Live To 105 (Or More)? Who Could Actually Afford To? And WHY Would You?

"When I see  these oldsters lifting 16 pound barbells with a pose that suggests they've just run a marathon I snarl at them, and say 'Look at me!  I can't run!  I can't lift barbells!.....Who are you to say old age isn't for me?

Old age is for anybody who gets there. Old age is for the healthy, the strong, the tough, the intrepid, the sick, the weak, the cowardly, the incompetent. People who run ten miles every morning before breakfast and people  who live in a wheelchair... Old age is less  a matter of fitness or courage than of luck equals longevity.

The compensations of getting old, such as they are, aren't in the field of athletic prowess. I think that's why the posters with the tag 'old age isn't for sissies' annoy  me so much. They're not only insultng to sissies they're beside the point."  -  Ursula K. LeGuin, 'No Time To Spare'

"Some people think they don't have to worry about aging because science will soon be able to stop it.  The unlikeliness of a perfect fix aside, cure aging then what? A great expanse of shapeless, seasonless life?  Greater competition for resources, jobs, partners and everything else on this already crowded, environmentally failing planet?"    Louise Aronson, M.D., Elderhood, p. 385


The late Nebula Award winning science fiction writer, Ursula K. LeGuin, doesn't go easy on the  super agers and longevity humpers in her book named above, from which that quote came (pp. 10-11). And why would she?  She's sensible and intelligent enough to recognize (as she continues) that:  "nothing guarantees health to the old". No amount of exercise, arugula, religious devotion (found to be an important "key" to longer life), social networking or whatever, will make a dime's worth of difference.   As she puts it (ibid.):

"No matter what you eat and how grand your abs and blabs are, still your bones can let you down, your heart can get tired of its incredible, nonstop lifelong athletic performance ... and there's all that wiring and stuff inside that can short circuit".

As in trigger cancer of one organ or the other, no matter how healthy you believe you are or how terrific your diet is.   Besides, you could run into other bad luck as well, including accident, or serious illnesses, like Alzheimer's.   Here I recall my sister-in law Krimhilde, one of the healthiest, fittest people I knew. A lifelong vegetarian who hiked 5 miles a day plus did yoga for 2 hours. 

  But it all went south at her 80th birthday when she developed Alzheimer's.

Hence, Ursula K. Le Guin's POV is that of a welcome realist as opposed to the delirious longevity pushers.

This is relevant again as too many are being deluded into pop-eyed foolishness published in the form of bunkum in the mainstream media.  In this case how you too can live to be 100+ just like a 105 y/o lady sprinter (Ida Keeling) on the cover of Sunday's PARADE.  Folks, do not be deceived by such fanciful longevity B.S. This lady is the exception and not the rule, similar to one Orville Rogers (another centenarian) featured in a MONEY magazine issue from November, 2018, e.g.


Then noting he "retired at age 60" according to the piece, after decades in a high- paying, sweet bread desk job. . The authors of the piece then went on to admit retirement planners "are losing sleep" over the amount ($195k)  most 65 year  olds currently have socked away.   This interjects the issue of how super elderly folks will live - if they lack cushy pension, health care benefits and other support.    As the MONEY article registers the potential inflation:

"At just 2 percent inflation the gallon of milk that cost you $3.75 today will cost you $6.79 in 30 years."

That means  a 65 year old today will need to sock away at least $5 million in a nest egg to be able to live to at least 100 years - and that assumes only one nursing home stay (or nursing assistance at home)  of no more than 6 months, one time in that duration of 35 years.

It is  indeed this  aspect of financing any extended longevity these  longevity research geniuses never broach, or provide practical solutions.  How will the super elderly then maintain financial security  and their implied independence until they finally shuffle this mortal coil?  These are pertinent questions given Social Security  will reduce benefits 25% by 2035 and Medicare faces insolvency by 2026 - meaning many seniors will face having to enter privatized plans. Neither of the articles in PARADE, or MONEY or an earlier one in TIME  (March, 2015)e.g.


