How to Find Fulfilling Work

What if ageing isn’t something that happens to you at the end of your life—but something you’ve been doing all along? Anne Karpf’s How to Age invites you to radically rethink your relationship with time. Instead of seeing ageing as decline or defeat, Karpf argues that it’s a creative, enriching process that unfolds throughout your entire life. She contends that you don’t suddenly become ‘old’ at 50, 60, or 70; you’ve been ageing—and growing—all your life. The real challenge, she suggests, is not merely to resist ageing, but to resist our culture’s fear of it.

Drawing on psychology, sociology, and inspiring stories of everyday people, Karpf dismantles the myths that make us dread getting older. She shows how to embrace change, mourn necessary losses, and cultivate lifelong vitality. Above all, she wants you to see that ageing can be a profound act of living—perhaps life’s richest stage of growth.

Why We Fear Ageing

From birthday cards mocking thirty-year-olds to anti-wrinkle ads targeting teenagers, Karpf reveals a culture saturated with gerontophobia — the irrational fear and hatred of old age. The book opens with Gina, a young woman dreading the arrival of her thirtieth birthday, and her parents, laser-focused on preserving youth through fillers and fitness. Both generations, Karpf argues, are haunted by the same anxiety: that ageing signals decline. But this fear is not innate—it’s learned. Modern societies glorify youth, productivity, and independence, leaving little room for the complexity and beauty of ageing. (Sociologist Margaret Gullette aptly calls this being ‘aged by culture’.)

This obsession with youth runs deep in our collective imagination. Hollywood almost always portrays older people as frail, bitter, or irrelevant; the beauty industry sells us the message that age must be corrected. By feeding us the idea that we can ‘fight’ ageing, Karpf says, we turn a natural process into a personal failure.

The Third Way: Between Fear and Denial

Karpf presents a ‘third way’ between the two dominant approaches to age: denial (embodied by Gina’s parents, who try to think and exercise ageing away) and dread (Gina’s panic at her first grey hair). The third way is embrace: accepting ageing as an essential part of living. This means recognizing that every age has its losses and gains—an idea that threads through the book. Mourning what you lose, she suggests, is the first step to making space for new kinds of growth. She quotes psychologist Molly Andrews: “Throughout the life cycle, change and continuity weave an intricate web.” The trick is to notice both—the “still me” that persists, and the evolving self that keeps growing.

The Gains of Age

While society fixates on decline, Karpf spotlights the gains of age: deeper empathy, patience, creativity, and emotional intelligence. Neuroscience backs her up: the brain in midlife (roughly 35–65) is far more plastic and integrative than we assume. Mature adults connect ideas more holistically, and often think more clearly under pressure. Examples abound: Winston Churchill became prime minister at sixty-six; Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum at eighty. But it’s not just the famous. Ordinary individuals—retirees who learn languages or launch new careers—show that creativity and curiosity can flourish late in life.

The older we get, Karpf argues, the more different we become from one another. Far from flattening us into identical ‘old people,’ ageing intensifies our individuality. As psychologist Donald Winnicott said, creative living means “retaining something personal that is unmistakably yourself.” Ageing, at its best, lets that essence unfold.

Why This Matters

Ageing isn’t a private matter—it’s political, cultural, and spiritual. When society devalues ageing, older people are marginalized, carers are underpaid, and self-loathing seeps inward. But if we redefine ageing as living—a process of becoming more fully ourselves—we humanize everyone, young and old. Karpf challenges readers to imagine each older person as their future self. Compassion isn’t just altruism; it’s self-preservation. “If you accepted that you will one day become old,” she writes, “you’d demand better treatment for older people today.”

In the pages ahead, you’ll see how Karpf develops this argument across multiple dimensions: how fear and denial distort ageing; how men and women experience it differently; how creativity and vitality can blossom across the lifespan; and how confronting death itself might relieve our deepest anxiety. In the end, How to Age isn’t about surrendering to time—it’s about befriending it. This is less a self-help manual than a manifesto for living deeply in your own skin, at every stage of life.

We often talk as though we’re only ageing in our later years—but Anne Karpf reminds us that we start ageing the moment we are born. In her opening chapter, she asks you to consider what would change if you understood ageing not as decline but as continuous growth. Childhood, adulthood, and old age are not separate boxes; they’re threads in a single tapestry. Seeing it this way helps free you from the cultural narrative that defines life as a downhill slope after 30.

