Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old

And I bet Mr. Town­shend doesn’t either.

In a very inter­est­ing com­men­tary in New Sci­en­tist, Fred Pearce dis­cusses the gen­eral aging of the world’s pop­u­la­tion. Accord­ing to Mr. Pearce, in 19 coun­tries, the aver­age life expectancy is now 80 years. “Of all the peo­ple in human his­tory who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Mean­while, women around the world have half as many chil­dren as their moth­ers. … The longevity rev­o­lu­tion affects every coun­try, every com­mu­nity and almost every house­hold. It promises to restruc­ture the econ­omy, reshape the fam­ily, rede­fine pol­i­tics and even rearrange the geopo­lit­i­cal order over the com­ing cen­tury. The rev­o­lu­tion has two aspects. First, we are not pro­duc­ing babies like we used to. In just a gen­er­a­tion, world fer­til­ity has halved to just 2.6 babies per woman. In most of Europe and much of East Asia, fer­til­ity is closer to one child per woman than two, way below long-term replace­ment lev­els. The notion that the pop­u­la­tions of places such as Brazil and India will go on expand­ing looks mis­placed: in fact, they could soon be con­tract­ing. Mean­while, except in a hand­ful of AIDS-ravaged coun­tries in Africa, peo­ple are liv­ing longer every­where.” Mr. Pearce goes on to dis­cuss the impact on tax base, retire­ment, health care and other issues. He makes very good points. I sug­gest you read the entire com­men­tary at the New Sci­en­tist site.

This aging will require changes from Soci­ety, econ­omy, gov­ern­ment; all have devel­oped assum­ing we age; we retire from active work­ing life around a cer­tain age. A key aspect of us retir­ing from active work­ing life is mak­ing room for advance­ment of younger peo­ple up the work­ing lad­der, thus mak­ing room at the bot­tom for new peo­ple to enter work­ing life. We have also cre­ated a sys­tem that allows the older gen­er­a­tions to retire from active work­ing life funded in large part by the efforts of the work­ing younger pop­u­la­tion. This is a con­tin­ued growth model that may well not work in the chang­ing world. I have some co-workers who are very out­spo­ken about their con­cerns that they will likely not be able retire at the age they had planned. They view this as a major dis­ap­point­ment in their lives. Not so long ago I con­sid­ered retire­ment a nat­ural part of the pro­gres­sion of a work­ing life. But today I am not so sure. Sure I may retire from the job I am in today. But one aspect of the job I am in that I would not like to give up is that I have daily expo­sure to peo­ple in all age groups from eigh­teen years of age to mid-eighty years old. What­ever I do as I age, I think I must make sure that I main­tain this contact.

As I close in on what was not so long ago the edge of old age, 60 years old at the next anniver­sary of my birth, I just don’t feel that old. This is in spite of hav­ing had mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to not make it to this point and being alive only through the mir­a­cle of mod­ern sci­ence and a few syn­thetic body parts and proper med­ica­tion. Yet I can go through a five-minute cable weight rou­tine that has been shown to put sev­eral thirty some­thing body­builders flat on their backs. Well, on one of my really good days, I can. Even though my musi­cal taste lean towards the clas­sics; you know, Palest­rina, Boc­cherini, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, John­son, Waters, Wolf, Berry, Lennon, McCart­ney, Jag­ger, Richards, Clap­ton, Bruce, Paige, Plant, Gabriel, Stipe, Buck, Waters, Gilmore, Enya, … the clas­sics; I am known to lis­ten to all sorts of New Age, Celtic, Alter­na­tive, Blue­grass, Pop, Electro-Pop, just about any­thing except most coun­try. There is lit­tle art I can­not find inter­est in, except pre­ten­tious stuff done just to gross some­body out. While I would not get one (or many) myself, I find a well-executed tat­tooed body very beau­ti­ful. My taste in design changes way to often for me to ever believe I could live my entire life with the same body art. I feel com­fort­able around peo­ple of just about any age. The excep­tions are young peo­ple who refuse to accept older peo­ple just because they are older and older peo­ple who refuse to accept younger peo­ple just because they are younger. The day I choose to move into one of those age-restricted com­mu­ni­ties that do not allow peo­ple younger than a cer­tain age to live in the com­mu­nity, that is the day you will know to pull my plug!

So the next time some­one tells me to act me age I will; but it won’t be my cal­en­dar age. And I will do every­thing I can to make my phys­i­cal state hold up until my men­tal age catches up to some­thing close to 50% of my cal­en­dar age!

Is Still Here