Roger Rosenblatt, author of More Rules for Aging, lays out ten directives for navigating old age without hastening its end. His core thesis: most survival in later years depends on restraint. If elderly people simply refused certain impulses, he argues, the world would be duller but safer. The essay blends humor with hard-won observation, adapted from his book published this month.

Among the rules, Rosenblatt urges readers to not share despair with friends, avoid small compromises that snowball into ruin, and embrace creative mistakes as truer to life than caution. He invokes Virginia Woolf's essay on a dying moth as metaphor for the beauty of struggle, and quotes Philip Larkin's line that what will survive of us is love.

The piece reads as a memoir wrapped in advice, drawing on Rosenblatt's decades of writing about family, loss, and human connection. His final rule against seeking immortality lands as a quiet thesis: legacy belongs to how we made others feel, not what we built.