Growing Up and Growing Older

When you were little, getting older meant freedom: staying up late, earning your own money, exploring the world. But somewhere in your twenties, that excitement flips into dread. Suddenly, growing older means losing options instead of gaining them. Karpf observes that this shift happens right around the time we start to feel the constraints of adulthood—work, bills, responsibility—while society tells us we’re past our ‘prime.’ This cultural dissonance feeds the illusion that there’s a cliff edge between youth and age.

Why “Youth Culture” Changed Everything

Before the 1960s, you were either a child or an adult; there wasn’t much in between. But post-war consumerism invented teenagers as a targeted market, and youth became a permanent ideal. Advertising shifted from celebrating maturity to worshipping youthfulness. This cultural shift trapped later generations in a cycle of anti-age anxiety—ages once associated with wisdom now signify obsolescence. The irony, Karpf notes, is that people once sought to appear older and more dignified, while now adults try desperately to look like their kids. (She quotes historians noting that even wigs were once powdered white to signal respectability and seniority.)

The takeaway is clear: your fear of ageing isn’t just personal insecurity—it’s a symptom of historical change. The ‘disease of ageing’ was created when societies began to equate productivity with youth and consumer power. Once you spot this, you can step outside of it.

Aging as Temporal Identity

Karpf borrows from psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and philosopher André Gide to show that ageing doesn’t erase your earlier selves—it enfolds them. The 4-year-old who learned wonder, the 18-year-old who longed for freedom, the 35-year-old who chased ambition—all live inside you. Just as a tree grows new rings without losing the old, you carry your past ages with you. That means you never stop becoming who you are; ageing simply brings new material for the story of you.

“You are not only as old as you feel,” writes sociologist Molly Andrews. “You are also as old as you are.”

To age well, you need to defy the cultural amnesia that separates life into isolated stages. Reflection and acceptance turn ageing into a source of coherence, not fear—a way of seeing your life as a single, evolving arc rather than a ticking clock.

Few fears run as deep today as the fear of ageing. In her chapter on “The Fear of Ageing,” Karpf dissects how consumerism, media, and gender double standards combine to make us dread getting older. She contrasts two generations: Gina, fearful at thirty, and her parents, who frantically deny age through personal trainers and collagen implants. Both illustrate the same modern pathology: trying not to age.

The Billion-Dollar Fear Industry

Karpf exposes how the beauty and pharmaceutical industries profit from our terror of ageing. Anti-ageing creams, hormone therapies, and fitness regimes sell not health but the illusion of perpetual youth. Even the term ‘anti-ageing’ itself, she argues, is self-contradictory: to be ‘against’ age is to be against life. (As activist Maggie Kuhn once said, “When ‘you look your age’ becomes a compliment, we’ll know things have truly changed.”)

Movies reinforce the same myth—like Sunset Boulevard, where the ageing Norma Desmond becomes the monstrous face of decay. We internalize these images and judge ourselves against them, convinced that happiness belongs only to the young.

The “Third Age” Trap

Even attempts to celebrate later life can backfire. Sociologist Peter Laslett coined “the Third Age” to describe an era of freedom after retirement but before frailty. Yet this concept depends on a darker “Fourth Age” of decline—the sick, poor, or dependent elderly who become the scapegoats. Karpf warns that by glorifying the ‘successful agers’—fit, affluent, perennially busy—we stigmatize those who can’t or won’t meet those standards. Ageing, she insists, is not a lifestyle choice or performance; it’s a universal condition.

Gerontophobia and the Mirror

The book also explores how deeply appearance shapes age anxiety, especially for women. Surveys reveal that more than 90% of women over 50 dislike their reflection. Social media and advertising drive this early self-surveillance—there’s now anti-wrinkle cream for eight-year-olds and Botox for twenty-somethings. In this “mirror culture,” youth becomes a moral virtue; age, a personal failure. Karpf shows that this internalized body shame not only fuels anxiety but steals our ability to live comfortably in our own skin.

Her antidote isn’t denial but rebellion: defy the notion that looking younger is the only path to relevance. The goal is not to hide your age but to fit it—to “live time rather than try to stop it.”

