Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

by John Leland

“When you’re old, you have to make yourself happy. Otherwise you get older.”

older people are more content, less anxious or fearful, less afraid of death, more likely to see the good side of things and accept the bad, than young adults.

When you are young and impaired, you are expected to fix the problem. When you are old and impaired, you are encouraged to accept it.”

In a culture that constantly tells us to overcome our limitations, sometimes it is more productive to find ways to live with them. For people

Health problems that looked devastating to me looked to them like a part of life’s progress after eighty-five—what was truly bad was always a step down the road.

They saw themselves as sums not of their disabilities but of their strategies for living with them.

seminars less in aging than in living.

problems were only problems if you thought about them that way. Otherwise they were life—and yours for the living.

The lesson was to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.

certain friends and family members who just brought me down—I let them go and didn’t miss them.

The lesson of John Sorensen was that to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.

Researchers have long observed that older people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives tend to live longer, fuller,

Living too long scared them; dying was the antidote to living too long.

One could live to two hundred. But yet I see some young people, twenty years old, and they seem to be bored already with life, and some of them cannot stand it. That’s something else.”