Judith Warner’s “I Feel It Coming Together” post on her “Domestic Disturbances” blog, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times, bemoans the fact that it’s all downhill after age 44. “I now see the passage of time more as a kind of bell curve,” she writes. “Years of ascension, soaring anticipation, followed by a plateau — which is not so bad, really — and then, no way to sugar coat this: a rather precipitous decline.” So long forever to “excitement, discovery, intensity.”
Oh please. Has Warner never met an older person who’s embraced a cause, fallen in love, seized the day? Her despair is ill-informed; many studies show Americans to be happiest in youth and in old age. Worse, she reinforces the destructive myths that underlie this country’s pervasive ageism.