3 Takeaways - The Surprising Science of Why Life Gets Better with Age with Stanford’s Laura Carstensen (#275)

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

We’re told youth is life’s peak — but what if that story is wrong?Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen reveals how time itself reshapes what we value and how we find meaning. Her research offers profound lessons for living well at every age — and for finding more meaning in the moments we have. It’s a conversation that will change how you think about time, happiness, and life itself.

We're told youth is the best time of life, full of promise, energy, and possibility. But what if that story is wrong? What if time makes us happier, not sadder, and what can it teach us about living well at every age? Hi, everyone, I'm Lynn Toman, and this is three takeaways. On three takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best. thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Laura Carlsonson. She's a Stanford psychologist and founding

director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She's one of the world's leading experts on the science of how time shapes what we value, how we feel, and how we live. Her research challenges many of our assumptions and reveals something remarkable. Life often gets better, the older we get. Laura, welcome to three takeaways. Thank you, Lynn. It's a pleasure to be with you. It is my pleasure. Laura, how did a car accident when you were 21 open your eyes about life and about time? When I was 21 years old, I was in a very serious car accident and ended up on an orthopedic ward for about four months. That experience, as it turned out, really profoundly changed my life and how I think about time and think about age. What I did,

discovered during those months is that I had a lot in common with older people who were also in the hospital having broken bones. And much of that had to do with how we looked at our lives. I had just, because of a serious car accident, come to recognize the fragility of life and really come to appreciate the time that I had. And for these older women, they had come to a similar conclusion and a similar state of appreciation of life, but come to it because of reaching an age where their futures were in all likelihood more constrained than they were at earlier times in life. And so what I found is that as we were thinking about our lives and what we shared in common, that these weren't age effects so much as time effects.

that is our time horizons had shifted, but I was very young and I still was very young and they were old and they still were old, but something shifted in how we were seeing things. I think it changed me as a researcher because I came to think of older people at a time when I was young, not as Martians, you know, some other, you know, sort of state over some other species as many people I think approached aging at the time, but rather as people adapting to different places in the life cycle and different temporal horizons. And that leads us to think and act and feel differently. So essentially what you're saying is that how people value time changes as we age or also changes based on our health. If somebody's health is precarious, they might have a different sense of the

value of time. Yes, when time is running out, our goals change. And some of that is just because we always set goals in temporal context. You can't pursue a goal outside of a temporal context. So this is very much a part of human experiences, setting goals as a function of time. And we have shown in our work that young people coming to the end of their lives because of a disease, show many kinds of changes similar to what older people show, that is appreciating life more than ever because they see it as more limited. How would you summarize how our emotions change over time? When we are very young, we are able to experience emotions at a level that's quite pure, if you will. We can be just happy. We can be just sad.

And the older that we get, the more complex our emotions become. As we reach our later years, emotions become highly mixed in a way that I think of as richness of emotional life, more even than just mixed. When we experience something very, very positive, let's say we're spending time with a granddaughter who's sitting in our lap, she's three years old. and we're reading a book. If a person were 11 years old and they were with that little girl at three, they might just think this is fascinating and fun. When you're 80 and you're with that little girl and she's three, you're completely sort of captivated by her and the positive feelings

that you're having, but you also have the ability to appreciate that she won't be that little girl forever. And so now you might be thinking of her as an adult, or you might be thinking or having emotions related to the likelihood that you won't see her become an old woman. And so we begin to have thoughts about time and recognition of time that changes the emotions we have in the moments that we're having them. I think an 80-year-old experiencing a profound happy experience will also have a tear in the eye because the recognition that this time will pass and that it will result in a richness of that experience that is absolutely impossible when emotions are pure and simple. Laura, how do people think about death over time? The older

people are, the less fear they report of dying, which appears at first glance to be paradoxical, right? I mean, you're closer to death, but you are less afraid of it. Young people, young adults, are the most fearful of death. It turns out older people don't express a lot of fear for most problems. Crime, poverty, they're less worried about their futures. Now, some of that's probably because the future is shorter, right? Fewer things can go wrong in a life as you get older, except dying. And dying, they are coming closer to the end of their lives by all actuarial accounts, but less fearful of it. The only thing that I know of that older people are more fearful of than younger people is becoming sick for an extended period of time where they

lose control. Because many people imagine that older people, especially old, old people are fearful of dying almost every minute of their lives. Exactly. That's the image that we have of older people. And I think that's a lot of why we think older people must be miserable. But they're not miserable and they're not afraid of dying. Why do you think as people grow older, they often become happier? When we are young and our futures loom large, it's very difficult to simply be in the moment. And as we experience time horizons that are becoming constrained, we think less about the future. If there's a silver lining of aging, it's that we're relieved of the burden of constantly preparing for the future, for the next step, the next thing we have to do. And so older people are much more able to just be in the moment.

