The findings raised a further question. If we shift as we age toward appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.
Carstensen was attracted to a different explanation. What if the change in needs and desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to do with perspective—your personal sense of how finite your time in this world is. This idea was regarded in scientific circles as somewhat odd. But Carstensen had her own reason for thinking that one’s personal perspective might be centrally important—a near-death experience that radically changed her viewpoint on her own life.
It was 1974. She was twenty-one, with an infant at home and a marriage already in divorce proceedings. She had only a high school education and a life that no one—least of all she—would have predicted might someday lead to an eminent scientific career. But one night, she left the baby with her parents and went out with friends to party and see the band Hot Tuna in concert. Coming back from the show, they piled into a VW minibus, and, on a highway somewhere outside Rochester, New York, the driver, drunk, rolled the minibus over an embankment.
Carstensen barely survived. She had a serious head injury, internal bleeding, multiple shattered bones. She spent months in the hospital. “It was that cartoonish scene, lying on my back, leg tied in the air,” she told me. “I had a lot of time to think after the initial three weeks or so, when things were really touch and go and I was coming in and out of consciousness.
“I got better enough to realize how close I had come to losing my life, and I saw very differently what mattered to me. What mattered were other people in my life. I was twenty-one. Every thought I’d had before that was: What was I going to do next in life? And how would I become successful or not successful? Would I find the perfect soul mate? Lots of questions like that, which I think are typical of twenty-one-year-olds.
“All of a sudden, it was like I was stopped dead in the tracks. When I looked at what seemed important to me, very different things mattered.”
She didn’t instantly recognize how parallel her new perspective was to the one old people commonly have. But the four other patients in her ward were all elderly women—their legs strung up in the air after hip fractures—and Carstensen found herself connecting with them.
“I was lying there, surrounded by old people,” she said. “I got to know them, see what was happening to them.” She noticed how differently they were treated from her. “I basically had doctors and therapists coming in and working with me all day long, and they would sort of wave at Sadie, the lady in the next bed, on the way out and say, ‘Keep up the good work, hon!’” The message was: This young woman’s life had possibilities. Theirs didn’t.
“It was this experience that led me to study aging,” Carstensen said. But she didn’t know at the time that it would. “I was not on a trajectory to end up being a professor at Stanford by any means at that point in my life.” Her father, however, realized how bored she was lying there and took the opportunity to enroll her in a course at a local college. He went to all the lectures, audiotaped them, and brought the cassettes to her. She ended up taking her first college course in a hospital, on a women’s orthopedics ward.
What was that first class, by the way? Introduction to Psychology. Lying there on that ward, she found she was living through the phenomena she was studying. Right from the start, she could see what the experts were getting right and what they were getting wrong.