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The Longevity Revolution
12 May 2015
Allison watched Jane Fonda’s TEDxWomen 2011 Talk and celebrated the idea that we all have something to look forward to in our third act.
Tags: allison read, allison watched, balance, ted, women and leadership
If you’re not a woman, you may be thinking, “Is this post for me?” I’d like to suggest that while Jane Fonda was speaking at TEDxWomen 2011, her message about the longevity revolution is for all of us. It won’t surprise you to learn that we’re living longer, but you might not know it's 34 years longer than our great grandparents lived. Fonda provides a new perspective supported by research that perhaps we don’t need to be so sad and fearful about aging.
In just 11 minutes, Fonda made me feel pretty optimistic about my third act (age 65 to 102). She appropriately acknowledges that there are real challenges about aging, that some of us are dealt a bad hand genetically, and that not all of us will be able to enjoy a third act. However, the good news is that while one-third of how we age is related to genetics, the other two-thirds is entirely up to us.
Fonda then quotes psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Emil Frankl, M.D., Ph.D., who said in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, “Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing—your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation." She makes a compelling argument grounded in neuroscience for how we can change our present by rethinking the choices we regret and by changing our attitude about those who have hurt us so that we can begin to actually feel differently about what has happened. We can also choose how to respond to our current reality and make better choices going forward. That’s a lot to look forward to and I’m going to try to do some of it now in my second act rather than waiting until I’m 65.
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