Candles

A funny thing happened to me today. I turned 70. I’m not quite sure how that happened. Most of my friends are younger, which isn’t surprising. Just by the odds one would expect that. They ask the same question: “Do you feel 70?” In truth that is hard to answer. After all, I’ve never been 70 before so I’m not sure what it is supposed to feel like. I know the answer they want to hear, which is “No,” so I politely tell them that because the question isn’t really about me. My superannuation reminds them of their own advancing years and mortality, so they want reassurance that nothing bad is in store. Something bad is in store. But it might not arrive at 70… or 80 or 90. Then again, it might arrive much earlier.
 

A more honest answer is more nuanced. Most of the time I feel little different than 20 years ago, but it would be a lie to say that there are no moments (in every day) when I feel very different. Without crossing the line into TMI, let’s take simple examples. My living room ceiling peaks at over 16 feet (5 meters). There are 4 recessed lights near the peak. One of them chose yesterday to burn out. I had no trouble setting up and climbing the extension ladder to swap the bulb, but I don’t just clamber up and down the ladder the way I did a decade ago (never mind 4 decades ago). I climb carefully step by step and catch my breath afterward. Reroofing the garden shed this past summer (it required only 5 bundles of shingles) took as much out of me as reroofing the whole barn did 10 years ago. I still could do the barn (I think) but it would take a few days longer. There would be a lot of breaks – from the labor, I mean. I don’t think I personally would break, but you never know. I’ve fallen off a roof or two in my day. I probably don’t bounce as well anymore.

Barn roof

Garden shed

The number of seniors in the world continues to rise. In the US 17% of the population is over 65. This is more than the percentage of the population under 10. A senior who wants to exercise the age-prerogative to yell at kids to “get off my lawn!” may be out of luck. There aren’t enough kids to go around. The growing number of seniors is the primary (far from sole, but primary) reason for rising health care costs. 68% of Americans on Medicare have chronic medical conditions. As we age, immune systems decline, eyesight fails, bones thin, bladders get impatient, and respiratory efficiency drops. Yes, exercise helps, but it doesn’t reverse the general trend. And that is just normal aging. Throw in a serious ailment and things get pretty hairy.
 
When I was in high school, optimistic science teachers told us, “Some of you sitting in this room will live to be 200!” The biotech revolution was just beginning back then, and there was a widely held assumption that it would advance as quickly as hardware tech had advanced in the 20^th century. That hasn’t happened. Life expectancy has gone up but only because medical treatment has improved and – most significantly – fewer people smoke. The pace of normal aging itself hasn’t changed at all. A healthy 90-y.o. in 1922 was much the same as a healthy 90-y.o. in 2022 – there are just more of them now since they are less likely to be taken out by infections and other ailments. Getting to 100 is still a rare event. The odds of reaching 100 are 1 in 10,000. The chances of reaching 110 are 1 in 7,000,000. Yet students continue to be told the 200-years line (though nowadays they are also told the world will end long before then). Despite well-funded efforts by The Immortality Project and by Elon Musk’s Transcendence Project and by private biotech firms such as Calico (which aims to “develop interventions that enable people to live longer and healthier lives”), I am skeptical that there will be any dramatic slowing of the aging process in the lifetime of anyone in the world today.
 
Is there an upside to aging? In psychological terms there may be. Studies over the past dozen years indicate that happiness in the general population (there are always individual exceptions) follows a U-curve. Kids are happy and then grow ever more unhappy as they become adults, reaching a nadir of happiness in middle age – not coincidentally a time when we are likely to have the most bills and responsibilities while reaping the fewest personal benefits from them. In middle age we also experience our first age-related health declines. Then happiness increases again after 65. It is not clear why. Maybe we just stop giving a damn.
 
Inner contentment is all very well, but there is no point denying that physical decline is inevitable. It can be resisted, but ultimately not defeated. We might as well make peace with that. Still, as is often noted, it beats the alternative. I suppose that is another reason to be happy. My current target is to reach 75, at which point I’ll have lived longer than any of my immediate family. After that… well, we’ll see how things go. I might have to hire someone the next time I need a roof.
 

 

Bob Dylan – Forever Young