Kensington, MD, April 23, 2024 — It’s common for people to list the age of 100 as the aspirational length of their life. Centenarians are widely celebrated has having achieved greatness in just about every human culture. Why not?
Today the calendar marked seventy five years since my birth. That means three quarters of the aspirational century is now in the books.
If sports were a metaphor for life, today I started playing in the 4th and final quarter of the game. The difference is that the human fourth quarter is literally sudden death overtime. You never quite know when the clock will run out. The only thing you do know is that life can dunk on you at anytime it wants. You won’t be taking the final shot.
The logic works sort of like this. My broken wrist will take 9 months to completely heal, restored to pain-free, full function.
When you’re 18 months old, 9 months is half of your life. That’s a long time. When you’re 38, it’s more or less a blip. However, when you’re 75 and don’t know how much time remains on the clock, the functional deprivation can seem like a disproportionately huge fraction of the time you have remaining.
You’re back to square one. At 75, time matters more than ever.
When I turned 65, I was on my AT thru hike. I posted a birthday blog, the premise of which was that at 65, my utility to the American economy was about the equivalent to a snotty Klenex – useless. No longer was advertising or other marketing targeting me at that age, in spite of the fact that I had more disposable income than ever and was blowing through the Appalachian Trail like a kid in a hurry to catch the school bus. Consequently, I might as well have been dead.
Here’s the post: https://jfetig.com/2014/04/23/mourning-bells-on-madison-avenue/
Things have changed. Seventy-five-year-olds are a valuable demographic. Now, suddenly, folks want to sell me lots of stuff – senior living condos, Depends, prepaid funerals, walk-in Jacuzzi tubs, hearing aids, power chairs, retirement annuities, life insurance and Medicare supplemental policies and, of course, cures for all those supposed aches and pains.
Really?
To be honest, decrepitude is evermore visible – except through a gauzy lens. The aging body is protesting from time to time. But, I can still keep time with the fifty-somethings. (Nobody says ever 70 -something.) I’m slightly slower up the mountain on occasion, but I’m always on the summit, lugging my chainsaw, when it counts.
April 23 is a birthday shared with Shakespeare, Shirley Temple, Prince Louis of Wales, William Penn, former U.S. president James Buchanan, and others.
I wish I could write like Shakespeare…
Sisu