This post is derived from my notes of the book Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, a fascinating book on medicine, aging and mortality.
I don't like to travel anymore.
Saying it feels like betraying my younger self. A few years ago, such a thought would have been unimaginable - travel was the ultimate freedom, the essential escape from work, the marker of an interesting life. I was such a believer in the idea of traveling as a good life that I proudly told people that I was out of the town every Friday evening and only back Sunday night. It was also all over my social media timeline. And yet, here I am, thinking about packing bags, navigating airports, and sleeping in strange beds as a poor use of my time, money, energy, and health.
Moments of reflections have helped me see through what our consumeristic society has normalized - the cultivated disgust for routine(it's cool to project a desire for novelty, as if it signifies a curious, adventurous mind), the expected disappointment with our work(it's normalized to say that you hate work, as if it's supposed to tell others how interesting they are, and that they have interests outside of it), the manufactured need for "getaways", and the prescribed formats of what those breaks should look like. The conditioning comes in different flavors. Since shopping and spending on material things are out of fashion, novel experiences are packaged as meaningful, and something that we ought to be craving for.
But I find myself asking this: If I want to run to stay healthy, or even to challenge myself, why do I need scenic trails in distant locations every time when my neighborhood sidewalks or hills serve the purpose? Why do I have to to pay to sign up for a race and earn a medal when I can go on a long run by myself, or with a few friends, as a way to catch up with them? If I crave relaxation, why can't I take time off work to read books, or watch films - whatever I wanna do - instead of doing the exact same activities in an overpriced Airbnb?
The shift in perspective seems to have happened some time ago. I just hadn't realized it. And the nature of the shift isn't unique to me. Research suggests, as mentioned in the book, Being Mortal, that as we age, we naturally transition from seeking novelty and breadth to going narrow and deep. Our desires turn inward, we prioritize deeper connections with people we love and care about, and external validation matters less. And strangely enough, this narrowing of focus often leads to greater happiness, a deeper sense of fulfillment.
The book mentions three competing theories attempt to explain this shift in our priorities.
The first celebrates this change as wisdom - the natural culmination of decades of lived experience teaching us what truly matters. I've watched my own dad go from working a busy schedule to spending more time exercising, eating well, serving others, talking to people, prioritizing overall well-being, and sometimes even doing nothing at all.
The second explanation attributes it purely to the biological changes - our aging brains literally shape our desires. The prefrontal cortex - our decision-making command center - physically shrinks with age, potentially explaining why older people prioritize emotional well-being over achievement. Meanwhile, dopamine production reduces, dampening the reward pathways that once lit up with external validation and accomplishment. Perhaps we seek deeper connections simply because our neurochemistry demands it.
The third theory is less optimistic - what if older people narrow their focus simply because they are forced to? Physical limitations, cognitive changes, and societal attitudes may restrict their options until they have no choice but to adapt. This speaks to the willingness to accept reality that comes with age, after constantly witnessing forces beyond our control repeatedly reshape our lives. The young still believe they can bend the world to their will; the old have learned which battles can't be won.
All three of them are fascinating and explore different dimensions of the change. But since life resists simple answers, I suspect that the truth combines elements of all three theories, plus factors we have not even imagined.
Here's where it gets interesting. All three of them also assume that age itself causes these priority shifts - a classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation. What if age is merely a proxy for something else entirely? What if there are things that come with age that better explain the shift than age itself?
For Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, a near-death experience in a young age forever changed how she understood human motivation. While recovering in a hospital bed, she noticed something strange - her priorities had suddenly shifted to mirror those of the elderly patients around her. This observation led her to develop Socioemotional Selectivity Theory(SST) much later in life, which proposes something radical: it's not age that changes our priorities, but our perception of future and the finiteness of time.
She observed that when young people face situations that compress their sense of future time - like terminal illness, natural disasters, or near-death experiences - they begin prioritizing emotional meaning over novelty and achievement, just like the elderly. From her research done right after the September 11 attacks and during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, she saw that age-related differences in priorities virtually disappeared. The Great Resignation, experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, also suggests similar elements at play. People realized life is short, and that what they were doing wasn't making them feel fulfilled, leading to resignations en masse and attempts to discover what brings meaning.
It makes sense. Time isn't just a thing that's measured in units and seen on clocks. It exists as a psychological dimension that we constantly interpret and feel, even if unconsiously. Our perception of time is influenced as much by what happens in a given time, as much as the absolute chronological time. Two days waiting to hear back from the recruiter about your interview feels like eternity, while great weekends seem to fly by. A night before a big exam, or race, feels excruciatingly long, while hours with your loved ones seems to dissolve instantly.
It also resonates deeply with my own experience. Although I've a aged a few years since my days of weekly adventures, I'm not old enough to have gained wisdom due to the sheer amount of time I've spent living.
Time has always been my most precious resource - the subject of endless arguments and negotiations in my marriage and the driving force behind my daily decisions. While I don't obsess over my mortality, at least that's now how I think about it, I'm acutely aware of how time slips away everyday under the weight of relationships, work, and other obligations. In the last few years, that sense of finiteness of time has only gotten stronger, more serious, not because of age, but because of kids. Having kids puts limitations on your time in a way that you're forced to rethink your relationship with it, revisit what truly matters to you.
The implications of SST are staggering: the narrowing of focus and a deeper sense of fulfillment that we associate with aging might actually be available to all of us, at any age, if we're willing to confront the finite nature of our time. Perhaps that wisdom isn't waiting for us in old age - it's waiting for us to recognize that our time is limited, whether we have decades left or just today.
And once we redefine our perception of time, come to see the finiteness of it, we also have the potential to inject intentionality into the numerous choices we make everyday - what we eat, who we spend time with, how we spend our time.
Every morning, between 4.00 AM and 4.30 AM, I have a decision to make: sleep for some more, or wake up and do something in the quiet time, when everyone around is still asleep. I know that the 90m after are never coming back, and with those 90m gone, so is my only real chance of getting quiet time that day. So I wake up, most days. Waking up feels terrible, but having woken up feels great.
Around 7.30 or 8.00 AM, I have a decision to make: exercise, or give in to the part of me that makes excuses for skipping it. I know that mornings work best for me to keep up a schedule. I also recollect this paragraph which is so profound and powerful, it gets me instantly in the right mind: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim." - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. So I choose to exercise, most days.
P.S.
[[Notes - Being Mortal]]
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