In 2012, she gave a popular TED Talk called “Older People Are Happier,” describing her surprising findings that older people tend to enjoy the attributes I just described. Of course, folk intuition has always held that age confers wisdom. But Carstensen upended generations of assumptions about why this might be so. As Atul Gawande describes in his insightful book Being Mortal, Carstensen found that the key isn’t age, per se, or the experience that comes with it, but rather the awareness of impermanence. It’s the knowledge that time is limited. It’s the sense of “but even so.”
