How to maximize the surprising upsides to aging

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It turns out there’s science behind the old saw “the older you get, the wiser you are." Laura Carstensen, founding director of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, says research has made surprising discoveries about the way older people view their lives. With fewer “what-ifs," they appear to gain more clarity on their place in the world.

The number of Americans living to at least 100 is expected to quadruple over the next 30 years, to about 422,000 by the mid-2050s, according to the Pew Research Center. Carstensen, who is 71 and a professor of public policy and psychology, says changes will be needed to make the most of those added years. She talked with The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything podcast about how we could rethink life’s traditional milestones.

Most people believe that growing older is associated with loneliness and depression and anxiety, that mental health suffers. The very good news is, it looks like people do better emotionally as they get older. This has been so surprising to researchers and to the general public that it’s probably been the most scrutinized finding about aging.

A lot goes wrong as we get older. There are physical problems, losses of loved ones, age discrimination. There’s a lot that isn’t good about growing older, but people seem to do better emotionally.

Older people have shorter time horizons. For many years, people thought that must make people miserable and scared. The interesting thing is there’s a paradox.

It actually makes people feel calmer not to have to prepare for this long and nebulous future, to be able to live more in the present. The premise of the center is that longer lives are a great gift of time. But what we’ve done