349: The Wisdom of Old People with John Leland
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The average life expectancy is nearly 83 years where I live. People are living healthier, wealthier, and longer lives than ever before, but what the heck do you do in that last third portion of your life? Golf or bingo? Yoga or CrossFit? It’s really hard to know what options we’ll have in our 80s, but it also seems pretty foolish not to plan for it now.
On this week’s show, you’ll meet a New York Times writer who extensively profiled six elders (over 85) in New York City. He’ll share what he learned about living and dying with us on the show.
Listen & Learn:
- The role of choice in happiness in later life
- Why isolation from a purpose can be just as painful as social isolation
- How pain and illness are less important than how people choose to interpret them in the context of their lives
- How “no regrets” is a common theme with age
Links & Resources:
ABOUT OUR GUEST
John Leland is a reporter at The New York Times, where he wrote a year-long series that became the basis for Happiness Is a Choice You Make. He is also the author of Hip: The History and Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road.
Before joining the Times, he was a senior editor at Newsweek, editor in chief of Details, a reporter at Newsday, and a writer and editor at Spin.
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | People say that public speaking is the number one fear and I've been leading |
| 0:09.1 | yoga courses now for 12-13 years and I will say categorically that is not true. The |
| 0:15.3 | number one fear is aging and death and no one's talking about it. There are |
| 0:20.0 | older people, aging people, our own relatives, right around the corner. |
| 0:23.7 | Look at the window right now. |
| 0:25.2 | There's an elder care facility right across the street from my office |
| 0:29.2 | and nobody is really planning or having open conversations about how we get older we talk about how we're |
| 0:35.7 | going to live but how we're going to end things up how we're going to die how we're going to wrap things |
| 0:38.8 | up how we're going to plan it's just totally, the unknown and so much out of our control that we avoid it. |
| 0:48.0 | I haven't done much work or thinking in this realm myself, but I would like like to I'd like to get more comfortable |
| 0:53.4 | and more strategic in thinking not just how I want to be in this world for the next |
| 0:57.9 | 80 years or so that I have left but also for you know the end of, the last third or the last 10 or 20 years of life. |
| 1:06.4 | On this week's show, we'll talk to a journalist, writer, an author who spent quite a great deal of time |
| 1:11.8 | with a bunch of people in their 80s and just really did |
| 1:15.4 | some deep work thinking about what it means to be old, what it means to live that latter |
| 1:20.0 | part of life, and the different choices you can make and how they affect how things can end up. |
| 1:25.9 | It's a different kind of conversation, but I think a valuable one, hopefully one we can explore |
| 1:29.6 | more in detail in the future. I hope you find this valuable your questions comments feedback always |
| 1:34.4 | most welcome email me podcast at yoga body dot com |
| 1:39.2 | so hello and welcome to the Lucas Rockwood show. Today's show is called The Wisdom of Old People and I'm joined here today with John Leeland. |
| 1:50.0 | John is a reporter at the New York Times. He wrote a year-long series that became the basis for a book we'll be chatting about today called |
| 1:56.9 | Happiness is a Choice You Make. He's also the author of a book called Hip, The History of Why Kerouac Matters. |
... |
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