The fears of aging have been one long cascading domino effect through the years: 20-year-olds dread 30; 40-year-olds fear 50; 60 fears 70, and so it goes. And there is something to worry about, though it isn't what you'd expect: research shows that having a bad attitude toward aging when we're young is associated with poorer health when we're older.

These worries tend to peak in midlife; but in LIGHTER AS WE GO, Mindy Greenstein and Jimmie Holland show us that, contrary to common wisdom, our sense of well-being actually increases with our age --- often even in the presence of illness or disability. For the first time, Greenstein and Holland --- on a joint venture between an 85-year-old and a 50-year-old --- explore positive psychology concepts of character strengths and virtues to unveil how and why, through the course of a lifetime, we learn who we are as we go. Drawing from the authors' own personal, intergenerational friendship, as well as a broad array of research from many different areas --- including social psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, humanities, psychiatry and gerontology --- LIGHTER AS WE GO introduces compassion, justice, community and culture to help calm our cascading fears of aging.