And younger people tend not to be able to do that as well. They're always thinking about the next thing they need to do. So they're happy, but they're worried about getting through their next meeting. And older people can just be in that moment. That's what I think the secret is. Your theory revolves around our sense of time. how much time we think we have left and how that changes what we value. How does that shift in perspective alter the way people live?

One of the best kept secrets of aging is that as we get older, we see more clearly what's important and what's not, what matters and what doesn't matter. As people get older, they come to care less what other people think of them. and they come to care more than ever about those special meaningful people in their lives. And being able to do that means that we live our lives differently. We don't try to please everyone. We pursue the most important, meaningful aspects of our lives. And let me say that for the vast majority of people, that means we're investing in our most important relationships.

for most people, the most important thing in their lives are other people. And so when you begin to live your life around benefiting from and benefiting those people you love, life feels better. And I think that's a big contribution to the overall improvements in the levels of emotional well-being we see with age. You've said that old age is new. as a hundred-year lives become increasingly common, how should we rethink education, work, and retirement?

We have an unprecedented opportunity before us. And by we, I'm referring to humans alive at this point in history. Throughout most of human evolution, life was short, really short. We don't know exactly how long people lived on average, but it was the estimates are 18 to 20, life expectancy stayed pretty short for most of human history. It increased a little bit at a glacial pace. And then in a single century, in the 20th century, we added 30 years to average life expectancy. And that means that we added more years to life expectancy in a single century, then we added across all millennia of human evolution combined. In a blink of an

eye, we nearly doubled the length of our lives. And this means we need to rethink all of our lives, every aspect of it, from education to work, to retirement, to the nature of families, to financial security. All of these aspects of our lives should be. change. And it's up to us to really begin to think about that script that's guiding us through life and rewrite our life scripts to accommodate lives far longer than our great-grandmothers ever would have imagined. Oh, interesting, Laura. If you could leave people of any age with one insight about how to live well across time, what would it be? I wish that we humans could come to appreciate what is good and special about every stage of life while we're in it.

I would love it if children really knew that this was the most spectacular time in life to climb trees and jump up and down. and that teenagers could appreciate the exquisite physical capabilities that they have and how to value physical health for most of them when they're very young. And I would love it if middle-aged people could come to experience life as not being burdened by all the responsibilities they have at that stage in life. but about being able to help other people more than ever at that stage in their life. And that if when we've got to be old, we could recognize that in many ways, the most advanced stages in our lives are the most precious of all,

because they are more limited and value goes up when the amount of anything goes down. And so we come to experience our later years with an ability to see what's beautiful in the world, unlike any other stage in life. My point is, there are good things and there are challenges with every stage of life. And I wish for people to be able to see what's good and special about each one of them while they're living in. That's lovely. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave? leave the audience with today. One takeaway is something I call the misery myth, and that is this deeply held belief that

old people are miserable, are unhappy, or lonely, are anxious. Older people are doing better in terms of mental health than all other age groups, better than middle-aged people, better than younger adults. Another takeaway is that not only are we living longer lives for the first time in human history, we're living in an age-diverse world. And in the United States today, there are roughly as many five-year-olds as 65-year-olds.

That's a population we've never had and we need to begin to think about how to use it. The third takeaway, is the opportunity we have now to rewrite our life scripts, what a life can and should look like given that we are living as long as we are. For the first time ever, we can rewrite the life script. What do century-long lives look like? And there's not one answer to that question, but rather lots of opportunities to draw new scripts, new ways of living that will allow us to live more creatively and productively and in more satisfying ways.

Thank you, Laura. This has been great. Thank you. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at three takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.

Thanks for listening.