Chris Crowley will be in conversation with Roxana Robinson on Tuesday, September 29 at 6:30pm at the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, Connecticut. The event is presented by Oblong Books in partnership with Scoville Memorial Library and the White Hart Inn. Tickets are $15.
Chris Crowley’s office is more than a place to work. At 92, he is quick to point out that it is also a nest, assembled from mementos and objects that carry pieces of his life. Some evoke accomplishments or adventures. Others summon people who are gone. “My nest is a time machine,” Crowley says. “They’re not dead in there. They’re still around in my life.”
The room figures in the final chapter of Crowley’s new book, Younger Forever: A SuperAger’s Guide to Life After 50 (Blackstone Publishing). The book is a dispatch from deep inside the territory Crowley began mapping more than 20 years ago with Younger Next Year, the blockbuster guide to aging he wrote with his physician, Henry S. Lodge. That book promised readers they could remain functionally 50 well into their eighties through vigorous exercise, sensible eating, strong social bonds, and purposeful living.
Younger Forever arrives with something its predecessor could not offer: the testimony of a man who has actually made the trip.
Crowley, who splits his time between Lakeville, Connecticut, and Manhattan, remains an unusually convincing advertisement for his program. He still skis black-diamond runs in Aspen, rides his bike, works several hours most days, entertains weekly, and exercises six days out of seven. He says he has none of the four major diseases—cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia—that affect many people in later life. He also says he lives without chronic pain.
Still, more than two decades of additional aging have made him willing to revise the sales pitch. “I think we overpromised a little bit,” Crowley says of the claim that readers could remain like 50 until 80. “There is a tide of aging that, no matter what you do, you’re going to feel some. There’s going to be some diminution of your physical ability.”
Chris Crowley
Exercise seriously, eat well, stay connected, and keep doing hard things. You can’t stop aging, but you can radically improve the years you have left.
He is still skiing at 90, but, he allows, he does not ski as he did at 50. These days he stays on single black diamonds. “Which is a triumph,” he says, “but it’s not the same thing exactly.”
Crowley’s candor gives Younger Forever its tension. The book retains the optimism, exhortation, and blunt humor that made the original series popular, while acknowledging indignities that no amount of kale or cardio can banish entirely: memory lapses, altered appearance, reduced sexual desire, incontinence, grief, and the accumulating evidence that the third act eventually ends. Blackstone Publishing describes the 248-page book as Crowley’s guide to “wellness, relevance, and pleasure” after 50, with exercise, optimism, and connection at its core.
Crowley came to writing after living what he calls his first life as an attorney. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and the University of Virginia School of Law, then spent 25 years at Davis Polk & Wardwell, much of that time as a litigation partner. He retired at 56, even though he describes himself as the comparatively rare happy lawyer. His reason has become a kind of personal credo: He wanted to live more than one life.
The decision was unnerving, but the next phase began promisingly. Crowley and his wife, portrait painter Hilary Cooper, moved to Aspen, where he spent half a decade as a ski bum. “My life in retirement has been major, major fun,” he says. “We lived there for five years. We had great fun—a better idea than you might think.”
Then came the books. Writing proved to be Crowley’s ideal retirement occupation: demanding enough to provide structure and purpose, flexible enough to leave room for the life he wanted. “You can do it when you do it and be gone when you want to be gone,” he says.
Younger Next Year, published in 2004, paired Lodge’s medical explanations with Crowley’s experiences as the patient trying to follow them. Lodge provided the science; Crowley supplied the cajoling, irreverence, and proof of concept. The book became a New York Times bestseller and grew into a series that includes Younger Next Year for Women, an exercise program, a journal, Thinner This Year, and The Younger Next Year Back Book. The books have sold more than two million copies worldwide.
Crowley also wrote The Practical Navigator, a legal thriller and reworking of the Minotaur myth. At an age when many people have abandoned the idea of beginning again, Crowley had launched yet another life—as a novelist.
He still writes almost every day, generally for three or four hours, though a promising idea can stretch the workday. Crowley is trying to improve his social media skills, an undertaking he describes as slow work for someone as clumsy at it as he is, and he is already proposing another book.
Having serious work matters to Crowley because the brain, like the body, needs resistance. The updated edition of Younger Next Year includes a contribution from neurosurgeon Allan Hamilton on cognitive health and aging. Crowley took its message to heart. “You have to use your brain at the high end to have it keep on,” he says. “It’s a use-it-or-lose-it device. You have to use your brain and use it doing fairly hard stuff. Don’t watch TV. Read. Write a book. Do some damn thing. Learn a language. Get involved. Care about something.”
The physical program has evolved as Crowley has aged. He formerly devoted four days a week to aerobic exercise and two to strength training. As the loss of muscle mass accelerated in his late eighties and early nineties, he shifted to three days of each. He says he can still leg-press 300 pounds. “Still, I’m weaker than I was,” he says. “But that’s fine. It’s good enough.”
Crowley continues to regard behavioral change as the foundation of healthy aging. Medicine can treat disease, he says, but prevention rests heavily on what people repeatedly do: exercise seriously, eat healthy food, remain engaged, and cultivate relationships. He is deeply skeptical of the longevity industry’s more exotic offerings—the peptides, transfusions, supplements, and experimental interventions pursued by wealthy people hoping to outmaneuver mortality. “I think basically it’s nonsense,” he says. Even Peter Attia, whose bestselling Outlive explores new approaches to extending healthspan, places exercise at the center of the project, Crowley notes. “The basics still work.”
Connection may demand as much discipline as exercise. Aging shrinks social circles through illness, death, relocation, and inertia. Crowley has responded by growing closer to nieces and nephews, spending time with his adult grandchildren, courting new friends, and entertaining at home with Cooper once a week. “You work at it, man,” he says. “You work at it.”
He considers isolation one of the curses of the third act, a threat to emotional and cognitive health that can deepen almost imperceptibly. Crowley cannot explain precisely why company feels restorative, but he sees sociability as a biological need. “We’re mammals,” he says. “We’re designed to work in herds and packs and law firms.”
The joke carries a serious warning. Without interaction, Crowley says, “we get goofy,” lonely, and sad. With it, “you feel better. It nourishes you.”
No regimen, however, can eliminate chance. Lodge died of prostate cancer in 2017 at 58. Crowley still misses his friend and collaborator, but Lodge’s death did not shake his faith in the principles they advocated. “Death is a joker,” he says. “There are snipers in the hills. Somebody can get picked off irrationally. What the stuff that we wrote about does is change your odds radically.”
Crowley has lived long enough to lose more than half his friends. He rides past a cemetery near Salisbury several times a week, where one of them is buried. Each time, he blows his friend a kiss. He thinks often of Lodge and many others whose absences cannot be repaired. Yet he refuses to turn longevity into a fantasy of immortality. Asked about the coming decade, Crowley laughs at the premise. If he lives another three years, he says, he will be “doing a hell of a job.” Death is somewhere around the corner. He knows that. He simply sees no advantage in staring down the block waiting for it to arrive. “The great trick,” Crowley says, “is to live until you die.”
