You’ve been warned in advance: this is a longer read than what normally gets posted here. But it’s worth it. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, ran an experiment in 1979. There is academic criticism of the experiment, because it was small, unorthodox, and perhaps lacking in rigor. Nevertheless, it feels intuitively right. And if it feels right, and the experimental data backs it up, we should probably run with it. Here’s hoping we see many more experiments just like this. And for those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, here it is in a nutshell: start living as if it were 20 years ago, and you’ll become younger in almost every way imaginable.