Address any of these matters, choosing to nibble around the edges with impractical baloney, babble and "hope" i.e. "corporations will have to change" which is not a plan.  WHO is going to make them change? A 105 year old granny who likes to do sprints?  A Business friendly GOP Senate? Give me a break.

Even if these "super ager" elderly somehow managed to find a company that'd hire them to work at least until 90 or so, it's still doubtful they'd amass enough money for future support. Given increased health care costs-  the fastest rising aspect of the national budget  ( and no end in sight) -  most people would probably need to at least win a state lotto of ten million to be able to live to 120 without being in penury.  And at least $2 million to live to 100 without raiding dumpsters and eating pet food. But why don't those feeding you the  super ager claptrap tell you any of that? Why would they? It kind of  adds a buzzkill aspect to their hype.

TIME - in its own take- wrongly  assumes in its prologue to the initial piece that: "Everyone wants to live longer", but that desire comes with caveats galore for rational folk . For example, why would anyone today,  at say age 67 or 68,  want to live to even 100 when numerous "hells" are set to be unleashed especially as climate change- global warming enters its ultimate phase?

If you think the climate hiccups being experienced now - including the constant polar vortex intrusions  and superstorms - are a big deal, stay tuned for the first year of no seasons and ensuing heat waves lasting 90-120 days with mean temperatures 100-110F. Even before then, say by 2025-2030 we will likely see electrical blackouts over extended periods, water shutdowns (or breakdowns of decaying urban water delivery systems, since we haven't done shit to repair them) and even power grids collapsing from excess demand - with tens of millions trying to "stay cool",  keeping thermostats at 81F.

You really want to stretch your years out to live in those conditions?  REALLY? Well sure, the richest one percent will because they can afford to - living in their golden -gated condos far from the decaying cities that will have no backup power.   But again, where would you get the money to support yourself even if you wanted to live so long and possessed the genes needed to enhance the odds?   Most finance folks I know agree those aspiring to such need to win at least one lotto, maybe two. Or come into a  $2- 4m inheritance or have rich adult offspring to provide support.  (The super agers shown in the media pieces are all either independently wealthy or have external sources of income to support their lifestyles. Ida Keeling, for example, is blessed with a "real estate investor" youngest daughter.  What about the oldsters who have no offspring?)

Getting away from the exceptions like Orville Rogers and Sprinter lady Keeling , we know geezers use up more expensive medical care than any other demographic, up to $500m / yr. of which $150 million is spent in the final month of  life.  Consider: In the 10 years since the last financial crisis that works out to a total of $1.5 billion spent in the final month of life.

Fortunately, facing off against the longevity nuts we have another realist and strong rationalist,  Barbara Ehrenreich, who has been trying to get more elderly to raise their consciousness regarding death. To treat it as a transition and not something to be feared and despised, e.g

As she puts it (The Nation, 'The Great Equalizer', October, 2018, p. 32):

"No matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds. In death we will once again be equals - and so an egalitarian politics also means accepting this outcome.

You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible means to postpone it.  Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of  an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever surprising world around us."

Of course, most Americans are squeamish in terms of death - even discussing it, tending toward euphemisms- and more likely to buy into the codswallop of the longevity researchers. That would be the clique of life extension quacks and fanatics   who believe many of us could even live to 142.  (To which Janice first responded, "Those oldsters had better improve on the art of begging! They'll need it!")

Ouch! A dose of reality as usual.

Ehrenreich herself got her wake up call in the course of writing her last book, 'Bright -Sided' in which she used her own breast cancer diagnosis as the basis for a striking critique of the whole "positive thinking" twaddle. In this case, puncturing the trope that people with cancer (like me, prostate cancer) are most likely to survive if they keep thinking optimistically about recovery.

