Barbara Waxman MS, MPA, PCC

10/09/2026

We plan for longevity as though it's a project we'll do on our own. Here's a story that shows how wrong that is.

In Sausalito, CA, two neighbors traded pleasantries for years. Then one of them fell at 93 and broke her neck. What redefined that relationship wasn't family or an agency. It was her neighbor showing up weekly with lattes; it was her husband installing a grab bar in the bathroom and changing the smoke detector batteries. "I never thought I'd have a new best friend at this time of my life."

According to a recent study led by researchers at the University of Michigan, about 14% of older adults with health limitations named a friend or neighbor as one of the people helping them; nationally, that's an estimated 2.4 million caregiving friends. We keep reading about the downfall of neighborhood support, and I want to point out that it’s not only happening; stories like this remind us that we each have an opportunity to find those people ourselves.

I've been making the case for building your own Wellbeing Team©. Neighbors, friends, and pets are sometimes the most overlooked members of that increasingly important support system.

This kind of support is powerful and fragile at once. It carries no contract and no legal protection; the Family and Medical Leave Act barely recognizes it. Neighbors move. Friends often age at the same rate you do. The smallest connection can become a lifeline, but only if we consciously curate those connections over time.

Who is on your Wellbeing Team, including the people with the smallest footprint who matter more than they know? And where could you be a small but vital lifeline in someone else's life?

The full piece:

https://www.marinij.com/2026/08/30/when-a-friend-becomes-a-caregiver/

For several years, Nicole Straight and Patricia Wood, who lived across the street in Sausalito, were neighbors more than friends, exchanging sociable greetings and occasionally having coffee. Then, last October, when Wood took a fall, broke…

10/01/2026

Survive, treat, prevent. These are not phases we’ve grown out of; each evolved from the one before it. Together they’ve added more than thirty years to life expectancy in little more than a century, making longevity the most salient achievement to date. It’s also our greatest challenge.

For all they gave us, the first three evolutions of medicine are organized around that single old question: how do I not die?

Read my latest on Substack: The Longevity Conundrum: We Want to Live Longer, But We Don't Want to Age.

🔗

Survive, treat, prevent: how medicine gave us thirty extra years, and why that contradiction is costing us a decade of them.

09/25/2026

Many of you have reached out to ask me about David Rehkopf, the new director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. This profile by Karen Breslau in Stanford Longevity Magazine is the best answer I've seen.

Congratulations, David!

David brings a rare combination to SCL: the molecular biology of aging, large-scale data science, and sociology. As the piece puts it, his focus as a social epidemiologist isn't only on how individuals can stay healthy; it's on identifying interventions that work at a population level so that policymakers have the evidence to act.

I would add companies and communities to that list. So would David; he wants SCL to build evidence that employers and governments can use to support longer, healthier lives across every income level.

Laura Carstensen describes his research on longevity disparities as "elegant and beautiful and sobering." Sobering is the right word. A longer life is not yet an equally shared one, and that's the work ahead.

SCL’s incoming director has developed a powerful combination of biology, data science and sociology to improve population health.

09/22/2026

We plan for longevity as though it's a project we'll do on our own. Here's a story that shows how wrong that is.

In Sausalito, CA, two neighbors traded pleasantries for years. Then one of them fell at 93 and broke her neck. What redefined that relationship wasn't family or an agency. It was her neighbor showing up weekly with lattes; it was her husband installing a grab bar in the bathroom and changing the smoke detector batteries. "I never thought I'd have a new best friend at this time of my life."

According to a recent study led by researchers at the University of Michigan, about 14% of older adults with health limitations named a friend or neighbor as one of the people helping them; nationally, that's an estimated 2.4 million caregiving friends. We keep reading about the decline of neighborhood support, and I want to point out that it's still happening, and stories like this remind us that we each have an opportunity to seek those connections out ourselves.

I've been making the case for building your own Wellbeing Team©. Neighbors, friends, and pets are sometimes the most overlooked members of that increasingly important support system.

This kind of support is powerful and fragile at once. It carries no contract and no legal protection; the Family and Medical Leave Act barely recognizes it. Neighbors move. Friends often age at the same rate you do. The smallest connection can become a lifeline, but only if we consciously curate those connections over time.

Who is on your Wellbeing Team, including the people with the smallest footprint who matter more than they know? And where could you be a small but vital lifeline in someone else's life?
Writing this made me miss my neighbor, Nancy Danielson. Salty; always straight to the point. Once she knew me, she smiled more, told me the history of my property (it used to be a dairy barn), and softened. I started making extra at dinner and bringing it over for a short visit. It oxygenated both our lives.

