You're Too Old to Believe You're Never Going to Die
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Why I’m overdue to go to Bhutan, where death is one reason they are so happy
Out of respect for those who are so caught up on longevity for longevity’s sake, I’m going to skirt that topic but not without making my feelings clear: get over yourself. Please.
I’ll leave it at that. For now.
At 71, I am well aware of the limitations of the flesh. I’m also aware that despite the gift of very long-lived genes in my family, I will be most fortunate to have another two-and-a-half decades.
My buddy JC is the marketing guy for Hawthorne, an active older living community. He says when we hit forty (where he is) one very small part of us realizes that the next sixty years, should we be gifted with them, are not going to be anything like the first four decades.
Not even close. If you take into account bad habits, bad food, all the stressors we have in our lives, pollution and climate change and all the rest, it’s a very different journey. Especially our final few years, depending on how long and how well we live.
There are lots of “it depends” in this equation, one of them being whether or not you’re a billionaire who can spend oodles on snake oil fixes to keep you young.
All the while, kindly, wasting the very time you have, which you don’t get back, measuring how many hard-ons you have a night (with your penis attached to a little rocket, no kidding) and then bitching about how hard it is to get a date.
I will refrain, although it’s hard. Refraining, that is.
Even if you and I did everything “right,” including eating well, moving much, building a good social environment and having a purpose, about 25% of our life is still driven by chance, about 20% by genes, and a slew of other wild cards like texting drunk drivers.
Any of which could catapult us into our next journey in a nano-second, including an aneurysm, heart attack, blood clot or a thousand other unhappy accidents of the body.
We say it, but we don’t believe it. We say, “tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.”
We also somehow believe in our deepest parts that dying applies to The Other Guy. Not us.
You and I are WAY Too Old to somehow believe that the Grim Reaper is going to give us a pass.
I have been itching to get back to what I love, adventure travel, for several years now. I’ve slogged my way through surgeries and recovery and PT. I’m finally back.
My 100% at 71 isn’t what my 100% baseline was at 61, and won’t be anything like that at 81.
I might be better at some things, worse at others. I have no idea.
This is for sure, however: I have no conceit that I am going to beat the odds and live forever. Nor do I even want to. I fail to see the attraction, unless we are so desperate for a do-over that we just want another go at it.
If we did get another long lease on life, would we really, truly, honestly change our habits? If someone moves out a key deadline, do we work harder, get it done earlier and better? Most of us take another day/month/year off.
We humans push out the hardest possible work, the work of the soul, because, well, it’s really really hard.
Folks get terribly repentant near the end, like the evil Mafia boss who wants his last rites to say so so so so SORRY and land in heaven despite a lifetime of murders.
Many, many others just get happier.
I got a referral to an article from
, which was an invitation to consider a slew of topics around our obsession with believing that the world just cannot possibly go on without us. The referral came from my calling out Blue Zones as hooey in Notes.Here’s the article:
Can this world survive without us in it?
Yeah it can. And will. The world will be just fine, just as it was perfectly fine before we got here, and will be after we leave. We are not that important, for the most part. Not a lot of Gandhis or Mandelas or Toni Morrisons to be had in the billions of us who show up and move on.
This allows us to, if wise, spend more time being in life, richly appreciative of the time and paradise we were given.
Some small group of people will affected by our passing through. Most won’t. On average, we may touch about 80,000 people in a lifetime of 73 years, assuming we meet three people a day.
Most of us hardly meet one new person a month. A year, for that matter.
That’s .001% of the world’s population, at best.
Which means most of us will be brief blips, having made as much difference as a gnat fart in a hurricane, no matter how much we shriek on social media.
There’s something wonderful about that. So relieving. We can stop trying so damned hard to be important. We end up so often being impotent instead.
My parents dealt with their impending departure with planning and good grace. They bought into an aging facility which worked well for them. Both of them died there. They were well cared-for. They had all of it planned out well before they reached my age.
These last few years I’ve taken a lot more steps to take into account not only an aging body but how such an aging body might fare in a split level house. It might not. While I will most assuredly continue exercising and eating well, life has a nasty way of sending us sideswipes.
To that:
Last night I started to step outside to pull down blinds so that my dog wouldn’t be so spooked by all the noise from the roofers. Suddenly a very heavy roll of some kind of roofing material came hurtling off my roof without warning. It bounced on the deck and slammed into my sliding glass doors, leaving a black mark.
Missed me by inches.
I felt like that guy who stepped to the right for some reason and a piano lands right where he had just been standing.
That close.
It’s bad enough that I injure myself taking on sports. This kind of thing can really ruin your day.
So can running out of money, not taking care of your legal considerations like a will, a power of attorney and a living will. I’ve got all those in place but two need updating. Every time I head out on a trip I’m reminded that such paperwork has to be completed in case of a terrible accident.
We are fools to keep thinking that it will never happen to me.
It won’t. Until it does.
