Meg Jay

Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults.

“But calling my mom makes me feel better.”

“I know it does. But those phone calls are robbing you of the opportunity to calm yourself down.”

When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what psychologists call “borrowing an ego.” She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own.

She realized that there was a difference between having a feeling and acting on it. Now when she felt anxious or incompetent, she calmed herself with what had gone well.

“Barring interventions or catastrophic events, personality traits appear to be essentially fixed after age thirty.”

when she worked with older adults in therapy she felt like a medical examiner, like her job was to figure out what had gone wrong in people’s lives and to bring closure.

Currently, he was “funemployed,” which meant he was supposed to be enjoying himself and riding out unemployment benefits, but life was becoming less and less fun.

Numerous studies from around the world show that life starts to feel better across the twentysomething years. We become more emotionally stable and less tossed around by life’s ups and downs. We become more conscientious and responsible. We become more socially competent. We feel more agreeable about life and more able to cooperate with others. Overall, we become happier and more confident and less—as Sam put it—anxious and angry.

Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from investing in adulthood

Men and women will soon face caring for two entirely dependent groups of loved ones at precisely the moment they are most needed back at work.