America Needs to Rethink What It Means to Be Old

It's really simple if you are rich you probably did an office job. You have personal coaches, eat healthy, always went to the doctor. You age like fucking Tom Cruise.

But if you were a truck driver or construction worker you are OLD at 70.

The problem with articles about the aging population is they are generally written by the young, or perhaps middle aged. The old have been young/middle aged, so they can speak of that time with some confidence and wisdom. The young have little to no idea of the challenges of aging. The middle aged have slightly better insight, but aging scares them to death…an inappropriate response as well.

Also, I read a comment by a gerontologist that “if you’ve seen one eighty year old…well, you’ve seen one eighty year old”. Everyone ages in their own unique way, and it is unlikely broad-brush superficial analyses of aging by “young punks”, say <50, are going to be very useful.

As a previous poster commented, the greatest difference in aging populations are between those who did significant, sustained physical labor in their working lives, and those who didn’t. Articles about the aging population are written by the latter. Minds can stay sharp, but the body just wears out. There’s little “retooling for the workforce” when it’s hard to even get out of bed because of physical pain. That is a cruel fantasy spoken of by the young.

One grace is the aged, excepting for medical costs, are a cheap generation…they generally know how to be happy with those few resources (physical, emotional, spiritual) they’ve gathered over the years. It’s not as much of an economic issue as people make out, other than the deflationary effect of less demand from a generally settled and content age cohort. We generally sits and think, and sometimes we just sits.

America needs to rethink what it means to be ______. Fill in the blank. It's a long list. I'm actually surprised it's taken us so long to get here. We have experienced a societal transformation as large and arguably larger than the Industrial Revolution and by comparison it's been fairly peaceful so far but the strains are finally starting to show. There seems to be a fairly pervasive feeling that the way things are is not working anymore.

I have been thinking about this issue a lot as it is part of my job. My conclusion is that we "won" the battle against disease and poor hygiene and infant mortality and, in general, a lot more people survive to experience the humiliations of old age. But the upside is that we used to experience the humilitation of dying in infancy, of a preventable accident, cholera, or some other problem that we now avoid so that we grow so old our bowels obstruct, we develop an untreatable cancer, or our heart gets tired and stops working well, and our bodies are full of pain, arthritis, we get lonely because our friends died, and people value us less because we have less human capital in our old age.

It is simply a trade off. Would you rather die young?

As we experience a societal transition to having a ton of old humans, we have a political system where human numbers matter, so the old can vote themselves more money and social benefits, which harms the prospects of the young at a time when family formation and childbearing is already hard and expensive. This is probably one of the most difficult social problems of our time. We do not have enough money or manpower to take care of all these old people, the robots are not good enough to do it for us yet, and yet the same old people can vote in a way that will suppress young human fertility so there are even fewer new humans to help out.

Ultimately I am hopeful because the human population will course correct and right size itself, the young growing up now will see their grandparents and great grandparents lonely and ignored in nursing homes and other human storage facilities and know that if they want someone to care for them they will have to have kids (or build the robots) to do it in their old age.

... Every problem we solve as a species will simply lead us to another problem. If the biohackers and longevity gurus are right...and we can live to 200...well what does this mean for our lives if our healthspan (time where we are pain free and relatively able and attractive) is maybe 100 years? Will we be treating 40 year olds as children?

Some of our oldest recorded wisdom, like the Epic Of Gilgamesh, was written so that we would understand that old age and death are inevitable, but it was better to live in happiness rather than despair. This smacks of truth.

TL;DR: decline in birthrate due to social media and dating sites will mean everyone will have to work till death.