Then in her latest book;  'Natural Causes: An Epidemic Of Wellness, The Certainty Of Dying, And Killing Ourselves to Live Longer' ,  she blows the lid off - revealing the body's macrophages as the ultimate 3rd column enemy.  While in normal conditions they are the body's 'blue collar workers' - disposing of dead and injured cells, acting as a vanguard of defense, they can also quickly deviate into a more sinister role - as when they aid and abet  cancerous growth. In that case,  "they serve as cheerleaders of death accumulating at the site of cancerous tumors and encouraging their growth".

In the case of males, the late life -taker is prostate cancer (which I am still dealing with) and then making the critical decision - if advanced cancer rears its head- to submit to one of the most barbaric  treatments possible.  That would be hormone therapy which basically destroys what makes a man a man, biologically, as revealed in this eye opening video:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtIfsvQh2qI 

Most men faced with this choice will already have reached the age of 75-77. So the question becomes: Is it really worth it to go through all the agony of the side effects for a few extra years?  In his bid for more years he must be willing to accept:  developing hard, excess breast tissue - which then may have to be surgically removed,  5x higher cardiac risk, diabetes,  shrunken genitals ("they are reduced to prepubescent stage" according to one researcher) not to mention severe depression and cognitive impairment akin to Alzheimer's.  Many guys in the support group to which I belong  (Team Inspire) are still willing to grab 5-10 more years of life - even in reduced life quality- which those like Ehrenreich regard as absurd.  I would add here the opinion of UPenn oncologist and bioethicist Zeke Emmanuel,  from an essay he wrote some years ago: 'Why I Hope To Die At 75' , e.g.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/:

"Here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic."

In her own take,  Barbara Ehrenreich  observes that contemporary society is:

 "so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it."  

In Ehrenreich's view there is one time-honored balm for the anxiety of approaching self-dissolution. And it isn't more chemo, more lab tests more cryotherapy or getting your balls cut off to fight prostate cancer at age 75. No, it is "submergence of oneself into something larger than oneself".

For most Americans, like the guys in the prostate cancer forum, a truly alien concept.  For my own take, plowing more money into Alzheimer's research is a better investment than squandering it on fulfilling longevity fantasies.

See Also:

• Healthy Eating-Living Leads To Massive Medical Co...

Pursuing "Immortality" & Treating Aging As A "Disease": The Province of Cranks And Quacks

Barbara Ehrenreich has provided an antidote to the imbecilic view of aging as a disease, in her book 'Natural Causes'.  Basically the only reason humans fight aging (and mortality) is to continue the fantasy of a 'neverending', individual conscious self. 


In a recent Financial Times piece featuring an interview with bio-researcher and wunderkind Laura Deming, we learn:

"Anti-aging science seems to be the latest gold rush in youth-obsessed Silicon Valley. Like long-ago emperors, some tech elites are pursuing immortality through unproven treatments."

Let's first accept as a proposition that pursuing immortality for humans is a fool's errand. The corollary to that is treating aging as a "disease" with the daft aim to eliminate it like one might eliminate Measles or smallpox is equally balmy.  One of the best retorts to that bollocks came via a comment from one FT reader: 

"Aging is NOT a disease. It's life's  natural conclusion. Death is necessary for renewal of the species. Imagine being 200 years old or 300 years old. Eventually, the planet will be filled with old people."

Terse, but splendid logic which only a quack would attempt to refute. Why? Well because the quest for immortality is an idiotic fantasy which gets more at the nature of  human hubris in refusing to accept that death is an integral part of evolution.  Thus,  we need death to remove species' members to make way for either better adapted offshoots or new species. Imagine if Australopithecus never died out to make way for humans!  Imagine if the dinosaurs never died out to make way for the mammals.

But this tripe is now circulating from otherwise sober heads, even in journals such as Nature, wherein one reads in one issue (June 28, 2018): 

“If there is a mortality plateau, then there is no limit to human longevity,” says Jean-Marie Robine, a demographer at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, who was not involved in the study.

That would mean that someone like Chiyo Miyako, the Japanese great-great-great-grandmother who, at 117, is the world’s oldest known person, could live for years to come — or even forever, at least hypothetically."