The full piece, by Paula Span for The New York Times: https://www.marinij.com/2026/08/30/when-a-friend-becomes-a-caregiver/

For several years, Nicole Straight and Patricia Wood, who lived across the street in Sausalito, were neighbors more than friends, exchanging sociable greetings and occasionally having coffee. Then, last October, when Wood took a fall, broke…

09/18/2026

What do I want to do with my one wild and precious life? (Thanks for the inspiration Mary Oliver!) I hear a version of that question from adults in their 50s, 60s, and 70s all the time.

We front-load almost all of our formal learning into the first decades of life. Longer lives are asking us to rethink that.

It was such a joy to open the fall semester for the CU Denver Change Makers program, in conversation with a new cohort of 28 fellows just beginning their four months together.

Here is what strikes me about a program like Change Makers. We have a well-worn track for the first third of life: primary school, secondary school, then college or training, all of it front-loaded into our first two decades, often with expectations of continuing education hours or a certificate to be added out of necessity somewhere along the way. Longer lives have opened a gap that track was never built to fill.

The Stanford Center on Longevity addresses this gap in its New Map of Life: rather than cramming formal education into the beginning, we need learning available at every stage, in ways that fit the life we're actually living. Learning throughout life, not just at the start.

That is exactly what these Change Makers are doing. Auditing courses, sitting in discussion with peers navigating the same terrain, treating this stage not as an ending to be managed but as a chapter to be designed.

Because that's the real shift. So much of the longevity conversation is organized around not dying: avoid the disease, delay the decline, defend the years ahead. Necessary, but incomplete. The more interesting question is what makes those added years worth living. More meaning. More purpose. More growth. A long life well-designed, not merely a long life survived.

My thanks to Anne Button, Diane Amdur, Janice Branam, and Karen LeFever, and to every fellow in the room for the depth of your questions. You are already doing the work.



Learn more about the CU Denver Change Makers program:

The CU Denver Change Makers program is designed for experienced professionals who are nearing or at the end of their primary careers and are navigating transitions in work and life.

09/17/2026

After more than twenty years working with adults midlife and better, I've noticed the questions people ask about a longer life are rarely the ones the longevity field answers.
Many of the questions about how to add years have been addressed. The more germane question is: how can I flourish in those years? What do I want to build in the decades I've been given, not just defend against? And what does this all mean when work is no longer the anchor? How do we think of that stage in the age of longer lives?

That last one is what I call preferment: choosing what comes next from a position of experience and agency, rather than retreating from something. It reframes longevity planning as something to design for.

Tomorrow, I'm joining a "Designing Your 100-Year Life" panel moderated by Kathleen Potempa (HealthyLifetime), alongside Brianna Stubbs (Buck Institute), Chris Orestis (Retirement Genius), and Victor Wang (friend.fi). I’m looking forward to hearing their perspectives and sharing some of my own.

https://www.agetechconnect.com/agetech-connect-summit-2026

AGETECH CONNECT SUMMIT 2026September 18, 2026 | The Buck Institute for Research on Aging The 2nd Annual AgeTech Summit will be held at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging on September 18, 2026. After a momentous sold-out event last year at the Atlanta Tech Village, we're bringing the Summit to...

09/16/2026

Thursday night, we celebrated Carstensen's nearly twenty years of founding and leading the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL).

Person after person shared the same message: she put longevity on the international agenda. Before Laura, longevity was treated as a niche academic concern about old people.

Laura and the SCL team changed that with the New Map of Life, a framework for century-long lives that treats the whole arc as designable, not just the end.

And she's not resting on her laurels. Laura Carstensen is close to launching a course on longevity that I know will matter.

Congratulations, Laura!

09/04/2026

I hope it's not too much to ask for your insights again--the response in chat and DM's have been tremendous and tremendously helpful. I should have asked this question at the same time: What is the difference between wellbeing and wellness? Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.

09/02/2026

I have a question I'd love your help with: in a few words, what does 'wellbeing' mean to you? Don't overthink, just share a sentence or words. DM or email me at [email protected] if you prefer. And thank you!!

06/26/2026

We've all met them. The 80, 90 year-olds rolling their own suitcases through the airport, traveling solo, living fully on their own terms. We tend to call them rare birds.
They don't have to be rare.
In my conversation with Neil Rerup on The Transitions Network, I talked about something the research makes clear: the wear and tear theory of aging is real. Time on this planet takes its toll on our bodies. But here's what often gets missed. When we use lifestyle as medicine, preemptively, we change what those later years look like. We can stay undiminished.
The shift starts in midlife, and it is never too late to begin. Put the right lifestyle in place now, and the years ahead become the ones where you collect your trophy. Not diminished. Not declining by default. Living.
It is possible. And it is within reach for far more of us than we've been led to believe.
🎧 The full conversation is live on The Transitions Network with Neil Rerup.