Quote of the Day: Betty Friedan on Aging & Wisdom

It’s early evening in December, and you’re scrolling past a photo from ten years ago, your face slimmer, your calendar emptier, your confidence somehow both louder and more fragile. Your knee aches when you stand, your inbox is full, and a small, uninvited thought arrives: Is the best part already behind me? In that private flicker of doubt, this line lands like a hand on the shoulder: “Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

We’ve been trained to read time as subtraction. The culture sells youth as the only season worth admiring, smooth skin, quick bodies, limitless options, and treats later decades as a long epilogue. That story doesn’t just insult older people; it narrows everyone’s imagination. It makes us fear the future instead of preparing for it.

Friedan’s reframing is blunt and liberating: aging isn’t a broken version of youth; it’s a different job altogether. Opportunity shifts shape. You may lose certain advantages, speed, novelty, social permission to be “figuring it out”, but you gain others: pattern recognition, boundaries, an ability to walk away from performative living. Strength becomes less about force and more about steadiness, earned resilience, practiced honesty, the courage to say what you actually want and do it without apology.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and a cofounder of NOW, spent her life challenging the scripts that confine human potential. She knew that liberation is often a matter of refusing the story you’re handed.

As the year tilts toward its shortest days, the temptation is to measure life by what’s dimming. Try a different metric: what’s opening. Choose one concrete act of freedom today, call the friend, start the class, volunteer, set the boundary, that treats your next stage not as aftermath, but as arrival.