2 weeks Ago
Get this: life expectancy has apparently hit its peak. According to msn.com , a recent study published in the journal Nature Aging finds that, barring any major medical breakthroughs, “people will top out at a maximum average age of around 87 — 90 for women, 84 for men.
” This news runs counter to numerous more optimistic studies I’ve written about the past 20 years. Tom Purcell Back in 2003, I wrote about futurists who strongly believed that advances in cell and gene manipulation and nanotechnology would allow humans to live up to 180 years — and maybe even into the 500s. Good God, do we really want to live until we’re 500? Do we really want “Me Generation” Baby Boomers to have 430 years to vote government benefits for themselves after retiring? Do we really want to encourage our younger generations, notorious slackers, to keep putting off adulthood? (Mother to son in year 2125: You’re a century old, when are you going to go out and get a job?) I don’t want to be a killjoy, but there are downsides to living long.
Sure, I’d love to have my parents around forever. It would be great if Dave Chapelle could keep telling jokes, or someone like Elon Musk could keep advancing rocket science. But the rest of us? I’m 62 already and have no desire to live for 100 years.
In my experience so far, life is made up of colds, bills, speeding tickets and people who let you down. These experiences are connected by a series of mundane tasks we must complete to sustain ourselves — like working in an office with people we loathe. This daily drudgery is occasionally visited by an exciting and enjoyable moment, but do we really want to live 500 years like that? Besides, how would we pay for it all? Living is expensive.
Are we going to work full-time for 40 years, retire, burn through our nest eggs, then sling hamburgers at McDonald’s for hundreds of years? Anyway, it’s dying that makes life most worth living! Consider, would you enjoy a movie if you knew it was going to last for 24 hours? No, what makes the movie enjoyable is its ending. The key to human happiness, you see, is not an abundance of a thing, but the shortage of it. Doesn’t pie taste better when we know it’s the last slice? Doesn’t a football game capture our attention more when it is the last of the season with only a few minutes left — the final game that determines who goes out the winner and who goes out the loser? And isn’t a comedian funnier when he exits the stage before we want him to go? Hey, futurists, we don’t want to stick around on Earth too long.
If you believe in God, as I do, life is just a testing ground anyhow. This life is just practice. It’s like two-a-day football drills.
We must first prove ourselves during the agony of summer practice to earn our rights to play in the big game in the autumn. Do you really want to spend half a millennium running wind sprints in summer practice? I surely don’t. Besides, if I only live until 84, I still have to suffer through five more presidential elections.
When you consider the misery of that, pushing up daises in a quiet field suddenly doesn’t seem so bad! See Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos featuring his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com . Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.
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