Stanford Center on Longevity

So my biggest lesson in life right now is how do you alchemize two things that sound opposites, slow down, holy urgency.

And most importantly, I think what's true of many people as they get closer to death, and Laura Carstensen at Stanford has proven this at the Stanford Center on Longevity, the less perceived time you have left in your life, the more you focus on what's important.

You don't focus on the future or the past.

You focus on the present moment.

One of the things you get used to is uncertainty, and you get used to the idea that every day is a bonus.

How are you experiencing gratitude? You know, Laura Carstensen at Stanford Center on Longevity has shown that when people have a perceived shorter amount of time left in their life, they tend to focus not on the future or the past but on the present moment.

And focusing on the present moment, they become happier.

So there's, there...

This may not be the same thing.

Laura Carstensen, who I mentioned earlier, who's the founder of the Stanford Center on Longevity, her most famous set of research, and I'll get it wrong, it's sort of a social-emotional theory of aging.

And what she's found is that as you get older, often you see social networks shrink.

And we've often thought about, oh, when social networks get smaller, that's a sort of a risk, a risk to health and happiness.

So let's actually talk about longevity versus aging first.

So I actually got interested in the topic of longevity when I met a woman named Laura Carstensen, who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

And I thought I was going to talk to her about aging, which I think to most people means, what are we going to do with all these old people? And she wanted to talk about longevity, how we reinvent our entire life course, starting really with birth or even before birth, so that our lives can be longer, healthier, and more productive.

One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century is almost the doubling of human lifespan.

So there are five things I look at with someone at these ages.

And what we basically said, there was a great quote we saw from Laura Karstensen, who is the professor that now heads the Stanford Center for Longevity.

And she said something like, gee, we're there with quantity of life, the med tech.

But the real challenge and opportunity forward is going to be quality of life.