This piece is an interesting reflection by Arthur Brooks on aging and what it means to think deliberately about the shape of your own life and how to make the final decades of your life mean something good and valuable for you, and for those around you. I say "final decades" to be as direct as possible; by the time you're about the age Brooks is, in his 50s, you are on the downslope of life, and things will only accelerate, so to speak, from there, until one day you are incapacitated, and then, no more. That is not cause to despair or be resigned, not at all (and that's his point); but it is most certainly time to be in earnest.
Brooks is especially alert to the dangers of professional success, the way that such success can become our main aim. He names "the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation: the idea that the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige." Now, in some sense, aiming at such success is natural and inevitable and even good. Aristotle wasn't wrong: when it comes to what counts as flourishing in life, normally the community's standards, if you can rightly identify them, are a good approximation of what flourishing can be. Wisdom is sought by finding the "wise man" (phronimos) and imitating him (and now we would also say "or her." But Aristotle also knew that flourshing could be different things at different moments in life.
Most people have known this, at least tacitly. And Brooks goes on to show this, as he discusses several traditions of religious and philosophical reflection on the process of aging and how life across the lifespan can be good and meaningful. He comes down to a set of simple principles: Jump-serve-worship-connect. These all seem potentially wise to me. They map on to the story that George Vaillant tells in his really provocative Triumphs of Experience, a book about a study of men from their late teens into their 80s and beyond.
If I had any distinct body of thinking to add to this, I might put in a shout-out for David Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses, which reflects on the possibility of different kinds of artistic creativity. I actually think the implications go far beyond artists. They seem pertinent to life in the academy, and to intellectual work more generally. It's an economist's book, and has all the vices of an economist's book (as all my books have the vices of a theologian's books--everyone has distinctive vices, don't worry economist buddies I'm not picking on you alone!), but I have found that book enormously illuminating and instructive and even deeply inspiring. I recommend it as well.
Every day is a good day to think about how you will make the most of your life, a diminished thing or not. Spend five minutes today thinking about it. Eventually, you'll be glad that you did.