What happens when you stop resisting time and start working with it? Karpf’s chapter on “Embracing Age” invites you to see ageing as transformation, not deterioration. Through her story of Howard and Gisele Miller—an older couple who cleverly had themselves delivered along with a pizza during a snowstorm—she illustrates creative adaptability, the agility of mind that often increases with age. It’s not that old minds calcify; they innovate differently.

Loss and Gain

Embracing age means letting go of the false dichotomy between “still young” and “already old.” Every stage brings both losses and gifts. As one woman tells Karpf, becoming “invisible” as she ages freed her from the exhausting pressure to please. Others find deeper friendships, or finally recognize the continuity between their younger and older selves. Mourning what’s gone—youth, mobility, certain dreams—is healthy because it creates space for renewal.

Karpf cites Roman philosopher Cicero, who reminded his readers that those who find life burdensome at any age are simply unprepared to live well. Vitality, he insisted, is moral, not physical: it comes from purpose and character, not muscle. The secret, then, is cultivating interests and relationships that can evolve with you.

Still Me, After All These Years

A recurring theme in Karpf’s work is identity’s continuity. Even as your life changes, the “you” at the core persists. Many of her interviewees, like Lucy and Stella, describe looking back and recognizing the same mischievous, thoughtful self beneath new circumstances. What really changes, they say, is perspective. Experience brings a mercy toward your past self—and a richer joy in your present one.

“I am far more able to love now than when I was younger,” one woman confides. “I was too self-absorbed then.”

The paradox, then, is that ageing doesn’t steal your vitality. It can reveal it. As Karpf writes, to embrace ageing fully is to keep saying an inner yes: to love, to curiosity, to life.

No discussion of ageing can ignore how gender shapes it. Karpf revisits Susan Sontag’s classic 1972 essay, “The Double Standard of Aging,” and shows how, while some progress has been made, women still face harsher scrutiny than men. For women, beauty and youth are culturally synonymous; for men, power and youth are. Both are traps.

The Female Double Bind

Older women are damned if they do (try to look young) and damned if they don’t. Media praise those who age “gracefully” but punish those who visibly show age or surgery alike. Karpf highlights celebrities like Mary Beard and Miriam O’Reilly, who challenge this bias by unapologetically showing their real selves and confronting age discrimination publicly. She also celebrates grassroots movements like the Hen Co-op and Growing Old Disgracefully network, where women reclaim the beauty and humor of older bodies. They prove that confidence, not collagen, is the true rejuvenator.

Equally striking is how young women now inherit this anxiety earlier than ever. Beauty brands urge 20-year-olds to ‘prevent wrinkles,’ creating generations who dread not just old age but adulthood itself. Karpf links this to a loss of perspective: when ageing is always “bad,” no one can ever feel comfortable in their own skin.

Men Join the Anxiety Club

Karpf notes that men are no longer immune. The rise of anti-aging products for men—and the pressure to maintain youthful vigor (see Viagra, gym culture, hair restoration)—proves that the double standard is evolving, not disappearing. Older men, too, are judged by the vitality of their younger selves and feel shame when their bodies change. Cultural scripts of “distinguished maturity” have been replaced by “midlife panic.”

Liberation Through Solidarity

Real freedom, Karpf insists, comes from naming and resisting these social scripts collectively. Each public act of age acceptance—whether an older woman refusing to dye her hair or an actor rejecting cosmetic enhancement—chips away at the shame industry. The aim is not just equality between sexes but liberation from the tyranny of youth itself.

Once you see ageing as shared experience rather than gendered failure, you recognize beauty in every stage of life—and perhaps glimpse what Sontag called “existential authenticity”: looking your age and being proud of it.

Can ageing actually enhance creativity? Karpf thinks so—and she marshals science, art, and personal testimony to prove it. Her exploration of ‘creative ageing’ flips the decline narrative on its head, revealing older adults as some of the most vital creators and innovators among us.

The Plastic Brain

Modern neuroscience shows that the brain remains plastic—capable of change and growth—well into our seventies and beyond. Midlife brains, research at UCLA found, actually integrate complex information more efficiently than younger ones. Experience gives them rich contextual intuition. Rather than losing intellect, Karpf suggests, you may simply be trading speed for depth.

