How to Age Up

How should we think about aging when the impacts of climate change can make the future feel so uncertain? That’s a question Sarah Ray, professor and chair of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, has been helping her students consider. Though climate anxiety can cause some to feel overwhelmed, Ray has tips for how to minimize doom loops and inaction. How to Age Up co-hosts Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan talk about how current climate concerns compare to the existential crises of previous generations, and how to practice hope during uncertain times. Here is a link to the full poem “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy. A passage is referenced in this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the next 10 years, our society will become more old than young. How do we leverage this time to build stronger intergenerational connections? Eunice Nichols, the co-CEO of CoGenerate, has spent more than two decades bringing older and younger people together to address issues that affect us cross-generationally. She explains how a history of structural policies, some of them great innovations, have contributed to this age-segregated era and about what a future could look like if people from different generations choose to partner together more often. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We don’t often talk about the benefits of aging. Dr.Karen Adams has a different perspective. From new beginnings to menopausal zest, the director of the Stanford Program in Menopause & Healthy Aging discusses what women can look forward to as they age up. How do you think about aging? Please leave us a voicemail (at 202-266-7701) with your name, your age, and your answers to the following questions: What aspects of aging are you nervous about? What are you looking forward to as you age? Who do you hope to be like when you are older? Is there someone in your life who has made you excited about getting older? Leaving a voicemail means that you are consenting to the possibility of The Atlantic using your audio in a future episode of How To. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our scientific understanding of the aging process may be expanding, but is our cultural thinking about aging keeping up? In the new season of The Atlantic’s popular How To series, co-hosts Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan explore the cultural gamification of aging, the obsession with defying this inevitable process, and how we might shift our understanding of aging to embrace the beauty of being mortal. Just as “leveling up” is a positive notion, How to Age Up challenges listeners to consider how we all, regardless of our specific age, might live better. How do you think about aging? Please send a voice memo to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com with your name, your age, and answers to the following questions: What aspects of aging are you nervous about? What are you looking forward to as you age? Who do you hope to be like when you are older? Is there someone in your life who has made you excited to get older? Sending in a voice note means that you are consenting to the possibility of The Atlantic using your audio in a future episode of How To. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. This episode, from our first season, How to Build a Happy Life features host Arthur Brooks and the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb in conversation about how the first step in making room for more joy in your life is learning how to identify it. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. This episode, from our fourth season, called How to Talk to People, features host Julie Beck in conversation with Eric Klinenberg and Kellie Carter Jackson to explore how both physical structures and cultural habits can better facilitate our connections with one another. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. This first episode, from our third season called How to Build a Happy Life, features the Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans in conversation with host Arthur Brooks. The two explore how to think differently about the time you crave and the time you actually have. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With digital spaces regularly evolving and updating, and the infinite scroll beckoning to us at all times, this episode questions if we have, as a culture, fully embraced the end of endings. Hanna Reichel, an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, helps illuminate how the emergence of godlike AI and the rise of creator culture compare with the reformations and transformations through which people lived (and died) in the past. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Music by Forever Sunset (“Spring Dance”), baegel (“Cyber Wham”), Etienne Roussel (“Twilight”), Dip Diet (“Sidelined”), Ben Elson (“Darkwave”), and Rob Smierciak (“Whistle Jazz”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With smartphones in our pockets and doorbell cameras cheaply available, our relationship with video as a form of proof is evolving. We often say “pics or it didn’t happen!”—but meanwhile, there’s been a rise in problematic imaging including deepfakes and surveillance systems, which often reinforce embedded gender and racial biases. So what is really being revealed with increased documentation of our lives? And what’s lost when privacy is diminished? In this episode of How to Know What’s Real, staff writer Megan Garber speaks with Deborah Raji, a Mozilla fellow, whose work is focused on algorithmic auditing and evaluation. In the past, Raji worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative to highlight bias in deployed AI products. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Music by Forever Sunset (“Spring Dance”), baegel (“Cyber Wham”), Etienne Roussel (“Twilight”), Dip Diet (“Sidelined”), Ben Elson (“Darkwave”), and Rob Smierciak (“Whistle Jazz”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the vibrance, innovation, and cacophony of online life can feel completely unlike anything humanity has ever created before, its newness isn’t wholly unprecedented. Humans reckoned with many similar challenges to life as they knew it while navigating a different kind of social web: the city. In this episode, Danah Boyd, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, explains how the sociological work conducted during a time of rapid urbanization in the United States reveals a lot about human behavior and what we need to feel safe, secure, and inspired. Music by Forever Sunset (“Spring Dance”), baegel (“Cyber Wham”), Etienne Roussel (“Twilight”), Dip Diet (“Sidelined”), Ben Elson (“Darkwave”), and Rob Smierciak (“Whistle Jazz”). Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is “real life,” now that the internet and AI are integrated into so much that we do? In the new season of The Atlantic’s popular How To series, co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore deepfakes, illusions, and misinformation, and how to make sense of where things are really happening. How to Know What’s Real examines how technology has altered our sense of connectedness and how to determine what is authentic and true. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Time can feel like a subjective experience—different at different points in our lives. It’s also a real, measurable thing. The universe may be too big to fully comprehend, but what we do know could help inform the ways we approach our understanding of ourselves, our purpose, and our time. Theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin explains how the science of time can inspire new thinking and fresh perspectives on a much larger scale. Music by Rob Smierciak (“Slow Money, Money Time, Guitar Time, Ambient Time”), Gavin Luke (“Time Zones”), Hanna Lindgren (“Everywhere Except Right Here”), and Dylan Sitts (“On the Fritz”). Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before laptops allowed us to take the office home and smartphones could light up with notifications at any hour, work time and “life” time had clearer boundaries. Today, work is not done exclusively in the workplace, and that makes it harder to leave work at work. Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost examine the habits that shrink our available time, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, a professor of Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, offers his reflections on American culture and shares suggestions for how to use the time we do have, for life. This episode was co-hosted by Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost. Becca Rashid also produces the show. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. The managing editor of How to Keep Time is Andrea Valdez. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Want to share unlimited access to The Atlantic with your loved ones? Give a gift today at theatlantic.com/podgift. For a limited time, select new subscriptions will come with the bold Atlantic tote bag as a free holiday bonus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices