many elderly have decided to make the most of their remaining days by concentrating on the positive over the negative.

Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, told me, “Once you abandon the idea of the personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual’s way of being in the world.”

‘Age doesn’t obliterate our individual traits and identities,’ Karpf writes, ‘on the contrary, it heightens them.’1 And research suggests we are likely to become happier as we grow older, contrary to our usual expectations. Why is that? We have already discovered what we might broadly take to be the reason. As our horizons change, priorities shift