I don’t know about you, but while I don’t feel old by any means, I’m not getting any younger. Examples:
I’ve got enough gray hair that my daughter likes to tease me for it.
I’ve gotten to know my dermatologist very well. (Irish ancestry and years of swim team and lifeguarding as a kid, I guess).
I’ve really gotten back into skiing this year and had an amazing time on the mountain—but I admit, my first goal each time out is to make sure I get home, as opposed to the ER.
The weird and unexpected thing about reaching an age that feels pretty normal now but that I would have considered to be ancient when I was in my teens or 20s—aw heck; 55, why am I hiding the ball?—is that I like the whole thing a lot more than I thought I would.
Yes, time moves faster — but that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a reminder that life is a gift, and you don’t get an unlimited supply.
If you want to do things, you should probably do them. If you want to tell the people you love how you feel, now is a reasonable time.
And frankly getting a bit older makes you (or at least me) take big questions more seriously: God, religion, what happens afterward—the whole thing.
All of which is to say: I’ve made my peace with getting older. At this point in life, I feel like my mantra is simply, “It’s all good.”
As it turns out, that peace of mind may be more valuable than I realized.
Better news about good news
Case in point: a fascinating new Yale study by Becca Levy and Martin Slade, just published in the journal Geriatrics, that turns a lot of conventional wisdom about aging on its head.
Drawing on data from more than 15,000 participants in the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study — tracking them for up to 12 years — the researchers found that 45 percent of adults 65 and older showed measurable improvement in either cognitive function or walking speed.
Nearly a third got cognitively sharper. More than a quarter actually walked faster than they did at the start of the study.
That sounds like pretty good news, doesn’t it? I mean: These are ordinary older Americans, tracked in their daily lives, showing real gains — in some cases well into their 80s and 90s.
But there’s even better news, about good news itself.
It’s that the single biggest predictor of whether someone in the study improved wasn’t their baseline health, their genes, or their exercise habits. It was whether they held positive beliefs about aging.
Levy and Slade measured what they call “age beliefs” — essentially, how people feel about getting older — and found that those with a sunnier view of aging were significantly more likely to show cognitive and physical gains over time.
The effect held up even after controlling for depression, cardiovascular disease, sleep problems, education, and a host of other factors.
Even among participants who started the study with perfectly normal cognition and walking speed, the ones with more positive age beliefs were more likely to improve further.
The researchers argue this points to a “snowball effect” — positive beliefs about aging lead to better physical and mental functioning, which reinforces even more positive beliefs, which leads to even greater gains.
How you think about getting older shapes how you actually age.
Not the first time
None of this would have surprised readers of Levy’s 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code, which laid out the science behind this idea in accessible terms.
Their new study adds something genuinely novel, however:
It’s not just that optimistic people live longer, or even that they’re healthier overall; instead, positive beliefs seem to actually drive measurable improvement in physical and cognitive functioning.
The study also takes a direct shot or two (or three, perhaps) at the scientific establishment.
A review cited by the authors found that aging is “consensually described as a process of loss.”
The World Health Organization’s assessment tool for older adults doesn’t even allow for the possibility of improvement — it only tracks decline.
For that matter, most studies average everyone’s results together, which mathematically drowns out the people who are getting better.
Levy and Slade say they deliberately designed their study to look for improvement, and found it in nearly half the sample.
‘Why would you want to?’
Caveats: The Health and Retirement Study skews white and relatively educated, so the findings may not translate equally across all populations.
Also, this is observational research — positive age beliefs predict improvement, but the study can’t definitively prove they cause it.
Still, the scale of the findings is hard to dismiss—and for that matter, why would you want to?
If 45 percent of adults over 65 are actually improving in cognitive or physical function, that’s more than 26 million Americans getting better with age, by the researchers’ own extrapolation.
That’s a fundamentally different story about what aging looks like — and what’s possible.
And if the research is right, then making peace with getting older isn’t just good for the soul. It might be good for the body, too.
Feel free to hit me up about it on the ski lift. Or maybe in the waiting room at the dermatologist’s office.
Either way, it’s all good.
Other things worth knowing …
Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting “productive” talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling. White House spokesperson Kush Desai: “The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge, and any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.” (Financial Times)
Related-ish? An individual unknown trader has made nearly $1 million since 2024 from dozens of well-timed Polymarket bets that correctly predicted U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran, according to an analysis shared with CNN. “All of this is strong signaling of insider activity,” said the CEO of the company that did the analysis. “This is pretty suspicious in my book.” (CNN)
For more than a century, baseball’s home plate umpires have called a ball or a strike based on interpretation of a vague, loosely defined strike zone. Now, for the first time, Major League Baseball is instituting a review system in which players can challenge ball-strike calls, using the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge system, which has been tested in the minor leagues and MLB spring training. (NBC News)
A New Mexico jury determined Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down. The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial. Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news. (NPR)
Bob Woodward (disclosure: my friend and old boss) has a new book coming out in September, and it’s an inside account of how the bestselling author and award-winning journalist came to write so many inside accounts. “Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir” will offer Woodward’s take on some of the government leaders he has known and the news he has helped break, from Watergate to the inner workings of the Trump administration. (AP)
Travel disruptions deepened Tuesday as senators raced to salvage a proposal to end the Homeland Security shutdown by funding much of the department, including airport workers going without pay, but excluding immigration operations that have been core to the dispute. (AP)
A Florida hospital has sued a patient, saying she has refused to depart her hospital room since being discharged last October. Under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, hospitals that receive Medicare funds must provide treatment that stabilizes anyone coming to an emergency department with an emergency medical condition, even if the patient doesn’t have insurance or the ability to pay. (AP)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Marc Najera on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
I believe that being positive is worth a try. When my doctor told me that we are now more concerned with health span versus lifespan, I replied. I’m more worried about funspan. If I’m going to live to 90 or 100 I want to have a positive experience. And attitude plays such a huge part of that! So no more black diamonds, wishing to parachute out of a plane or any of those things I thought I could do when I was young younger, and relatively immortal.
Re your Other Things articles, I would refer readers to Judd Legum’s Popular Information Substack for today if you don’t normally check it out.
I read with admittedly great joy that Delta Airlines has suspended its concierge service to members of Congress during this TSA non-funding spree. General impression by the traveling public has been overly positive and would like it if other airlines would follow suit.
The story about the patient who wouldn’t leave; same thing happened at my hometown(Asheville, NC)hospital(HSA). I could probably dig up the details if there were any further interest in the story.
As for positivity, I’m positive I’m here today 👍🏻 and that it’s going to be another hot day. Beyond that, who knows?