Image via CrunchBaseBy PAULA SPANWhen I asked Lars Tornstam, a Swedish sociologist, for an example of the state he calls gerotranscendence, he described a hypothetical daughter planning a cocktail party. Her elderly mother usually attends the affairs and enjoys herself, so the daughter invites her as usual — but this time, the mother declines. Naturally, the daughter worries. Is her mother ill? Depressed? This is not like her.
But perhaps there’s nothing wrong, said Dr. Tornstam, who has been investigating aging for more than 25 years. Our values and interests don’t usually remain static from the time we’re 20 years old until the time we’re 45, so why do we expect that sort of consistency in later decades?
“We develop and change; we mature,” he told me in a phone interview from his home in Uppsala, Sweden. “It’s a process that goes on all our lives, and it doesn’t ever end. The mistake we make in middle age is thinking that good aging means continuing to be the way we were at 50. Maybe it’s not.”
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