I saw this little blurb in the Denver Post a few weeks ago about how the first-born children of young mothers are much more likely to live past 100 years old. Being the first-born increased the probability of becoming a centenarian by 1.7 times, while being the child of a young mother (Less than 25) means you are twice as likely to live to 100. I fall into both of those categories, so I guess I should be planning a big birthday bash for 2084 (You are all invited).
Then, last week, I watched a show on the Discovery channel about what life is supposed to be like in 2057. They made it sound like medical advances will make it possible to live much longer by then. The host said something about living to be 200. What if I end up living way past 100? 120? 140? Maybe in 2084 being 100 will be more like being 80 today; certainly old, but there's still the possibility of a squeezing out few more years...
I'm not sure how I feel about this news. Old age doesn't really seem that appealing to me, so I don't know why I should be excited about having more of it. It just sounds like more years of bad knees, weak hips, expensive medicine, senility, and boring old-man cars.
But then I guess that just because I AM old doesn't mean I have to ACT old. Maybe I could still be doing fun and interesting things well into my 100s. I would want to be the kind of guy who still rides his bike on the weekends when he's 88 years old. I want to be the kind of guy who still travels around the world into his 90s. I want to be the 98 year old ripping up the bumps at Vail. I want to be the 100 year old guy who goes to race-driving school for his birthday.
I wonder how many languages I could learn by my 100th birthday. If my goal is to learn 10 by 50, then learning 20 or even 25 by my 100th shouldn't be too much of a reach. The hard part would be picking which languages to study because the first 10 are easy to pick because 10 covers almost all of the world's major languages, so beyond 10 would be smaller, less important languages and dialects like, Romanian, Dutch, Cantonese, Greek, etc.
Yeah, that's the kind of 100-year old I want to be; a biking, skiing, traveling, speeding, 100-year old that can say crazy/offensive things in 20 languages.
According to an article I saw in BBC awhile ago, to reach my full centenarian potential, I need to follow the advice of some of Cuba's many centenarians. The study found that many Cuban centenarians attribute their long life to plenty of coffee, cigars, and sex.
The little blurb also talks about how obesity contributes to global warming, but that's a topic for another day.
Speaking of cool old Cubans, today's video is Chan Chan by the Buena Vista Social Club.
2 comments:
I suppose this is good news for you, as you have about 77 years to prepare for this financially. But I think that I meet both of the criteria too, but my whole retirement plan is based on the idea that I only need to fund a retirement that lasts till I'm about 68 or so. So when I read your post, for my situation I was sorta going "Crap, how am I gonna make THAT work??" make a retirement plan stretch from about 16 years (say 52 to 68) to something more like 48+ years of retirement (52 to 100+). But then I realized that even if I'm 2x likely to reach 100 cause I'm a first-born and my mother was also way young, for me 2x0 still = 0. So I guess my original plan is still relevant. Whew - I was about to have an anourism there for a sec!!
And since you will be busy saving $$$ to fund your own 50+ year stretch of retirement, IF by chance I make it past 68, but have already exhausted my meager retirement fund that was only planned to last till 68, then PLEASE PROMISE ME that you will honor the old eskimo or native american tradition for the elderly who have managed to outlive their retirement savings and let me quietly stake myself out to be left behind with some dignity the next time the family migrates for food, to become grizzly or polar bear bait - instead of becoming a burden to society and my family. Im serious dude!!! I dont want to end up draining YOUR retirement saving cause you have to keep buying me Depends for 40 years or something. OK??
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