He Asked 1500+ Elders For Advice On Living And Loving. Here’s What They Told Him.

Karl Pillemer has spent the last several years systematically interviewing hundreds of older Americans to collect their lessons for living.

Pillemer admits he’s an advice junkie. He’s also a Ph.D. gerontologist at Cornell University.

Some years ago, after turning 50, he wondered whether there is something about getting older that teaches you how to live better. “Could we look at the oldest Americans as experts on how to live our lives?” he asked. “And could we tap that wisdom to help us make the most of our lifetimes?”

His first book, “30 Lessons for Living,” synthesized advice from over 1,000 elders on topics like happiness, work, and health.

Now Pillemer has followed up with “30 Lessons for Loving,” which features practical wisdom from over 700 older Americans with 25,000 collective years of marriage experience. One couple he profiles was married for 76 years. Another interviewee describes divorcing her husband, then remarrying him 64 years later.

I spoke with Pillemer for Sophia, a HuffPost project to collect life lessons from accomplished people that was partly inspired by his work.

Pillemer shared seven key pieces of advice he’s heard repeatedly from older Americans — about their greatest regrets, finding fulfillment, and keeping relationships healthy through life’s ups-and-downs.

1. Stop worrying so much.

I asked these oldest Americans what they think people tend to regret at their age, and what they would advise younger people to do to avoid regrets.

I expected big-ticket items — an affair or a shady business deal, something along those lines. I really didn’t expect to hear the one answer that was among the most frequent and certainly among the most passionate and vehement: stop worrying so much.

Towards the end of life, what’s really important to people is to be able to see how their life mattered, how it was meaningful, how there was a story to it that wraps up in a good way.

People who are able to create that kind of narrative, and think of their life in that way, are typically happier. They’re more generative. They’re much more serene and open to the end of life. So that is really good work for people to do. Writing about it is something that a number of my interviewees did. Often my best interviewees were people who had done some writing of memoirs.

There is a concept which some of them also did, it’s called the “ethical will,” where people will write down what they would like to leave to younger generations about their values and principles and morality, how someone should live a life.

It’s so critical for older people to record their memories. I would go one step further. Stop me if — actually, I’m going to go ahead and say it. We’re in the midst right now in our society of a very dangerous experiment. That’s one where young people, outside of intermittent contacts in their own family, have no meaningful contact with older people in any other dimension of their lives.

Whereas old people were often much more integrated and were sought out as sources of wisdom and advice and life experience, now they really aren’t, because our society is so age-segregated.

I think that we place young people in peril without these kind of intergenerational contacts. This is something that’s so natural for the human race. It’s really only been about the last hundred years that people have gone to anyone other than the oldest person they knew for advice about something, say like marriage or child-rearing.

Even though it sounds artificial, it’s important for older people to record their own thoughts and memories, but it’s really critical for younger people to ask them for them, and not just for stories, but for guidance and practical advice for living. I’m not against professional help. I think it’s great. But sometimes people might go and ask the elders in their lives for advice on finding a meaningful career or improving a relationship first.

So I think that it’s both older people doing it themselves, nurturing these memories and reflecting on their lives, but it’s also our role as younger people to help them to do it, to express interest in it and be a part of their reminiscing and summing up their life into a meaningful story. That’s what we really risk losing now. It’s a large reason for these projects, I have to say, and why I’m writing these books.

Transcription services by Tigerfish; now offering transcripts in two-hours guaranteed. Interview has been edited and condensed.

Sophia is a project to collect life lessons from fascinating people. Learn more or sign up to receive lessons for living directly via Facebook or our email newsletter.

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