The Snowball Effect

What Thriving 89-Year-Olds Have in Common

A geriatrician named Mark Lachs has spent his career studying people who are thriving in their late eighties. When asked what they share, he doesn’t mention diet, genetics, or the right supplements. He says they have something that gives them meaning and purpose. Could be a grandchild, he says. Could be politics, animals, traveling, or volunteering at the art museum.

Could be, though he doesn’t mention it, a novel no one asked for.

I read this and felt the particular satisfaction of science confirming what I’d already decided. I write fiction—five novels, a sixth in progress, a Substack that reaches slightly more people than my immediate family. The Amazon rankings are what they are. But most mornings I wake up with a problem worth solving, and according to Dr. Lachs, that’s the whole game.

The mechanism, apparently, is a snowball. If you feel good about yourself as you age and believe you can still be useful to the world, you’re more likely to invest in yourself: working out, socializing, and showing up. Which gives you confidence. Which makes you more likely to do more of the same. The opposite cycle is equally available: convince yourself that improvement isn’t possible, and you probably won’t bother trying.

This is either deeply obvious or genuinely revelatory, depending on the day.

What I find useful is the specificity of it. Lachs isn’t talking about happiness in the abstract. He’s talking about the particular traction that comes from caring about something outside yourself. The grandchild. The art museum. The chapter that won’t cooperate.

My current novel has a 73-year-old protagonist, and some mornings I spend two hours trying to fix a single scene. Last week, my character refused to do what I needed him to do, and I wrote myself into a corner I couldn’t see my way out of. I was annoyed in the specific, energizing way you can only be annoyed by a problem that actually matters to you.

That annoyance, it turns out, may be load-bearing.

Lachs has a line I keep returning to: positive attitudes about aging aren’t a drug, aren’t a surgery. No toxic treatments required. Just an attitudinal adjustment, and apparently, the mind-body connection is “as powerful as many drugs we give and without any of the side effects.”

When I was younger, I thought purpose was something you either had or were still searching for. A destination. What I’ve learned, later than I’d like to admit, is that it’s more like maintenance. You have to keep feeding it. A novel helps. So does a Thursday writing group that will tell you honestly when something isn’t working. So does a Substack that forces you to put something in writing every week, even when you’re not sure what you think yet.

The researchers call it a snowball. I’d call it simpler than that.

You just need something that makes the morning worth starting.