This quote from Rose Tyler’s article got my attention:
There’s a long-lived custom in both philosophy and religion of using death as a source of inspiration, a catalyst for forward-thinking action. Ironically, it’s the absurdity of death — the fact that we don’t exist, then exist for a little while, and then don’t exist thereafter — that can spur us on.
In the great scheme of things, you have so little time for worry and spite that you might as well get on with the important things; we might as well make this little place we share as good as we can for each other. (author bolded)
Yet we worry incessantly. About everything. Including dying. So much so that we can’t live while we’re living, we’re so afraid of dying. That’s the lesson of Bryan Johnson, who is so obsessed with living that he’s not living at all.
If you’re that terrified of dying, then you are also terrified of living.
Years ago I saw a comic which cut to the beating heart of religious dishonesties, such as life is hard and we go to our reward. Worked very well for slaves and apartheid, mind you. Same thing for us driven by punishing Calvinist values.
The comic shows a guy standing at the pearly gates, with - typically Saint Peter but only if you’re Catholic or at least Christian- barring entry. To the confused hopeful person, the saint asks,
“So how was Paradise?”
We were born into Paradise.
If you’d like a good idea of how we humans lost our way, forget Adam and Eve. Spend a little time with Dr. Carl Safina in his most recent book Alfie and Me: What Owls Know and What Humans Believe. It will reveal where we went off the rails, back in Greece, with one particular philosopher we still revere for all the wrong reasons.
The book will break your heart when you realize how we went so very wrong, elevating all things human above all things Nature, effectively putting the end to the Paradise we were given. Industry commerce BUSINESS PROFITS above all. Look where that got us. It’s worth a read, as are all his books.
We live in Paradise right here, right now. Too many of us are missing it.
One of the most powerful scenes from Hook, starring Robin Williams, underscores this point:
Are you missing it? Do you really believe that all life is work work work until you go to your “reward?”
I hope that works out for you if you do. I choose to live as though we are in Paradise. In the precious few years I have left, with the mobility I work hard to maintain, the options left to me with this aging body and a fast-changing world, I don’t want to be left on life’s sidelines with my face plastered to my phone and tubes attached to every part of me, including my bank account.
The older I get the more life I want to live. How I do that is different from you, as it should be.
I happen to love adrenaline rushes, and want more of them. That said, I’ve made changes to the kinds of sports I am willing to do, and how long I will be gone as I do them.
Several reasons for this. Here’s one:
At long last I’ve given myself the gift of a dog again, which has brought me great joy, which was long overdue.
I moved where I’ve long wanted to live, taking days to walk the Coast and let my furball pull me in all directions in celebration of her young life.
I’m exceedingly fortunate that I had a house I could sell so that I had these options. Many don’t. That said I worked very very hard for the house that I could sell.
It’s not about slowing down for me. It’s about recognizing that the shoreline, the end of this life, is now in sight. Walking to the back of my “ship” to stare at the open ocean behind me, thinking about the past, is ridiculous. Yet so many live that way.
I’m going to Bhutan. Here’s one big reason why: they strive to think about death two or three times a day. That helps keep them one of the happiest nations on earth.
My buddy Melissa made a pilgrimage there years ago and came back transformed. She spent a lot of time working with the elderly. At 66, now she is living that truth in her own life.
Like me, she’s drawn to spiritual work. As time marches us both towards our own inevitable ending, we are searching for more ways to be deeply appreciative of the life we have left.
I’m starting to save for a trip to Bhutan where I will ride horses, soak up the countryside and do my best to absorb more lessons about being alive in the moment.
As I did in Myanmar, I get to immerse myself in a Buddhist country and question my own Western values, perhaps coming away a little wiser.
Such deep cultural immersions allow me to shed more and more of the cultural insanity we continue to justify: to have more, buy more, call aging a disease. In the process we kill off our planet and the Paradise we have while wasting the sacred time we were given to love the world, ourselves and each other in it.
I’m going to die someday. Sooner than later. Accepting that is making my moments much happier right now. That’s the whole point.
Death is a gift because embracing it makes life more precious.
Let’s play.
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If someone you know needs a reminder to be in life now, please also consider
Above all choose life. Choose play. Choose being in the Paradise we were gifted.
I hear you - the knowledge of death makes life sweet. I think about death a lot. I was diagnosed 5 years ago with stage 3 cancer, and went through treatments for a year. I’m fine now, mostly out of the woods. I’ve lost a lot of my cancer crew, people who had the same diagnosis as me.
Oddly, I don’t worry anymore. I’m 48 but mentally I feel 78 in that I am happy I have had a life to live. Sometimes I notice other people my age still think they will never die. I find that curious! This is why I feel older now. Because death makes sense to me.
My mother said. “Jenn , you don’t remember anything before you were born. Don’t fear. Dying is like being born “ fine words to a 10 year old. Now 73 and taking in all the wonders after years of trauma I’ll hope to stick around for another decade . P.S. can I come back as Maya Angelou !!!