Introducing: <em>How to Age Up</em>
The science around aging is expanding but are our cultural narratives keeping up?
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In the new season of The Atlantic’s popular How To series, co-hosts Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan explore the cultural gamification of aging, the obsession with defying this inevitable process, and how we might shift our understanding of aging to embrace the beauty of being mortal. Just as “leveling up” is a positive notion, How to Age Up challenges listeners to consider how we all, regardless of our specific age, might live better. New episodes are published every Monday starting April 7th. Subscribe now.
How do you think about aging? Please send a voice memo to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com with your name, your age, and answers to the following questions:
- What aspects of aging are you nervous about?
- What are you looking forward to as you age?
- Who do you hope to be like when you are older? Is there someone in your life who has made you excited to get older?
Sending in a voice note means that you are consenting to the possibility of The Atlantic using your audio in a future episode of How To.
The following is a transcript:
Natalie Brennan: Do you think of yourself as grown-up?
Yasmin Tayag: In terms of the responsibilities I have, yes. Because I go to bed early, because I know I have to get up at five to take care of my kid. But there are environments in which this, like, switch goes off in my brain: When the Brat album came out last year—
Brennan: [Laughs.]
Tayag: I listened to it before going out one night, and it just shut something off in my brain, and I was like, I’m in my 20s again! [Laughs.]
Brennan: Yeah, Brat can do that. [Laughs.]
Tayag: I’m Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer with The Atlantic.
Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, producer at The Atlantic.
Brennan: We’ve been thinking a lot about aging and how it is different today than it was in the past.
Eunice Lin Nichols: In the early 1800s, knowing somebody’s specific age would be, today, like somehow randomly knowing your neighbor’s blood type. It just wasn’t a thing. But today, everybody’s become so age-obsessed.
Tayag: What’s really going on here in this pursuit for longevity?
Timothy Caulfield: It’s about this optimization, and it causes people to be less supportive of public-health interventions, because it really is about you. You, you, you, the responsibilities on you. And if you’re not doing it, you’re failing. [Descending gamelike sound effect.]
Tayag: This season, we’ll be talking to people who are resetting our assumptions about aging.
Karen Adams: And I’m here to tell you that your mother and your grandmother are pretty much having a good time. [Laughs.]
Brennan: And working to build new communities, across generations.
Nichols: They actually created a built community around foster families and older adults who are retired, grandmas and grandpas all around, that chose to be in this neighborhood—that’s the dream.
Tayag: Aging doesn’t have to feel like a game with constantly changing rules.
Brennan: A few years ago, everything was plant-based. It just seemed so clear: Mediterranean diet is the way to go. And now I’m being served content all the time that’s like, You need 8 billion grams of protein before you even drink your coffee in the morning. Like, is Big Protein just behind this?
Tayag: I think it’s a good rule that if the new advice is something you have to buy more of [Gamelike money sound effect.]—be wary! And if the advice is always changing back and forth [Oscillating gamelike sound effect.]—be wary!
Brennan: Listen to How to Age Up.
Tayag: The first episode arrives Monday, April 7. Subscribe now. [Gamelike reward sound effect.]
Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.
