When the elders described their lives, they focused not on their declining abilities but on things that they could still do and that they found rewarding.
Gerontologists call this the paradox of old age: that as people’s minds and bodies decline, instead of feeling worse about their lives, they feel better. In memory tests, they recall positive images better than negative; under functional magnetic resonance imaging, their brains respond more mildly to stressful images than the brains of younger people (via).
Older people report higher levels of contentment or well-being than teenagers and young adults
