Aging

As many of you know, we’ve been brainstorming how to create MEA Regenerative Communities, a 21st-century multi-generational alternative to the archaic 20th-century retirement community. Our co-founder Jeff Hamaoui has been pioneering this effort with Baja Sage, not far from our MEA campus, and some of you are planning on buying a home there.

As we get older, time becomes a luxury. Yet, I still play a decades-long game of believing a full calendar makes me a worthy human. During COVID, I learned how to trick my age-old habit of filling up every sliver of my day.

Would be interested in your perspective on this New York Times article focusing on Joe Biden’s wisdom. I don’t bring it up to be political, as Wisdom Well does its best not to venture into political waters very often.

The day before I turned 55 I received a letter from my bank. The auxiliary checking account I'd opened for online transactions would soon be assessed an $8 monthly fee unless I maintained a $1000 minimum balance or deposited $250/month, neither of which was feasible for me.

Many of you may have seen this recent New York Times magazine feature on the social life of forests. “Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts.

My friend Arthur Brooks, who is working on a book on the curse of success based upon many of the principles we talk about at MEA (challenge of letting go of one’s identity, being defined by ego), has a podcast called The Art of Happiness based upon his exceptionally popular Harvard University class.

Twentieth century social scientists used to look at life as three sets of 8,000 days, the first ending around your 21st birthday, the second ending in your mid-forties when your “crisis” had taken hold, and the last act ending around your sixty-fifth birthday when you were retiring and withdrawing from an active role in society.

Policymakers better take note. My friend Andrew Scott, co-author of “The 100-Year Life,” outlines the following in his essay for the International Monetary Fund entitled “The Future of Aging for Policymakers:”

Sometime in my mid-forties, I stopped being terrified of wrinkles. Until then, I had followed all the expert advice on how to fight them. Some rules were basic— like always using SPF. Others required a bit more investment—like sleeping on a silk pillowcase.

Life expectancy. Such a profound concept, even melancholic if you let it be. But, here’s the thing: the word not only speaks to how long we live, but how much we expect from life. In other words, it can be an empowering concept and one worth investigating. To that end, I want to introduce four insightful articles/studies and one question.