They don’t tell you, when you’re young, that choosing is a subtractive art. It’s presented instead as progress. As expansion — doors opening, paths multiplying, a horizon that keeps obligingly retreating the closer you get to it. There is talk of freedom, of possibility, of becoming. The implicit promise is that more options will yield a better life, in the same way that more toppings, up to a point, seem like they should improve a pizza, right up until the slice collapses un

Glory days, well they’ll pass you by … There is, embedded within this über-Springsteenian lyric (that you have heard a million times either voluntarily or while trapped in a retail environment that believes in emotional coercion through classic rock), a kind of gentle threat disguised as nostalgia’s theme music: namely, that your best moments are already behind you, and worse, that you will someday speak about them in a tone that suggests both pride and a mild but irreversibl

If you hang around long enough in the anterooms of late marriage — dentists’ offices with ceiling-mounted televisions tuned to muted home improvement shows, the Chinese buffet where you just spotted a couple of feisty old gals with verboten Tupperware lids protruding from their purses, the slow checkout lines of grocery stores — you will have observed two distinct species of elderly couples who superficially appear, at first glance, to be engaged in the same long project (i.e