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I just turned 70 and bought a 12 year old Corvette. I think that says a lot about my attitude. I am having more fun than ever and do not miss working even a little.
I halfway expect to punch out in the middle of a downhill decreasing radius corner trail braking to the apex at way over any sensible speed. Most likely on a closed track. I actually drive the 'Vette slower on public roads than my Burgman Scooter.
My dad has a Corvette and he drives this car every single day. He is in his late 80s!
Mine is a C-5 with a removable hard top, the 350 Hp engine and automatic tranny. We drove it from New Hampshire to Yellowstone NP last summer. It turned out to be a really neat touring car as well as a very good performance car. It is not the fastest or most powerful but it is good enough for us. I hope to be driving this car when I am 90 or so.
Originally Posted by KonaldDuth I've been thinking
Quote:
Originally Posted by le roi
ok, yes, good.
I second that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by GregW
I just turned 70 and bought a 12 year old Corvette. I think that says a lot about my attitude. I am having more fun than ever and do not miss working even a little.
I halfway expect to punch out in the middle of a downhill decreasing radius corner trail braking to the apex at way over any sensible speed. Most likely on a closed track. I actually drive the 'Vette slower on public roads than my Burgman Scooter.
You're a crazy man!!
...actually, I just started accumulating classic dirt bikes to restore (and ride of course) and I'm nearly 60 :P
I've been thinking about this recently. The average person in Western society is going to live to be 80+. That's a pretty long time, especially considering that the majority of it will be spent beyond your prime years of health, employability, mental ability, etc. No wonder we see people trying to delay adulthood, relive their "glory years", etc. In summary, what I see is an epidemic of lonely, confused people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
The beginning of this paragraph doesn't seem to have anything to do with the end. We start with people living longer, which I expected to end in something like increasing the retirement age for social security or something. It ends with young people feeling unhappy and lonely. The two aren't related at all.
Young people are "delaying adulthood" because adult hood is a big piece of steaming ****. It's easy to **** all over millennials, but millennials live in a very different world. Just as an example, the 40 hour work weed is dead; most American workers work at least 50 hours a week anymore. Their pay doesn't reflect it. Despite this sounding like BS to just about anyone, and the fact that millennials make up the majority of the work force now, they still get berated with insults of being entitled and lazy because they are aware at how bad things currently are.
Life spans haven't changed much since time immemorial - the great difference over the centuries is that a much greater percentage of people are living out that life span rather than dying before they can complete it. Historical life expectancies of 30 or 40 reflect the fact that about a third to half of all people born lived out their full life span, as opposed to almost everybody in modern times. Most of the ones that didn't were cut down in infancy or childhood. Historically, few people died in young adulthood or even in their 30s or 40s.
Life expectancy at birth in past eras was overwhelmingly influenced by mortality rates, not life spans, thus until recently in developed countries life expectancy at birth was a yardstick for mortality*; a convenient one to boot, which is why demographers like it so much. But life expectancies at birth of 20, 30, 40, or 50 don't mean that the typical person died at around those ages; in the overwhelming majority of cases it was exactly the opposite. Although youth and middle age mortality was higher historically, this phenomenon is mostly due to averaging a lot of people dying in old age with a lot of people dying in childhood; this yields a number in-between childhood and old age.
Of course when most people look at life expectancy they think it means the age at which the typical person died, not helped by professionals using "living longer" as a shorthand for this phenomenon, and even legions of those same professionals look at the statistics through the distorted prism of Whig history which has a bias that the present is better than the past. This is also not helped by the phenomenon of many scholars believing more in their own numbers and statistics than in historical fact.
I don't mean to minimize the impact that hygiene and antibiotics (and to a lesser extent other modern medical discoveries) had - the dramatic lowering of premature mortality rates we experienced was an enormous and unprecedented achievement for mankind, but talking as if they made our life spans longer is simply incorrect, and ignores the true importance of mortality before old age to boot.
