I’ve never been terribly keen to share my age, but if you must know the general range, suffice to say I was born during the administration of President Eisenhower—his first term. That puts me squarely in the heart of the Baby Boomer cohort and—not to put too fine a point on things—it also puts me closer to, well, the end of the line than one might prefer. Like a lot of Boomers, I resist aging and the mortal end that it implies with a host of strategies: vigorous workouts, periodic hair colorings, and a healthy dose of simple denial.

All of that led me to write today’s story on why Americans as a whole and Boomers in particular are so resistant to aging—especially when we live in a world filled with other cultures that not only don’t denigrate, but venerate the aged. As Thomas Pyszczynski, a 68-year-old psychology professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, told me, “We have this evolved imperative to stay alive. So the awareness of death creates this potential for terror. As a result, we use the same intellectual abilities that make us aware of death to manage our fear of it.”

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