Around the world, happiness follows a U-shape. It dips in mid-life and peaks in old age, despite functional decline, despite losses, despite the things we'd expect to bring it down. A piece in Psyche this week walks through why. Read it here.

The authors put it down to goal systems reorganising as the perceived time horizon shortens. In younger life, happiness competes with other things — career, accumulation, status, future security. The day you spend doing something restorative carries an opportunity cost, a quiet hum of "I should be working." In older life that competition fades. Happiness sits at the centre of the goal system, and the reorganisation makes it attainable in a way it hadn't been earlier.

The authors draw on Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory. The lever is time horizon; age is the proxy. Younger people facing shortened horizons reorganise the same way. Older people imagining decades more reorganise back.

Much of the sector's wellbeing thinking, mine included, has treated happiness as something to supply — through programs, activities, engagement initiatives. But, if the Psyche piece is right, a lot of that happiness is already there.

Moreover, a program designed by someone whose goal system hasn't yet reorganised tends to reflect what they find energising: variety, novelty, achievement, throughput. Imported into a setting where residents have moved past that, the same activity can read as obligation rather than offer. Low uptake then gets coded as a problem to fix, and the sector tends to import more of the same.

The activities themselves are usually fine. Lifestyle coordinators are typically reading their residents well, often with more skill than the system gives them credit for. The implicit theory under the activities might still be inverted. What we may actually be doing is taking care not to disrupt something that's already arrived.

Which makes "doing less, well" the right calibration for a stage of life the rest of the system is still catching up to.

Tuesday 28 July | 2–4.30pm AEST | Online | Ticketed

I'm running this workshop with Ageing Australia, building on the June webinar on AI in aged care. The session covers Tier 2 and Tier 3 of AI adoption — the structured phase that comes after Tier 1, where generic tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot are already in everyday use across the sector.

Hands-on walkthroughs of five practical tools — AI Use Case Discovery, Value Assessment, Ethics Assessment, Risk Assessment, and a Prioritisation Roadmap. Governance and oversight considerations through the back half. For executives, operational managers and anyone moving their organisation past individual experimentation.

Wednesday 5 August | 9am–5pm AEST | Establishment Ballroom, Sydney | Ticketed

A one-day forum for NDIS and aged care providers on where AI and automation are landing in day-to-day operations — rostering, compliance, intake, payroll — and where they're still rough. Hosted by Tania Gomez Consulting, the program runs across VR for dementia, AI governance, short tech showcases from a range of vendors, and a CEO roundtable to close. I'm speaking on the future of care.

You can read more here. Registering through the link below takes 20% off. 👇

The new Glean Work AI Institute report surveying 6,000 knowledge workers across the US, UK and Australia puts numbers on something we've been suspecting. AI saves workers around 11 hours a week. 6.4 of those go back to "botsitting", which is giving AI context, checking outputs, fixing mistakes. 69% admit to "botshitting," that is publishing AI work they haven't verified. And while 87% of staff use AI regularly, only 13% of organisations report real business gains. Read the report.

Despite the reported friction, the average worker still gets close to half a day back every week, which is a real and substantial number. The gap between 87% using and 13% gaining is the more useful figure. It's mostly about how well the AI use is scaffolded. The 13% have done the work, but most organisations are still figuring it out, so it’s normal to be where you are.

A short film about Gert, a 70-year-old Danish mariner and yogi, on dying well. He'd like to die consciously, at home, and "full of days" — the phrase he gets from his grandmother, who used it for her own sense of fulfilment near the end. Until then, yoga, simple routines, and a long-running interest in Native American teaching. Watch it here.

A new book argues that extended longevity is straining democracy and intergenerational equity in Australia, and that older Australians won't relinquish the power their numbers and longer lives now confer. A reviewer pushes back: the line is held by whoever owns the assets, the rules and the institutions. That happens to be largely older people, but the lever is wealth and power, with age mostly downstream. Read the review.

The longevity itself is increasingly being sold as a luxury product — Axios this month catalogued longevity cafés in apartment buildings, $2,000-a-night sleep-optimised hotel rooms, executive function coaches at $300 a session. More years go to whoever can already afford them.

Fathom is an AI notetaker that joins your Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls, transcribes them, and writes a summary with action items.

The free plan does unlimited recordings, unlimited transcripts in 38 languages, no time limit per meeting. After your first five meetings of the month you drop from the advanced summary template to a basic one, but recording and transcripts keep running. The default mode joins your call as a visible bot named "Fathom Notetaker." On Mac, there's a bot-free desktop mode in beta that captures audio locally.

The usual cautions. Keep anything client-identifying or clinical out of a public tool unless your organisation has cleared it.

Try Fathom.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis