“The higher wisdom of the moment routinely makes a distinction between chronological age and ‘real’ age. Real age is now what you and your lifestyle will it to be. Real age sends those fond-hope and fat-chance birthday assurances that 70 is the new 50. Yet for every paragliding 80-year-old there are legions of immobile others, pressed to submission by disease or the stony weight of madness.”

James Morris, from a review of Never Say Die: the Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age by Susan Jacoby, in the Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2011.