Back to the OP, the bottom line is that in almost all historical eras if you survived childhood you at least had a good chance of completing a life span not very different from modern people, thus most people had to plan and prepare for living through old age. Thus any psychological effects of realistically having to prepare for living through old age wouldn't be appearing in Western society now, they would have always been with us.
Now, there may be psychological effects from the drastic lowering of premature mortality and the much higher proportion of elders in the population, but those wouldn't take the form of people trying to stretch out their life stages. People are doing that (or are being pushed to do so) today, but that has little to do with nearly everyone born living out their normal life span as opposed to only a fraction of people.
*We saw this at work in the late 20th century in parts of southern Africa with HIV; their life expectancy at birth cratered from 60 to 40. This showed that death rates were vastly higher, not that the typical guy lived to 60 before and then just lived to 40.
Speaking for myself, I hope I don't live to become a burden upon my kids. I watch people live beyond the point in which they have the ability to care for themselves even in the least. Kept alive by a cocktail of drugs and constant intervention. I never want that to be me.
Im not greedy. I hope to live to be 75 or so have all good years then one day while tying my shoes, keel over dead.
I think the issue you are touching on is society OK paying for people to live into their 90s consistently. SSN was set up as a pyramid scheme and Medicare now accounts for 1 in every 6 dollars in the federal budget. Even worse is that a significant amount of the costs is at end of life.
If someone busted their butt and worked for 50 years only to amassed a fortune, let them pay as much as they want to stay alive for another day. For those not paying for it, that is where it gets complicated. Should society pay 100K for a 90+year old to get another month? What about 2 months? what about a year?
Like what was mentioned, for too long we have held that longer the someone lived the better. I think we are now coming to the realization that this is not the case and letting people make the decision when to leave is a good thing.
I'm in my early 50's and, am still in Ok health. Tho IF something serious turns up; I doubt I'd bother getting treatment unless the odds were real good I'd be healthy again.
I'm in my early 50's and, am still in Ok health. Tho IF something serious turns up; I doubt I'd bother getting treatment unless the odds were real good I'd be healthy again.
Speaking for myself, I hope I don't live to become a burden upon my kids. I watch people live beyond the point in which they have the ability to care for themselves even in the least. Kept alive by a cocktail of drugs and constant intervention. I never want that to be me.
Im not greedy. I hope to live to be 75 or so have all good years then one day while tying my shoes, keel over dead.
That or going in your sleep seems good to me.
My girlfriend's father is 76 and has been in the hospital now for over a month. He had felt tired. Turns out his instincts were right. His heart was giving out. He had a quadruple bypass, plus a heart cath, a pacemaker, and a defibrillator installed. He was in massive, screaming pain even days after the surgery. They were going to move him to the rehab hospital ten days after the surgery but on the way he went into cardiac arrest. They were able to bring him to a different hospital "on the way" where he's been since. He'll be moved to the rehab hospital one of these days, and he'll spend a couple months there. He also had some sort of severe digestive trauma years ago, I don't know all the terms, but he has an external stomach. He's also got Alzheimer's. Even before the heart trouble he was on a vast array of medications and could barely move across the house under his own power. He moves between utter confusion, anger, and frustration at not being able to remember. Life is not a joy for him.
And I had a talk with my girlfriend. I told her I couldn't do it. I couldn't do any of it. She says she knows, and she says she agrees and couldn't do any of it herself.
My step-mother's mother had a massive stroke in 1989. Two days before Christmas. She never successfully said another word. She would try -- "sss-sss-ssu-ssu-suu-suu-soo-soo-ssssss." She always had expressions of abject terror on her face except when they REALLY heavily medicated her. She couldn't feed or clothe or groom or clean herself. I always imagined life for her was like a nightmare you never wake from, or like having the worst LSD trip while strobing from Nitrous Oxide. And yet... they kept her alive through 2003. What kind of monster does that?
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