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Steven Petrow: Get Old With Grace

·26 min·1 clip

Internalized ageism can foreshorten lives by as much as seven and a half years.

1. Blinkist Podcast's Simplify episode centers on Steven Petrow and his book Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. 2. Host Caitlin Schiller speaks with Petrow, an author and columnist for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today, about why he now calls himself "son, uncle, writer, and dog dad." 3. The episode asks what aging looks like when identity shifts away from titles and toward relationships, habits, and self-awareness. 4. Petrow says the project began as notes about his parents in their seventies while he cared for them. 5. He says those notes became a New York Times essay and then a book after about 200 readers sent similar lists and admitted feeling guilty. 6. Petrow describes the original list as a way to ask how people can live "a little more gracefully" than the generation before them. 7. He says the earliest item was "I won't double space after a period," a chapter that was really about adapting to technology and staying in communication with people. 8. Petrow calls double spacing one of the book's most controversial topics because people are attached to the habit. 9. He says the phrase "old" is slippery, because many people define it as older than they are now or four years in the future. 10. Petrow notes that old age is tied to Medicare at 65, but also to different expectations in African countries, Japan, and U.S. zip codes. 11. He says the "organ recital" is one of his favorite chapters because groups of people over 50 often spend 10 or 15 minutes listing aches, pains, and illnesses. 12. Petrow argues that defining ourselves by ailments can make us start to think of ourselves as those ailments. 13. He cites studies on "internalized ageism" and says it can foreshorten lives by as much as seven and a half years. 14. Petrow describes intergenerational friendship through Denise Kessler, a landlord who became a close friend when he was around 40 and she was 77. 15. He says Kessler was active in political protests, copied the local newspaper, and kept a younger circle of friends, which made her a role model for him. 16. Petrow uses the term "perennial" for people who are curious, engaged, open, and connected regardless of cohort labels like millennial or boomer. 17. The conversation stays intimate and reflective, with Schiller asking follow-up questions about family care, aging, and what people want their legacy to be. 18. Petrow repeatedly grounds abstract ideas in his own life, including his sister Julie's death at 61 and her insistence on being remembered for her wife, girls, brothers, and friends. 19. People interested in aging, family caregiving, and relationship-building across generations would get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting quick productivity advice without reflections on mortality and identity may skip it.

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