Index

No More Bucket Lists?

Longevity Daydreaming

I just listened to a live podcast on the business of longevity set up by the New York Times Dealbook people. In it, Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical school discussed the state of research into how and why human beings age and the economic effects of changing our life expectancy. In particular, one of the things that Dr. Sinclair mentioned was his thought that we could live better for that extra time.

Right now, we spend the last part of our lives getting sicker and sicker, having the economic output of our lives sucked out of us by the medical blackmail system. Since I am coming into the start of those declining years, I was particularly interested in the thought that I could do better.

I have not yet declined to the point of living in nursing home hell. I sincerely hope that I never do. I am well aware that my kids will not give up their lives to take care of me. Society doesn’t work that way anymore. I am just hoping that I am given a chance for a “clean exit.” Right now, my life insurance would not pay if I die by some form of suicide, assisted or not, but I have zero interest in spending years in severe misery just to get a death benefit. To me, “terminal illness” is not a slow, painful death sentence but a message that it is time to pick the way I leave.

Mind you, I am well aware that the “declining years” are a massive benefit to the profits of the medical industry. There is no chance that they will cooperate in this longevity stuff if they think it will cut into their profits. For that reason, I am somewhat surprised that Dr. Sinclair can hang onto his chair at Harvard. I am sure that his research is thoroughly unpopular with big pharma and their ilk.

Alzheimer’s and late-stage cancers are not in themselves terminal, but the medical industry is not interested in curing them. For that reason, people spend years or decades dying slow, painful deaths. Physical pain causes untold suffering because the opioid nannies refuse to let even a dying person have enough. Our relatives deal with expensive palliative care as our minds turn to sushi. Cheap, quick assisted suicide won’t buy any yachts for big pharma executives, though. They are going to fight that with every lobbyist they can lay dollars on.

But what if we managed to extend our “useful life” by a decade or two despite them? When we are ready to quit doing whatever bullshit job we made a living on during our younger years, can we make a second career doing something that matters? This is one of the more idealistic things that Dr. Sinclair mentions, but that isn’t even a vague possibility for almost any of us now.

So far, I have been lucky. My wife has allowed me to freeload on her. She lets me write my babbling and publish it. She hasn’t forced me to get another “job” and bring in cash, not yet.

I wrecked my kidneys on my last “job” and can no longer work a quarter of a mile from the bathroom. I am no longer useful as an “engineer” in the industrial sense of taking the physical abuse that comes with the job. My brains and the part that did the productive work are still just fine. The other half, the being on the site and kissing the bosses’ asses - that I can no longer do. I can’t say I was ever that great at kissing ass anyway, but I managed to fake it most of the time.

Right now, our business world lives on the concept that an employee is there for the bosses to abuse. If you can’t or won’t accept the abuse, you better be talented enough to make it entirely yourself. There is no place in the U. S. business environment for someone with enough self-respect to stand up for themselves.

The COVID plague has made a dent in this. Large chunks of the white-collar workforce have been working from home. It hasn’t hurt their productivity in any sense. It measurably improved it in the places where anyone bothered looking. The bosses want their peons back, though, and are fighting every way they know to force the workers back into their cubicle hell. They don’t care whether it makes the plague worse. They don’t care if it kills productivity. They need that ego-stroking more than they need productivity. “Happy employees” is an oxymoron to them - they like beating the slaves. That’s why they wanted to be bosses in the first place.

I hope that Dr. Sinclair’s research pays off. I want to think that there is a longer, happier life available. If the American medical blackmail industry has its way, though, it will only be available to millionaires that are willing to pay huge sums for it. As always, big pharma, big insurance, and big hospital corporations care nothing about the people they are supposed to be there for. All that matters is profit, full stop.