of choice available on all the multiple channels. He gives us five or ten recommendations, separating the wheat from the chaff. Finally, an educated guide to streaming.

This next week I am very tentatively beginning school; that is, Master Ski Racing School. Why I am doing this is a bit beyond me today. It seemed like such a good idea in the abstract in the snow-free autumn; but, now that I will actually be doing this, it is seeming as nuts as a George Plimpton stunt.  I get that we all need to continue to challenge ourselves, and that not growing is to fossilize, but maybe learning Mandarin would be safer and more useful. Oh well, the die has been cast and, assuming none of my body parts end up similarly in casts, this will merely be humbling and undoubtedly exciting. 
 
Onward and upward,
David

With the holidays comes our natural impulse to review the previous year and, especially for us Thanksgiving-observant Americans, what we are grateful for. The big one we often overlook is that we are alive. That is not guaranteed and at any point in time it could change. Perhaps because of my age, I’ll be 64 next week, the concept of radical aliveness has entered my thinking. If this were the last year of your life, and you knew it, how would you be living today? Would you be doing the things you love to do with the people most important to you? 

It struck me earlier this week as I was skiing up on the mountain on a glorious sunny day with almost no one there, what a wonderful moment this was. My body flying down the hill in this incredibly beautiful place, how remarkable this moment was and how fully alive I felt. Then I reflected on how I could have done this last year, and the year before, but I chose not to, and how this year something seems to have shifted — my trajectory has veered from omnipresent-work-focused to one of being as happy as I can be as often as I can. This flies directly in the face of my somewhat Calvinist upbringing. Maybe it was about time to re-examine what is actually of value. The work I did not do that morning got done later in the day, probably with more speed and sparkle than it would have otherwise.

My Thanksgiving day advice is to tell someone you love in detail how much you appreciate them, to go buy tickets to a show that would make you happy (Taylor Swift tickets will get resolved soon for all of you ageless superfans), and start prioritizing doing the things that make you smile, that make you grin in a way that you did as a kid. Happiness is a positive epigenetic signal; science says you will live longer because of it.
 
Onward and upward,
David

As someone fired by creativity, when I was younger I was somewhat suspicious of habits and routines. I rather quickly realized that if one wants to be impactfully creative, one needs a schedule and a series of habits. There is only so much invention one can do in a day, and it is best to allocate that to the places where it matters. Every day at about the same time, I go to the gym. I don't invent new exercises, I just follow a plan. Sure, I'll graze Instagram for some crazy moves, but what works is repeating the same exercises every week.

The downside to habits is that we can become locked into them without question. This is something we need to guard against. Just because you have done something at the same time and the same place for a while, doesn't mean you should be closed to some adjustments. Let's not get grumpy when someone offers up some novel experience. We may like it.  I tend to have the unpleasant habit of badly judging new people before I meet them. Embarrassing. Comically, I tend to go completely the other way when I actually talk to a new person. 

The quandary is: How rigid should we be with our habitual routines, and how open to newness should we be? It's really not that big of a deal. If in doubt, use the 80/20. Habit 80% of the time. I like to go to bed early and get up early. I also enjoy a raucous dinner party. Some mornings I will skip the gym. So what? It will be there tomorrow and so will I.
 
Onward and upward,
David

The word community is one of those buzzwords we hear floated about these days. What does it mean to be in a community?  Is there a mutually supportive and amplifying positive effect among everyone, or are people just showing up to have a shared experience? When I go to the movies, I have a group experience. Having a shared group experience is great — we thrive on those — but just because I attended a yoga class, I am not necessarily part of that community. 

In a big city, one tends to become tribal about the specificity of one’s location to the amusement of those who don’t live there. NYC below 14th street, or Los Angeles west of the 405, Paris by arrondissement. The minutia of these distinctions only seem to be of importance to those living in those zones. Somehow sharing a city with millions of others drives the need to differentiate ourselves into self-designated tribal zones. But, again, this is not a community.

Maybe what coalesces a group into a community is a shared need. The dam is breaking, and we need volunteers to fill sandbags. My house is burning down; can you help me put out the fire? This may be true, but it isn’t everything. I now live in a relatively small town, maybe 10,000 people depending on who is doing the counting.  Last week, I unwittingly went to an actual community event. It was the local ski swap, and I was just looking for a deal, not so much to have any sort of community interaction. Yes, I got some deals, but what I also got was an eye-opening community experience. The event was to raise money to help people who may want to partake in winter sports, which can otherwise be spendy. The people working the event, the people who waited for an hour in sub-freezing weather, everyone could not have been more enthusiastic, friendly and helpful. 

I left with a profound sense that I had just experienced something meaningful. It has stayed with me, this idea that I now belong here, that people here really do care about each other and for the group as a whole. Maybe it is the scale of the town — yes, I know, it's not a typical small town, maybe it is the singular focus on outdoor activities, but I felt something that night: civic engagement and actual community. A lot of voluntary non-emergency effort went into this, and it showed. Creating a community requires effortful participation from all parties. Community service, right? That is one of the things that makes it sticky. We humans can be pretty impressive. Mostly we want to do the right thing, engage, and be helpful. It is about being invested, caring and, as 100-year-old Deborah Szekely said last week, doing the right thing. 

Onward and upward,
David