How do aging bodies, moral attention, and sensory memory reshape what matters as we grow older?

In this wide-ranging exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen invites Rick Rosner to reflect on aging, attention, and meaning. Rosner moves fluidly from bodily changes—napping, gray hair, and the “frowny belly button”—to grief, diminished sexual expectation, and the unsettling realization of becoming the “outer layer” of surviving relatives. The conversation expands outward to moral scale, questioning how individual injustice fits alongside mass suffering in Ukraine and global politics. Rosner then pivots to culture and cognition, discussing film, Los Angeles life, and why smell remains uniquely powerful in memory. The result is a candid meditation on aging, biology, ethics, and human awareness.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When did you first start noticing yourself getting old—napping more, feeling sore, lying down and dozing off?

Rick Rosner: I have always been like that. Everyone thought my dad had narcolepsy because he would fall asleep all the time—during movies or while watching TV. It was funny. He would fall asleep during a show, wake up at the end, and ask, “What happened?” We would tell him something absurd like, “It was sad. Everybody died.”

So it runs in my family. I would fall asleep every day around three o’clock at work. I got caught sleeping on the job so many times that my coworkers once made a Christmas card out of photos of me asleep and called it “Silent Night.”

Then I discovered coffee, which helped me get through the day. But I have always been a big napper, so that alone is not a strong indicator that I am getting old. The gray hair is more convincing. The cottonmouth is another one. I get it now, actually. It is the worst. Maybe my number-two most depressing indicator of old age is the frowny belly button.

Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?

Rosner: When you are young, if you have visible abs, you often have a horizontal crease that runs straight across your belly button. If you are lean, that fold can line up right at the navel.

For me, that crease has turned downward. The skin around the belly button sags with age, because the belly button itself is anchored to underlying tissue and cannot move. It is fixed in place, while the surrounding skin loses elasticity. It is like a nail in a wall: the center stays put, but everything around it can droop. So instead of a straight line, the crease around my belly button bends downward into a frown. That has bothered me more than I expected.

The balls are the standard aging joke—how they get longer and saggier. That is probably true in general. I have always had saggy balls because I have varicose veins in my scrotum, so they have been carrying a heavy load for a long time. That part feels less like aging and more like consistency.

Another one is toenail fungus. As you get older—especially if you wear socks that keep your feet moist—you are more prone to fungal infections. I wear a lot of socks because of circulation issues related to varicose veins. Toenail fungus is stubborn. There are many advertised cures, and there are oral medications, but the topical treatments rarely work well.

The pills can sometimes help, but they are hard on the liver, and it feels excessive to risk liver damage just to have better-looking toenails. And even then, the fungus often comes back once you stop treatment. That is why older people tend to have thick, yellow, twisted toenails. One of mine is so bad that when it grows out, it just crumbles, because the fungus destroys it. It is disgusting.

Another depressing realization is my ass. I do not usually look at it, but when I do, it reminds me of an elephant’s backside. Elephants do not really have a butt so much as folds of skin where the legs meet. That is what mine looks like now—no defined butt, just skin folds. It is not great.

There is also reduced ejaculation volume with age. Ejaculation feels good, it is relaxing, and it used to be a reliable way to fall asleep. Now, sometimes my body just says no—you are going to sleep, and that function is offline.

I talked recently with a guy who is on testosterone replacement therapy, and he said it is fantastic. I might look into it, but it also seems like a bad idea. You see people who appear overstimulated or strained on testosterone, and I do not want to risk cardiovascular problems or a stroke at sixty-five just to feel more youthful.

All right, enough of that. I want to shift gears quickly before we run out of time. Over the past few days, I have been complaining about what appears to be a serious injustice involving a law-enforcement shooting of a woman named Renée. The details are still unclear, and it is not yet known whether the officer involved will be held accountable. I realize you might be feeling some impatience with me returning to this topic.

