Introducing: How to Age Up

How to Know What’s Real

The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC

Education, Self-improvement, Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2025

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our scientific understanding of the aging process may be expanding, but is our cultural thinking about aging keeping up? In the new season of The Atlantic’s popular How To series, co-hosts Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan explore the cultural gamification of aging, the obsession with defying this inevitable process, and how we might shift our understanding of aging to embrace the beauty of being mortal. Just as “leveling up” is a positive notion, How to Age Up challenges listeners to consider how we all, regardless of our specific age, might live better. How do you think about aging? Please send a voice memo to [email protected] with your name, your age, and answers to the following questions: What aspects of aging are you nervous about? What are you looking forward to as you age? Who do you hope to be like when you are older? Is there someone in your life who has made you excited to get older? Sending in a voice note means that you are consenting to the possibility of The Atlantic using your audio in a future episode of How To. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you think of yourself as grown up?
0:04.1	In terms of the responsibilities I have, yes, because I go to bed early,
0:10.0	because I know I have to get up at 5 to take care of my kid.
0:13.8	But there are environments in which this, like, switch goes off in my brain.
0:19.7	When the brat album came out last year, I listened to it
0:23.8	before going out one night and it just shut something off in my brain and I was like, I'm in my
0:28.6	20s again. Yeah, Brat can do that. I'm Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer with the Atlantic. And I'm Natalie Brennan, producer at The Atlantic.
0:40.3	We've been thinking a lot about aging and how it's different today than it was in the past.
0:45.3	In the early 1800s, knowing somebody's specific age would be today like somehow randomly knowing your neighbor's blood type.
0:52.3	It just wasn't a thing.
0:55.0	But today, everybody's become so age-obsessed.
0:58.0	What's really going on here in this pursuit for longevity?
1:02.0	It's about this optimization and it causes people to be less supportive of public health interventions
1:09.0	because it really is about you, you, you, you,
1:13.1	the responsibility is on you. And if you, and if you're not doing it, you're failing.
1:18.8	This season, we'll be talking to people who are resetting our assumptions about aging.
1:23.7	I'm here to tell you that your mother and your grandmother are pretty much having a good time.
1:32.5	And working to build new communities across generations.
1:36.4	They actually created a built community around foster families and older adults who are retired.
1:42.9	Grandmas and grandpas all around that chose to be
1:45.7	in this neighborhood, that's the dream.
1:48.4	Aging doesn't have to feel like a game
	...

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