Late Bloomers and Lifelong Learners

Karpf fills her narrative with examples: Goya sketching “I’m still learning” at eighty; Verdi writing Falstaff in his seventies; contemporary retirees mastering new languages or artistic media. Studies of aging artists in New York show that creative professionals remain engaged and happy precisely because they keep making things. One sculptor in his nineties walked two city blocks every day to his studio, declaring, “It’s not about youth—it’s about work.”

Karpf calls this attitude ardent old age—a concept borrowed from French therapist Marie de Hennezel to describe elders who radiate curiosity, joy, and sensuality despite physical decline. It’s passion redefined: less about excess energy, more about persistent wonder.

Less Doing, More Being

But Karpf balances her enthusiasm with nuance. Productivity shouldn’t be the only measure of a good old age. Joy, she emphasizes, can come from stillness, contemplation, or delight in small things—the warmth of sun, the taste of coffee, shared laughter. “Why,” she asks, “should the right to sit and stare be reserved for the young?”

Ultimately, creative ageing is less about producing art than about living artfully—treating each day as an opportunity to perceive freshly. The ageing mind, when free from comparison to youth, can become not smaller but truly expansive.

Karpf’s brief but striking chapter on death argues that acknowledging mortality is not grim—it’s liberating. Western cultures, she notes, have erased ‘old age’ as a cause of death, renaming it as a medical failure. Yet death, like ageing, isn’t an error to be corrected but a fact to be integrated. Denying it only deepens our fear of age.

The Temptation to Deny

We live, Karpf writes, in cultures with “thanatophobia”—a fear of death as intense as our fear of ageing. Advances in medicine have separated death from daily life and exiled it from conversation. The result: when it finally comes, it feels like punishment rather than culmination. To befriend death, she argues, is to reclaim perspective and learn to live fully.

Remember You Must Die

Karpf turns to literature and philosophy—from Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori to Zen Buddhism—to show that remembering death intensifies life. May Sarton put it simply: “One must live as though one were dying, because then the priorities become clear.” Facing mortality, paradoxically, dissolves anxiety about ageing. If death is part of living, then every day spent getting older is also a day still alive.

She shares the rise of community “Death Cafes” and the Order of the Good Death—modern movements inviting people to talk about dying over cake and conversation. These forums restore death to its rightful place in life, transforming taboo into tenderness. Accepting finitude, Karpf says, softens our hearts and connects us more deeply to other people and to time itself.

In short, thinking about death is not morbid; it’s mature. It teaches you to cherish each breath and view old age not as enemy but as evidence of having truly lived.

In her final chapters, Karpf expands the conversation beyond individuals to society itself. She argues that our deepest ageing crisis isn’t biological but relational—we’ve fragmented the human lifespan into disconnected silos. To heal our fear of age, we must “reweave the arc of life.”

Seeing Life Whole

Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that modern civilization “does not harbor a concept of the whole of life.” Karpf picks up this thread, urging us to stop viewing youth, middle age, and old age as separate species. Instead, she envisions a full-spectrum model of living, where empathy replaces competition between generations. Projects like “Magic Me” and “Generations United” bring schoolchildren and elders together for creative collaborations—proving how interdependence nourishes everyone involved.

Age segregation, she warns, feeds fear. When younger people rarely encounter elders outside their own families, stereotypes thrive. But when we mix across ages, mutual respect blossoms. Harvard studies show that older adults who engage with younger generations stay healthier and happier, while youth exposed to elders develop more positive expectations for their own futures.

Interdependence, Not Independence

Karpf also challenges the myth of independence. Our culture idolizes strength and autonomy while despising weakness and need. But as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “We cannot be human all by ourselves.” Embracing interdependence—accepting help gracefully and giving it freely—restores dignity to care itself. Every stage of life depends on others; acknowledging this truth frees us from shame and isolation.

Finding Meaning in Mortality

Ultimately, Karpf concludes that living well means integrating your entire lifespan into one coherent story. Gratitude, mourning, creativity, and love—these are the tools of what she calls ‘spirited age acceptance.’ They don’t erase decline, but prevent decline from defining you. The reward is vitality. Often, she notes, research shows that people actually become happier with age, learning to focus on relationships and meaning rather than status and striving.

Karpf ends with an image of Gina, now older and wiser, remembering her grandmother at ninety-one—radiant, curious, alive. Through her, Gina finally sees that to age is to live. The ultimate message of the book is beautifully simple: hope to age, because the alternative is never having known enough of life.