Social Science   

Researchers report psychedelics show great promise to support healthy aging. We'll survey relevant geriatric research and legal issues and discuss these stories of older adults using psychedelics “to reconnect with purpose, heal old wounds, deepen relationships, and make peace with mortality." For Abbie Rosner's informants, aging becomes a time of insight, connection, and renewed aliveness. Why is this happening? This group is for anyone curious about psychedelics to support healthy aging.

Kate LaBore is a cultural anthropologist, former educator, health consultant and independent researcher. She’s interested in countercultural practices, personal narratives and intentional communities. Abbie Rosner is a writer and baby boomer fascinated by her cohort’s explorations of the drugs of their youth. Her book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, examines the growing trend of older adults using psychedelics to radically reimagine what it is to be an elder.

Retirement opens a remarkable chapter — one ripe for meaningful contribution. Seniors bring decades of professional expertise, life wisdom, and patience that communities around the world desperately need. The Peace Corps welcomes volunteers of all ages, offering older adults a chance to share their skills, experience personal growth, and forge deep cross-cultural connections. Far from slowing down, joining the Peace Corps lets seniors prove that purpose knows no age limit.

Wendy Scott Keeney is an archeologist/anthropologist by training, a businesswoman in philanthropy and business development by profession for 40+ years. Wendy has lived and worked both internationally and across the US. She returned from 2.5 years of Peace Corps service in November 2025. While there, she taught HIV-AIDS education to high school students.

Drawing on behavioral science research, we explore meaning, purpose, resilience, mindset, and habits, and apply these ideas to your life. Through guided reflection, creative exercises, peer collaboration, and a simple online interactive workbook that supports iterative reflection, you will gain new perspectives, clarify what gives your life meaning in retirement, and define achievable goals.

Raj Bhargava teaches design Your Next Life Chapter at Stanford Continuing Studies and has taught behavioral science at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. A Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow, he has been founder of Jaspersoft, CEO at Trade Inc, and executive at Oracle and Hewlett Packard. He holds an MBA from University of Michigan and an MS from Penn State.

We will read and discuss the title book by Daniel Kahneman, which describes our two types of thought processes. Thinking fast is automatic and unconscious: it recognizes faces, reacts to danger and makes most of our daily decisions without us noticing. Thinking slow is deliberate and analytical: it calculates, considers and checks. The problem is that thinking fast is lazy and does the work only when it genuinely must. Almost all our decisions are made by thinking fast, even when we believe we are thinking carefully.

Gerry Lapidus has led more than 70 book discussions at OLLI. The classes are informal conversations based on passages in the book. He retired as a Product Manager at AT&T and Lucent Technologies.