A 73-year-old woman covered Vogue. Céline Dion is having a style renaissance. Big Little Lies is the new Pretty Little Liars. But are we really living in a post-ageist society?

Heidi Klum

FLARE

Celebrity

One of the benefits women of my generation enjoy is, unlike fish or birds, we aren’t limited to one element. Life always seems to present us with a series of environments in which we can flourish—if we’re lucky. Right now, I’m enjoying a personal, elemental sweet spot as a happily single woman with six treasured grandchildren. It’s the perfect time to publish my first novel.

author

When I look around at friends my age, I see more varieties of experience than perhaps any other generation before us. Some are happily single, some have children, some are as angsty as ever, some are starting over. What’s more, I’ve watched friends in their 20s agonize as they establish careers, and I’ve seen a couple in their 30s lose a child.

aging

Earnest goals seem like a hard thing to come by these days. Columnists and cultural commentators used to blame this on some perceived millennial penchant for irony or an inability to take things seriously. In one particularly memorable New York Times column a few years back, a Princeton professor argued that irony was not only the “ethos of our age” but also preventing us avocado-toast-hoovering navel-gazers from living our best, most productive lives.

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