Growing Older: Physical Decline or a Shift in Self-Belief? A Conversation I Never Forgot I remember when a colleague celebrated his fiftieth birthday. I asked him, “How do you feel? Is anything different now?” He smiled slightly and said, “I don’t actually feel any different. But I do feel that I’m slowly losing strength.” At the time, I took his answer as a joke, or as that familiar kind of male self-irony. It seemed to me that he was exaggerating. He was active, reasonable, physically fit. He did not look like someone who was declining. And yet, his sentence stayed with me. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps because he was not speaking about pain or illness, but about a sensation. When It Was My Turn When I turned fifty myself, nothing dramatic happened. The day felt like any other. My body did not change overnight. My thinking did not shift either. But after a few years, I began to notice something more difficult to define. It was not a clear physical decline. I...