Essentially, the book is saying that Terman participants who worry about death or bad events, who are also known as catastrophizers, die sooner. I thought this was pretty common knowledge, since these people would stress out more and shorten their life spans by a couple years. I also found it interesting how suicidologist Dr. Schneidman read the biographies of ten suicides and accurately identified which ones were committed suicide through his discriminant analysis. The men who shot themselves thought that something was missing in their lives and that life was not worth living. Then Dr. Scheidman focused on interview reports regarding their occupation, family, and health from ten aging lawyers and found that not a single man ever spoke the word death in reference to his own inevitable demise. I thought this was fascinating, yet I was skeptical. In my knowledge, as people get older, they think about death more often, whether it is in a positive or negative light. For these lawyers who lived longer did not reference death at all is surprising. Yes, they focused on living, but they must’ve thought about death at some point. Or do they ignore it all together and focus on the greater parts of life? Or perhaps they wholeheartedly accepted that life is meaningless in the grand scheme of the universe, and they just continue to live life to the fullest.
I like how the book ended on how catastrophizers can train themselves to rationalize their thoughts into more positive, realistic thoughts and outcomes given their situation. I personally think that I was a catastrophizer in the beginning of high school (or going through an angsty teenager phase), then I turned my thought processes around in a more positive light in senior year of high school.