We are living longer and our lifespan after the middle years continues to extend due to medical advances. But how do you age wisely? How do you remain psychologically healthy and fully engaged given the immense and daunting challenges of later life - accumulated regrets, loss, disappointments, physical deterioration, and mortality?
From ancient Greece to the 21st century, the greatest philosophers and psychologists have considered these questions, and remarkably, their opinions converge. There is a single essential task - integration - that once accomplished, equips us to cope with the many problems we are likely to encounter as we get older. What's more, their insights are supported by cutting-edge neuroscience. Exploring the common ground shared by the Stoics and the Existentialists, William James and CG Jung, Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Siegel, clinical psychologist Frank Tallis has written his own essential alternative to the standard self-help prescriptions.
Frank Tallis takes on such questions as how we can embrace and accept our mortality when our brains are hard-wired to resist it, how we can achieve meaning in our lives, and how we can understand the passage of time and make the most of it. It's immensely readable whilst also intelligent and thought-provoking.
