My partner and I were recently enjoying one of those lazy weekend mornings just chatting about life in general when we got onto the subject of getting older and how we feel about it all. I made the point that my passion and The Eldering Institute® is about transforming our...

It is almost impossible to turn on the television or read a newspaper or a magazine without encountering one pundit, expert or "man on the street" either talking about the future or trying to blame someone for something. Our media commentary is rarely about what is happening now--mostly it's about...

There is nothing new about ageism, other than the fact that there are increasing numbers of people growing older (which means increasing numbers of examples of age discrimination against older people). The latest statistics from the AARP show formal anti-discrimination complaints are up roughly 30% in the workplace. I had...

I want to create a new organization to stamp out stupidity and indifference and restore common decency and goodwill into society. I think I'll call it the National Organization of Pissed-Off Elders (N.O.P.E.).

What's pissing us off?

A lot more than just "aging" issues like Social Security, pharmaceuticals and our...

Julia Baird has a nice piece in the September 25th issue of Newsweek called "Positively Downbeat". She's commenting on Americans' obsession with being happy and the billions we spend to learn "the secret". It's all about quick and easy fixes for life's dilemmas and the not-so-small industry of consultants,...

Yesterday I received yet another of those 'big lettered' alarms about how appalled someone or another is about some left-wing motivated travesty against America, our troops and/or God. This one was about how the words "So Help Me God" were intentionally deleted from Roosevelt's 'Day of Infamy' inscription on his...

I remember this phrase from the Est Training in the 1970s. It was one of the maxims the people received at the end of the program in 'the little book of aphorisms.' This booklet was filled with Werner Erhard's insights on life and basically reinforced the idea that 'this is...

One of the things I appreciate most about the Internet is being 'surprised' when I stumble onto something or someone that I didn't know existed. This weekend a friend mentioned a new PBS series called "Justice" presented by Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel. A few minutes on Google and...

New York is a consumer paradise. That's one of the reasons it is a shopping mecca for so many people from around the world. Folks who can afford it want to have an apartment here, the 'Big Brands' want to have a store on 5th Avenue, and the rest of...

Over the course of my lifetime, I have heard many 'bottom-line' bits of wisdom. For example, "the key to happiness is loving what you do". Or, "at the end of the day, you can either resist life or surrender and live life on life's terms". These kinds of nuggets are...

A good friend of mine is a Canadian that grew up in Lebanon. His family still owns a bit of land that is situated between two of the refugee camps. It is a bleak scene by all accounts. I asked him what he learned growing up in that kind of...

I am not an economist. Thank goodness. This is not a good time to be one. There is a wonderful overview of the field, "How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?," by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The bottom line is that the current situation "which nobody...

It was said that the philosopher Martin Heidegger's last words were "Only God can save us." He was, perhaps, one of the deeper thinkers (at least in modern times) on the question of who we are and what is really going on. As far as I know, he wasn't religious....

Forty-five years ago Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "the medium is the message". I wonder what he would have made of today's media-on-steroids. Someone sent me a fascinating YouTube piece called "Social Media in Plain English" , which was followed up with a dramatic piece on the extraordinary impact...

Future historians may mark the first decade of the 21st century as the time when democracy died. And if they do, they will say that democracy died because people became so resigned and afraid that they retreated into closed and cloistered communities motivated by self-interest, ideological fervor and ignorance. History...

This week is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. Can you believe it? It seems not so long ago that we were all about "peace, love and music" -- a generation that was going to change the world. And in many ways we did! In CBS's Sunday Morning retrospective on Woodstock,...

I am no fan of the far right, but can respect an honest difference of opinion. When the difference of opinion turns into crass and cynical lies and propaganda designed to frighten and deepen the already fragmented population, then it is time to cry "STOP!". During one of the darker...

I confess to be among those who have some difficulty getting my head around how much a trillion dollars is. I can remember a book I read to my daughter called How Much is a Billion that was filled with mind-boggling examples, including things like the number of seconds that...

Socrates said that we don't really have wisdom until we learn to die. Cornell West said the same thing in the acclaimed documentary Examined Life by Astra Taylor. When I first became interested in aging and how our culture views 'growing older' many years ago, I learned that, beyond a...

I spent the weekend in California, hanging out with my children and visiting old friends. I was in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and picked up on the current mood from both ends of the State--at least based on my small sample of conversations. The consensus is that California...