You are about to head toward the heart of a much larger injustice. Ukraine did not do anything wrong, and for nearly four years now, Vladimir Putin has been trying to take over the country, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties.

So my question is this: is it annoying to hear me complain about the death of one woman when there is so much injustice elsewhere in the world? You are probably more exposed to international injustice than I am, because you are a journalist and because you are Canadian and tend to hear more global news. Do you get sick of me focusing on American injustice when the scale of suffering elsewhere is so much larger?

Jacobsen: It is interesting what annoys people and what does not.

Rosner: Today was day four of this situation, and it is still not clear what the repercussions will be for the officer involved or for ICE more broadly. Kristi Noem and J.D. Vance continue to push the claim that the woman tried to run the officer over, even though available video evidence appears to contradict that narrative. They keep repeating that line.

The FBI has said it is investigating. Whether the investigation will be thorough and transparent remains unknown. The state of Minnesota has also said it has been attempting to gather evidence, but claims it has been blocked by the FBI, which reportedly took control of the evidence and asserted jurisdiction.

It is unclear how long it will take before we find out whether the officer will face consequences. He is reportedly in hiding, which in itself is not necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. Police officers are often not arrested immediately after controversial shootings. Given how angry a large portion of the public is, it is reasonable that he and his family would be kept out of public view for safety reasons.

At this point, all anyone can do is wait. There were no major new revelations today, so attention naturally shifts elsewhere.

One place it has shifted is back to the Epstein files, which were legally required to be released weeks ago. Only a small fraction has been made public so far. The continued delay has fueled speculation that the withholding is politically motivated or intended to protect powerful individuals. Whether that is true or not, the perception of a cover-up persists.

We were distracted by the shooting for several days. Meanwhile, U.S. employment numbers for December were released. The reported job gains were modest—on the order of tens of thousands. Trump has described these numbers as extraordinary. By comparison, job growth during the final year of the previous administration averaged several times higher. That contrast does not seem to matter politically. Trump will boast about nearly anything, and his supporters tend to accept it at face value.

Jacobsen: Any new movies? 

Rosner: I started watching Him, which is a recent Jordan Peele movie about a college quarterback transitioning to the pros. It is framed as a horror movie, and I am curious where the horror comes in and what the twist will be. It has Marlon Wayans playing the greatest quarterback of all time, who is training his successor.

That reminded me of the house across the street from us. There are two twin houses across the street, about sixty-five feet tall, designed by a friend of ours, Jeff, who is an architect. He lives in one of them with his wife. When those houses went up, a neighbor got very upset.

At the time, hillside houses in Los Angeles were allowed to be up to sixty-five feet tall, because the slopes are so steep that building upward is often the only way to make a house workable. Standard R1 zoning usually limits houses to thirty-five feet, but hillside properties were an exception. After these houses were built, that exception was eliminated, and the hillside limit was reduced to thirty-five feet. That was largely due to pressure from neighbors who knew how to get things done at City Hall. It is a shame, because the taller limit made architectural sense on steep lots.

I love those houses, but they are tough to live in. They have an enormous number of stairs, and there is a strong chimney effect. The temperature at the bottom of the house can be five to eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than at the top, which is brutal in the summer.

They live in one of the twin houses. The other one has had a rotating cast of famous residents. One of the Wayans lived there for a while, which is why the movie made me think of it. I do not remember which one, but it was one of them. He probably got tired of the stairs.

After that, a porn star named Belladonna lived there for a while. She set up cameras and essentially ran a work-from-home operation. She waved at me once. She seemed nice.

Living in Los Angeles can be fun that way. You sometimes see famous people, or you live in the less fancy part of a neighborhood where famous people live in the fancier part. In our area, there have been a lot of recognizable names. Clooney used to live up the street. So did Alex Trebek, Lea Thompson, people from Lois & Clark, and Desperate Housewives.

