Tag Archives: Aging

Books & Reading, Film & Movies, Love & Relationships

Dear Sally Albright: 40 is Only the Beginning ‹ Literary Hub

Miriam Parker on Late Blooming and When Harry Met Sally

By Miriam Parker, August 17, 2022

from article…

Sally: And I’m gonna be forty.

Harry: When?

Sally: Someday.

Harry: In eight years.

Sally: But it’s there. It’s just sitting there, like this big dead end. And it’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73.

Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties when I finally did the math. Sally was THIRTY-TWO in When Harry met Sally. Thirty-two! And it started to dawn on me: I’m almost thirty-two. I live in a small dark apartment on West 83rd street where I look at a brick wall—not nearly as nice as Sally’s Upper West Side apartment. I do not even have Cold Hard Mexican Ceramic Tile Floors or a Wagon Wheel Coffee Table or andirons. (I still, to be totally honest, am not clear on what andirons are.) This was my first clue that When Harry Met Sally was a fantasy. And a realization that the messages I internalized from it were wrong.

Source: Dear Sally Albright: 40 is Only the Beginning ‹ Literary Hub

Current Affairs, Food & Drink, Science & Health

Coffee with sugar can be healthy, reduce death risk, study suggests | USA Today

By Mike Snider, USA TODAY, May 31, 2022

close up of coffee cup
Photo by Chevanon Photography on Pexels.com

Coffee drinkers, new research reinforces previous findings that your daily cup of joe may help you live longer – regardless of whether you add a bit of sugar.

Compared to non-coffee drinkers, regular consumers of unsweetened coffee were 16% to 21% less likely to die during a seven-year follow-up period, according to a new study in the May 31 edition of the peer-reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine.

Those who added sugar and drank 1½-3½ cups daily of sweetened coffee were 29% to 31% less likely to die, researchers said.

Source: Coffee with sugar can be healthy, reduce death risk, study suggests

Current Affairs, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

Is this the end of retirement as we know it? – BBC Worklife

By Sophia Epstein, 30th May 2022

from article…

The ‘retirement ideal’ has been changing for years. Older people are increasingly unretiring, changing the shape of this life stage.

Picture retirement in your head. It’s a laughing, grey-haired couple sipping piña coladas on a white sand beach; perhaps they’re getting some liquid courage for their sky dive later. Not a care in the world, their only responsibility is getting their grandchildren good gifts for their birthdays.

It’s a beautiful fantasy – and for many retirees, present and future, it’s just that: a fantasy. The concept of retirement as we know it is changing, and has been for a long time.

The number of people working past retirement age has grown consistently since the 1990s. In the US, 32% of people aged 65 to 69 were in work in 2017, far more than the 22% who were working in 1994. In the UK, employment rates for people older than 65 doubled between 1993 and 2018.

Source: Is this the end of retirement as we know it? – BBC Worklife

Pleasures, Science & Health

7 hours may be the ideal amount of sleep starting in middle age | Health | CNN

By Katie Hunt, CNN, Updated 12:13 PM EDT, Mon May 2, 2022

Flashpop/Digital Vision/Getty Images

The optimum amount of sleep is not too little but not too much – at least in middle and old age.

New research has found that around seven hours of sleep is the ideal night’s rest, with insufficient and excessive sleep associated with a reduced ability to pay attention, remember and learn new things, solve problems and make decisions.

Seven hours of slumber was also found to be linked with better mental health, with people experiencing more symptoms of anxiety and depression and worse overall well-being if they reported sleeping for longer or shorter stints.

“While we can’t say conclusively that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis looking at individuals over a longer period of time appears to support this idea,” Jianfeng Feng, a professor at China’s Fudan University and an author of the study published in the scientific journal Nature Aging, said in a statement.

“But the reasons why older people have poorer sleep appear to be complex, influenced by a combination of our genetic makeup and the structure of our brains.”

Source: 7 hours may be the ideal amount of sleep starting in middle age | CNN

Books & Reading, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Pleasures, Science & Health

15 of the Best Books for Seniors | Book Riot

By Tracy Shapley Towley, Apr 8, 2022

From article…

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When I was a kid, I thought my grandma was old.

She wore clothes I associated with older ladies, and she made cinnamon sugar toast for us when we went over there. She used mothballs! When my grandfather died, it turned out she didn’t know how to pump gas or write a check. And she was in her early 70s! That’s not even old! Why did I think she was old?

Is it just that the times were different and nobody was out there writing think pieces about how moms and grandmothers needed to flaunt their sexuality? Is it because I’m getting closer to my grandmother in age, and when I was a wee, tween, and teen I just lumped “older” into one category?

Or is this due to advances in healthcare and quality of living? I mean, my father-in-law is 72, and he’s perfectly capable of climbing a mountain if he wanted to (he doesn’t want to). But then again, he’s about 40% robot at this point, having had so many joint replacements.

Source: 15 of the Best Books for Seniors | Book Riot