A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!

..In which we take a brief look at a timeless problem: time

By Ed Goldman

Did you know that Stanford University houses a Center on Longevity? Having sat through and also delivered a slew of college lectures, I’m surprised that every institution of higher learning hasn’t established one of these, mainly to determine why lectures can run so long or just seem to run so long, which is pretty much the same violation of human decency.  

Questions:

1. Shouldn’t a school of electrical engineering have a Center on Shortevity in which students would study the inevitability of circuit shorts? 
2. If so, should a law school have a Center of Brevity, where One-L classes would teach how to write legal briefs that are actually brief? And perhaps explain why a “short” sale of abandoned real estate never is?
3. Is there an opportunity here for a savvy fashion student to design casual wear branded as electrical shorts and legal briefs? And while we’re at it, should a marketing student create a Short(s) Sale for real estate agents seeking comfort while showing non-air-conditioned homes in August?

OK, fun’s over. As you’ve no doubt surmised, Stanford’s Center on Longevity is actually a serious-minded research adjunct which is working with an undeniably compelling statistic. Experts are predicting that the number of Americans who live to be at least 100 years old will quadruple over the next three decades—about 422,000 by the mid-2050s, according to the Pew Research Center (which I also recently discovered isn’t a facility for studying church benches. Only three months into 2025 and I’ve already learned so much).

In a Wall Street Journal article, Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford longevity project, says, “Most people believe that growing older is associated with loneliness and depression and anxiety, that mental health suffers.” So far, I’m right with you, Laura. Then you throw a wet towel on my pity party by adding, “The very good news is, it looks like people do better emotionally as they get older.” Question: Which people are we talking about?

Then Carstensen—who’s 71 years old, by the way—suddenly sounds as if someone spiked her Geritol iron supplement. “We should make childhood longer, make high school longer. What if we had two years off during high school?” I accomplished both of those things by remaining childish in high school and sleeping through classes in both my junior and senior years. But I think Carstensen has something much more beneficial in mind.

Ah, here it is. “One year [off from high school],you’d volunteer in the community so it’d be some sort of public service. And the other year you might serve as an intern in a workplace that you think you might like to end up working in.”

For a person who’s in my general ballpark, age-wise, Carstensen seems to live in a different, far-from-parallel universe, experience-wise.

“Humans are pretty good at dealing with the cards we’ve been dealt, but humans are not very good with the ‘what-ifs,'” she says. OK, agreed. 

“And young adulthood and middle age are just filled with what-ifs,” she declares. True dat, as nobody I know actually says (along with “‘sup?”). 

And finally, “The older we get, the more certain and the more predictable life feels.” A hundred percent accurate. I predict my arthritis will worsen, my patience will thin and my death will loom more imminent.