We’re burning daylight. We are 30 years older than we were 30 years ago, and in another 30 years, many of us will be gone. After I started paying attention, I read thousands of pages about extending healthy and productive years and making our time count. As we age, our mortality becomes real.
How Will You Age?
There are more important goals than finding the world’s best soft frozen yogurt. Maybe there is even a higher goal than having every national park sticker on your RV.
A neighbor burns his daylight in his recliner, looking out the open garage door. Some people pile onto the casino bus. Their addiction transfers kids’ and grandkids’ inheritance to gambling corporations. Are those your ideal future? We make our choices, and then our choices make us.
Recently, I’ve read many books on legacy, longevity, and health. My top-rated books encouraged readers to learn who they were created to be and what they wanted to do with their remaining time.
A Long Bright Future
Scholars at the Stanford Center on Longevity estimate that a million Americans will be 100 or older by 2050. Can you imagine being alive at 100 and enjoying it?
Dr. Laura Carstensen is the center’s Founding Director and a professor of psychology at Stanford. Her book A Long Bright Future: An Action Plan for a Lifetime of Happiness, Health, and Financial Security aims to destroy the myth that old means fragile, useless, or senile.
Her book was foundational for me. It created a vision and a strong intention to live a longer, healthier life, to be more, and to do more, to the extent it was within my capacity.
Unsurprisingly, people with a college education and reasonably good health will have far more and dramatically better choices than people with lesser education or poor health. She asserts that most of us will outlive our grandparents by a generation.
Think about that. That notion has taken root and changed how I live, eat, exercise, and sleep. This volume paints a picture worth seeking.
Her wonderful notion is that we are perfectible and that Americans will use their bonus generation to become altruistic and enlightened. I believed those ideas in college, but my life experience does not support the comforting fantasy that more education or wealth automatically produces better character.
Maybe I’ll be among those who live to a vigorous 100. Barring accident or catastrophic illness, I may be healthy most of the way. The challenge will be to live a life worth imitating in the time Stanford predicts most Americans will have.
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So now it is your turn. If you outlive your grandparents by a generation, how will you lead a life worth imitating? What would you do more of? Less of? Please share any book or documentary that you have found helpful.
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Terry Moore, CCIM, is the author of Building Legacy Wealth: How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Imitating. Read his “Welcome to My Blog.”