Aging

Dorothy Hoffner is one of those few folks who survived both the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago and the recent Covid pandemic.

We're all familiar with the $600-billion anti-aging industrial complex, which is basically an anti-women enterprise since most of these products target women. Simultaneously, we have a growing bio-hacking movement trying to decode the secrets to living forever. It is a movement fueled mainly by rich tech entrepreneurs and feels like an all too familiar "male conquest."

When I saw the title of this recent New York Times article (https://bit.ly/3QqrzmC), I quickly checked to see if it was written by one of our MEA faculty members or alums. It wasn’t, but the article profiles one of our favorite academics, Dr. Becca Levy, who’s spoken to our MEA community.

At the airport recently, I heard a little piece of what I would consider unintended ageism passed on from a mother to her six-year-old daughter.

Ken Dychtwald has been my “modern elder” for a couple of decades since I got to know him as a fellow Esalen Institute donor and all-around cool dude. How many hipsters in their twenties in the 1970s decided to explore aging and longevity as a career? Not many, but Ken has always been ahead of the curve, creating Age Wave long ago. For a half-century, he’s been offering the world all kinds of interesting data to back up the socio-demographic changes we’re seeing around aging.

Ever since I wrote this post last month, “Older Single Women of the World, Unite,” (meawisdom.com/wisdom-well/post/older-single-women-of-the-world-unite) I’ve been in a series of separate email conversations with more than a dozen single female MEA alums who are curious about their definition of family as they age.

“When you cannot do what you’ve always done, you do what matters most.” Robert D. Hales

While in Europe, I eavesdropped on conversations about Joe Biden. In the course of an hour, I heard an Aussie say that Biden has been a successful President "in spite of" his age and a German saying he was successful "because of" his age.

The data is daunting.

In the past, I’ve suggested that our body is a rental car we were issued at birth. While we didn’t get any choice in the color or model, we do have some control over how we drive and maintain the vehicle.