Old Age Creeps Up

Before retiring to my cold basement to edit, I spent some time in the sun drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette (I know, I know - I need stress relief right now, so there!!) and reading this highly disturbing article in The New Yorker about aging (which quickly made me regret the cigarette).

Here are some excerpts but I recommend reading the whole thing (here) to be properly scared shitless :

"After all, for most of our hundred-thousand-year existence—all but the past couple of hundred years—the average life span of human beings has been thirty years or less. (Research suggests that subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.)

Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand. We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time."

- "The Way We Age Now" by Atul Gawande, April 30th, The New Yorker Magazine

By all rights, I should be dead now that I am over 30. Hell, in Roman times I would be ancient! So I plan to enjoy every damn miserable moment I get on this planet as my organs harden, my teeth fall out, my eyes get worse, my feet become unattended, my inner hard drives fail, my prescriptions increase and I slowly begin to fall apart...

"Nonetheless, as the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when just one more defect is enough to impair the whole, resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore."
- "The Way We Age Now" by Atul Gawande, April 30th, The New Yorker Magazine

And to make matters worse, there are not enough doctors to deal with all us aging, malfunctioning factories! Who wants to deal with machines that are falling apart when you can work with nicely oiled, brand new machines?

All of this reminds me of an ethnography I wrote in college connecting an old age home to American's obsession with horror movies. My thesis was that we are so afraid of the decline of our bodies that we hide the evidence away in nursing homes. Still, we are fascinated by the inevitable process, so we indulge in horror movies with decrepit zombies falling apart and trying to eat us as a way to indulge our hidden fears.

We are all gonna die. Some sooner than others. There it is. Sucks.

So all we have is this moment, the present. I guess I am glad I had that coffee and a ciggie (a heavenly combo if there ever was one) and sun/reading break (also heavenly combo) after all.