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

by John Leland

Was there a threshold at which life was no longer worth living?

“One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority;

My instincts thought they knew what it was like to be ninety, but they didn’t, and as soon as I quieted them, the learning got a lot easier. Being an expert is exhausting. Being a student—letting go of your ego—is like sitting for a banquet at the

Helen Moses, age ninety, found the second love of her life in a Bronx nursing home, against gale-force resistance from her daughter. The romance had been going for

More people are living past age eighty-five than at any time in human history (nearly six million in America, up from under a million in 1960),

“The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It’s a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.” Pretty

Older people report a greater sense of well-being and fewer negative emotions than younger people. That sense of well-being rises until sometime in the seventh decade, then begins a gradual decline, but still remains higher at ninety than at twenty.

spend your dwindling time and energy on the things you can still do that give you satisfaction, not on lamenting those you once did but now can’t.

He had taken stock of the things he still enjoyed and weighed them against the effort it took to keep going.

“I was your age, but you were never my age.”

Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

look up

How much of the helplessness experienced by some old people was a problem of aging, she wondered, and how much was a result of the world telling them what they were supposed to do? How would things be different if instead of thinking of late life as getting old, we thought of it as living long—a gift given to those lucky enough to be born in the right century?

Severe memory loss is a horrible thing, and we rightly fear it, but selective forgetting can be the better part of wisdom. When you’re forty-five, it pays to remember all the mistakes you made in your marriage or career, so you can learn from them; at ninety it’s better—wiser—to forget, because the memories will only hurt.

Dont read this if you think old age is sadly waiting for death.

Imagine that: to be free of the future, meaning the sum of all things that probably won’t happen, minus the one that will, which is one’s death. Even if just for a minute, the feeling is like that of first flight, weightless and free. Most of us live with this future every day, laboring under its weight. To think like an old person is to journey unencumbered.

doctors to insert a ventilator

Maybe it is a liberty of younger people to think that the best mate is the one you don’t have: a stranger you haven’t met yet or an improved version of your current partner. It favors the future over the present and past—natural when the future looks long and full of potential, less so when you know what’s coming. But it also obscures or diminishes the partner you really have. Ruth, John, and my mother all preferred the satisfactions of the life partners they’d had, whatever their shortcomings, to the unknown.

the more the health care system enabled people to survive to old age, the more they developed chronic diseases that sucked the quality out of life.

If cancer patients typically die of pneumonia, say, and we develop treatments for pneumonia, all we’ve done for their cancer is ensure that they spend more years dying of it. In place of a day on their deathbed, we’ve given them a month and called it progress.

In a widely circulated essay in The Atlantic magazine titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” Emanuel,

So no more cancer screenings, no antibiotics, heart-valve replacement, or bypass surgery. No flu shots, dialysis, step aerobics, or kale salads. If he missed out on some of the rewards of the late years—seeing his grandchildren get older, poker with the fellas, the satisfactions of mentoring the next generation—these were not life’s rich bounty but token compensation for the loss of everything that makes life worth living.

Emanuel at fifty-seven is not likely to concoct wholly novel ways to conceptualize lymphoma or breast cancer. His old cortical and subcortical cells—those responsible for solving complex problems—just won’t fire bright enough to light the way. But his insight that his cancer patients all said that cancer taught them what was important in life arose not from complex processing but from experience and the ability to recognize patterns. He couldn’t have made this insight at twenty-five, when the processing centers in his brain were really cooking, because he would not have seen enough patients to recognize the pattern. Yet this insight is arguably as useful to him as any lab breakthrough—it taught him literally how he wanted to live and die.

unregimented as Fred, the nursing home’s strict schedule was a jolt to the system. He ate all his meals in the same seat with the same people. That morning he’d slept late, so the staff didn’t take him to brush his teeth. Like all the elders, Fred worked hard to maintain his autonomy, a battle that got more challenging each year. But instead of complaining

With the exception of John, all seemed to redraw the line between what was acceptable and what was too much, pushing it just past their level of disability. 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.

Here was a lesson in giving up the myth of control. If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose. But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you—that is, a response to the world as it is—then old age is more another chapter in a long-running story.

Whatever vices or bad habits he had—and he was too cheap to drink or gamble—

In each study, the subjects who wrote down something they were grateful for reported greater levels of well-being and more optimism about the coming weeks or days.

Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so.

Qian’s son Henry, who was visiting from Connecticut, said that the difference between the United States and China was that in China, children were expected to take care of their elderly parents, but here, the government was expected to do it.

Troubles are always with us, and getting rid of this one or that won’t make us happy; it’ll just move another hardship to the head of the class.

What’s clear is that dementia lessens the quality of life for many patients’ caregivers, and that these are the people whose voices we most often hear on the ravages of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

Here was a lesson that had nothing to do with being old. Too often we think that if only we undo the impediments to our happiness, we can be truly happy. But there are always more impediments, more reasons not to be happy now. Helen chose instead to embrace the life she had. She didn’t resent her daughter’s meddling or feel sorry for herself because she wasn’t getting married; she didn’t magnify her unmet desires by treating them as a punishment. They were life, her life. Impediments are the circumstances in which we find happiness.

our lives everywhere are built on the help of others: the people who built roads or invented alphabets, the colleagues who fix the photocopier or their ancestors who discovered pi. Help is everywhere—it is vanity to think we’re compromised by it.

Check out this quote.

Vast forces in the universe had conspired to enable me to awaken in my bed rather than as a widow with five children in Aleppo.

The relationships she held on to were meaningful and productive, and she had managed to filter out a lot of the relationships that vex people at any age. Life was short; find the people who really matter, and the relationships that allow you to thrive.

In the meantime, whether we’re twenty-five or eighty-five, we can choose to live in the things that warm us—in love, humor, compassion, empathy, a supportive arm—not because they make life easy, but because they do the most for us when life is hard.

Anaïs Nin

“When you think of old persons, what are the first five words or phrases that come to mind?” were 44 percent more likely to recover from a disability than those with negative age stereotypes.

Researchers have long observed that older people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives tend to live longer, fuller, and healthier lives than people who don’t.

“It has a lifelong benefit, but something unique happens in old age, where being goal-directed helps you stave off bad health outcomes,”