Jeremy Allen White from The Bear lives nearby. Carol has seen him running with his shirt off, which she enjoyed very much. Uzo Aduba lives around here too. You see a lot of people like that. The key is acting cool. You cannot act impressed that they are famous. You just act mildly pleased to see a neighbor, even though you almost never see them out in the wild.

Jacobsen: There are certain emotions that, over time—especially as you get older—become less useful. They lose some of their utility, and nature seems to dull them. Through selective processes over development, they are no longer as necessary, so you feel them less strongly. Which emotions?

Rosner: I would say horniness, even though it is not really an emotion. Maybe sexual expectation is a better way to put it. I have been with Carole for almost forty years, so that part of life has changed. That drive has been blunted over time.

I do not want to go into a full inventory of what parts of that impulse remain and what parts have been erased by time, but something is still there—just not in the same way.

I watch our dogs as they get old, and I wonder how aware they are of what is happening to them. Dogs adapt their behavior to their current physical abilities. You have met both of them—the brown one and the white one. The brown one is less sharp than the white one. As they age, they go up and down stairs more carefully.

The white one is also going blind, but she has adapted to it. She is not happy about it. I might be anthropomorphizing a bit, but what does not feel like anthropomorphizing is the way she pauses, confused, as if thinking, “What the hell?” The brown one is less aware, so she sometimes stumbles down the last few steps and tumbles onto the carpet at the bottom. We have been lucky that she has not hurt herself.

The white one does not jump onto the bed anymore, because she cannot judge the distance now that she is blind. A reckless dog might keep trying and fail repeatedly, but at least the smarter dogs seem to adjust their behavior to their limitations. That makes me wonder whether they know they are old, whether they understand aging as something that happens to living things, and whether they have any sense of how it ends.

They cannot know it with any depth or specificity. They have not watched many other dogs age and die. If the white one had seen that process repeatedly, she might be able to infer that it is something that will happen to her. The brown one would not have a clue.

In terms of emotions, there is loss. When you lose layers of relatives and realize you are now on the outer edge—the next layer to go—it is not exactly an emotion, but it feels like dread mixed with melancholy. You have lost these people, and now you are next.

I have no parents left. I have a stepmother who is eighty-five, but my mother, father, and stepfather are gone. My uncle and aunt are gone. Carol has one aunt left, who is ninety. Our grandparents have been gone for a long time. As you lose those layers and realize you are now the outer layer, it is deeply unpleasant. That does not quite answer your question, but it is what your question brought up.

Jacobsen: What do you think makes smell such an enduring sense? You smell a perfume or cologne when you are ten, and twenty years later a random scent can trigger that memory.

Rosner: Nature either did that by accident, or it persists because it served a purpose. Most traits we inherit offered a survival or reproductive advantage at some point. Some traits persist accidentally, having evolved in one context and carried forward into another. Smell clearly serves a purpose, and it has a different relationship to memory than vision does.

It may not be that smell works differently with memory so much as that we encounter many smells far less often than visual stimuli. You can go decades without encountering a specific smell, then suddenly encounter it again, and it triggers an old memory. With vision, we are constantly layering new visual experiences over old ones, which makes that kind of deep recall less likely.

Smell works because volatile molecules enter the nose and bind to receptors shaped to detect them. That is the basic mechanism. Some smells are tied to molecular shape, others to volatility. The details are complicated, but the function is clear: smell keeps you from drinking nail-polish remover, or from eating a toxic berry on the savanna twenty thousand years ago.

Now that I think about it, the strong link between smell and memory may exist because smell conveys critical information about what we might eat or be exposed to. Our brains are especially good at storing memories tied to those signals. Visual information is richer and allows for broader inference. You do not need a library of remembered paw prints. If you see a massive paw-and-claw print in the mud, you know something big and dangerous is nearby.

Twenty thousand years ago, we did not have formal systems of knowledge. We had libraries of associations. We could not reason deductively about unfamiliar smells. We could only recall past experiences associated with them and decide whether something was safe or dangerous. That reliance on memory made smell especially powerful.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Elly Johnson on Unsplash

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