Podcast Dept.

January 3 & 10, 2022 Issue

Does Wisdom Really Come

from Experience?
In “70 Over 70,” we learn what binds—and separates—the
old and the young.

By Rachel Syme
December 27, 2021

In “70 Over 70,” Max Linsky attempts to bridge the gap between generations. Illustration by Jo Zixuan Zhou

I
n March of 1995, Mitch Albom, a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, was up late channel surfing when he saw a familiar
face on the screen. Morris (Morrie) Schwartz, his Brandeis sociology professor, was suffering from A.L.S., and talking sagely
on “Nightline” about his impending death. Albom, who had promised Schwartz that he would keep in touch but hadn’t written to
him in sixteen years, saw this as a cosmic sign—or a journalistic opportunity—and visited Schwartz more than a dozen times in
the next few months. He recorded their conversations about life and love, hoping to sell the transcript and pay off Schwartz’s
medical bills, but he struggled to find a buyer, and Schwartz died a few weeks after Doubleday agreed to take the project. The rest
is the stuff of book-business legend: “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which came out in 1997, became one of the best-selling memoirs of
all time, moving more than fifteen million copies in more than forty-one languages.

What made the thoughts of this seventy-eight-year-old so popular? Schwartz’s axioms—such as “Love each other or perish” and
“Money is not a substitute for tenderness”—were not particularly revelatory. It was his proximity to death, and his nearly eight
decades of experience, that turned his platitudes into a pop-cultural phenomenon. Eager not to waste our lives, we tend to devour
lessons from people approaching the end of theirs. There’s something macabre about this appetite, the way it turns an aging mind
into a consumable product. It can feel especially rapacious given the otherwise blithe dismissal of the elderly in the U.S., where
millions of people are aging without savings, safety nets, or affordable care options. When it comes to senior citizens, most people
are happy to engage with a seasoned mind; it is the body, breaking down and beginning to wither, that becomes inconvenient.

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Published in the print edition of the January 3 & 10, 2022, issue, with the headline “Pearl Hunting.”

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The top twenty-five New Yorker stories of 2021.

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Rachel Syme is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered Hollywood, style, and other cultural subjects since
2012.

More: Podcasts Elderly Old Age Generations Interviews

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