The fears of aging have been one long cascading domino effect through the years: twenty year-olds dread thirty; forty year-olds fear fifty; sixty fears seventy, and so it goes. And there is something to worry about, though it isn't what you'd expect: research shows that having a bad attitude toward aging when we're young is associated with poorer health when we're older.These worries tend to peak in midlife; but in Lighter as We Go, Mindy Greenstein and Jimmie Holland show us that, contrary to common wisdom, our sense of well-being actually increases with our age--often even in the presence of illness or disability. For the first time, Greenstein and Holland--on a joint venture between an 85 year-old and a fifty year-old--explore positive psychology concepts of character strengths and virtues to unveil how and why, through the course of a lifetime, we learn who we are as we go. Drawing from the authors' own personal, intergenerational friendship, as well as a broad array of research from many different areas--including social psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, humanities, psychiatry, and gerontology--Lighter as We Go introduces compassion, justice, community, and culture to help calm our cascading fears of aging.

IntroductionPart I: Character, Character Strength, and Continuity Over TimeChapter 1. The Oak Tree and the U-Bend: Age, Well-Being, and the Experience of Me-nessChapter 2. A Look at the Grownup YearsChapter 3. Character Strengths and VirtuesChapter 4. Older Age in the Olden Days: A History of Aging in the Western WorldPart II: The VirtuesChapter 5. The Virtue of Transcendence: Beyond the SelfChapter 6. The Underappreciated Virtue of Humor: You Can't Spell Joy Without the OyChapter 7. The Virtues of Humanity and Social Justice: Do Unto OthersChapter 8. The Virtue of Courage: If I Only Had the NerveChapter 9. The Virtue of Wisdom: Knowing What We Don't KnowChapter 10. The Virtue of Temperance: Moderation in All Things (almost)Chapter 11. The Virtue of Passing on to the Next Generation: The Bridge Between Past and FuturePart III Putting the Virtues to WorkChapter 12. When Older Doesn't Feel Lighter: Loneliness and Social IsolationChapter 13. The Virtue of Appreciating the Cycle of Life in EldersAppendix: Vintage Readers Book Club Readings