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September 17 - October 16, 2025
I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity; someone disappointed at his dreams unfulfilled—perhaps the career he never pursued, the schools he never attended, the company he never started. Now, I imagined, he was forced to retire, tossed aside like yesterday’s news.
What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn’t just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the “striver’s curse”: people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.
On average, the peak of creative careers occurs at about twenty years after career inception, hence the finding that people usually start declining somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.
In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications. The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline.[15] The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multitasking.
So what are you going to do about it? There are really only three doors you can go through here: 1. You can deny the facts and rage against decline—setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment. 2. You can shrug and give in to decline—and experience your aging as an unavoidable tragedy. 3. You can accept that what got you to this point won’t work to get you into the future—that you need to build some new strengths and skills.
Crystallized intelligence, relying as it does on a stock of knowledge, tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all. Cattell himself described the two intelligences in this way: “[Fluid intelligence] is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning.”[6] Translation: When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can
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Cicero believed three things about older age. First, that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige.
Success is fundamentally positional, meaning it enhances our position in social hierarchies. Social scientists for decades have shown that positional goods do not bring happiness. Even money, which people swear they like simply for what it will buy, becomes largely positional beyond a relatively low level.
The point is that the symbols of your specialness have encrusted you like a ton of barnacles. Not only are these things incapable of bringing you any real satisfaction; they’re making you too heavy to jump to your next curve.[30] You need to chip a bunch of them away.
In my fifties, my life is jammed with possessions, accomplishments, relationships, opinions, and commitments. I asked myself, “Can the right formula for a happy life really be to add more and more, until I die?” Obviously, the answer is no. Even worse than the inherent fruitlessness of this strategy, it gets less and less effective over time as our first success curve declines and the returns to our efforts diminish.
To sum up, here are three formulas that explain both our impulses and the reason we can’t ever seem to achieve lasting satisfaction. Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want Success = Continually having more than others Failure = Having less
Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.
Whether paralyzing or mild, the fear of death has eight distinct dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death, and fear of premature death.[3]
On the Sunday afternoon before the first day of each month, contemplate these questions: If I had one year left in my career and my life, how would I structure this coming month? What would be on my to-do list? What would I choose not to worry about? I am willing to guess that “taking an extra work trip at the expense of seeing my spouse” and “staying late to impress the boss” are not items that will be on your schedule. More likely, “take a weekend away” and “call my friend” will show up instead.
The problem is that many people do decline alone: on their way up they have let their relationships wither, so on the way down they don’t have a human safety net. This makes any change in the second half seem all the more difficult and risky.
There are seven big predictors of being Happy-Well that we can control pretty directly:[6] 1. Smoking. Simple: don’t smoke—or at least, quit early. 2. Drinking. Alcohol abuse is one of the most obvious factors in the Grant Study leading to Sad-Sick and putting Happy-Well out of reach. If there is any indication of problem drinking in your life, or if you have drinking problems in your family, do not wonder about it or take your chances. Quit drinking right now. 3. Healthy body weight. Avoid obesity. Without being fanatical, maintain a body weight in the normal range, eating in a moderate,
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The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34]
Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, Withstand the winter’s storm, And spite of wind and tide, Grow up the meadow’s pride, For both are strong Above they barely touch, but undermined Down to their deepest source . . . Admiring you shall find Their roots are intertwined Insep’rably.
exposure to negative emotions makes us stronger for when there is a true crisis. Research shows that stress inoculation training—in which people learn to cope with anger, fear, and anxiety by being exposed to stimuli that cause these feelings—is effective in creating emotional resilience.
In his book Meanings of Life, psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that when you find meaning, life seems more stable. Perhaps paradoxically, suffering during transitions can create the meaning in life that imposes a sense of stability over subsequent transitions.[11] This is one of the great consolations of aging and seeing a lot of change.
Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.