Live forever, because this demographer  (and others) found one Japanese elder who's 117? Give me a break! And this is supposedly on the basis of "statistical analysis" which then means either that analysis omitted selection effects or  indicates a total misreading of the data. In this case that a mortality plateau translates to the conclusion that "human lifespan doesn't have an upper threshold."  Did any of these specialists even take a course in basic logic? Evidently not.  And who are the main morons behind this twaddle?  Well, "anti-aging startups".    E.g.

Anti-Aging Startups Leading the Longevity Research Revolution

https://www.boldbusiness.com/.../anti-aging-startups-leading-longevity-research-revol...

1. Cached

Now, it is essential  here to differentiate those like Deming- who simply seek  to "increase humans' 'health span'  (i.e. the number of years of healthy life), from the brigade of cranks and quacks  in techie startups who want to convince you humans can actually aspire to achieve some cockeyed "immortality".  And to that end, the sheer chutzpah to treat aging as a "disease" that can be cured. 

Rather than aim at immortality like the cranks and quacks, Ms. Deming's goal is a tad more temperate:  simply to extend healthy years for normal lifespans. When asked by the FT about one of her experiments pertaining to longer life for worms, she references "starving them, mutating them, then cutting their gonads off." 

Translated to humans, think of near  starvation diets (like me doing the 5:2, 800 calories a day, 7 days a week), altering key genes and also cutting off the sex organs and hormone-producing glands (testes, ovaries). Somehow I doubt that sort of extreme 'cure' would fly for most Americans . But it gets to the core of what REAL measures would be needed to add even ten (quality) years to the lifespan of humans, far less 40 or 50!  In other words, vastly more draconian measures than merely getting a blood transfusion from a penniless millennial at a vampire center, e.g.

Blood ready to be infused into old farts - to try to stave off aging - at a vampire center

 Indeed when the FT asked Deming for real world evidence she replied "Korean eunuchs!"  Quickly adding she "wouldn't mess with her own fertility".  Gee, that's nice to know!  Bear in mind this is merely to add a few healthy years, not to advance some absurd proposal for indefinitely long lifespan.

At least to her credit, Deming admits there is no 'magic bullet' to stopping or slowing aging.  This shows she has her feet planted on the ground.  Also, her head isn't up in the clouds some place like the gaggle of longevity promoters who believe they can get human life spans up to 120 or 140 years, or "living forever".  (They'd do better to conquer Alzheimer's disease first!)

Author (and Atheist) Barbara Ehrenreich appears to grasp how this yen to conquer aging and death arose. She  is convinced it's all about a form of egotism, in this case belief in a never ending ego as tied to the conscious self.  As she writes in her book 'Natural Causes: An Epidemic Of Wellness, The Certainty Of Dying, And Killing Ourselves to Live Longer''


"Contemporary society is so deeply invested in the idea of an individual conscious self that it becomes both logically and emotionally impossible to think of a world without it."

She elaborates much more several pages on,

“No matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds. In death we will once again be equals - and so an egalitarian politics also means accepting this outcome.  You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible means to postpone it.  Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of  an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever surprising world around us."

This is a tough pill for the longevity cult  and their startups to accept, but eventually they will.  Her take here is the basic atheistic premise that death represents nothingness, no being at all, hence no consciousness of self or anything. If one had to compare it to something in human experience it would be closest to general anesthesia for a major surgery.  No sensation of time, and no memory...nothing.  So Ehrenreich's theory is that the longevity quacks are pursuing their fantasy as a means to escape this ego nothingness, the loss of fundamental personal identity. This makes perfect sense given the techie launching startups in this area perhaps possess the biggest egos - next to hedge fund owners and investment bankers. So it's no surprise they'd desire to go on forever.

But because they can't accept this ego-destroying state that Ehrenreich proposes, this condition of perpetual nothingness-  and they don't buy into religious immortality -  they conjure up a physical equivalent.  A kind of  ersatz biological immortality  based on cockeyed notions of extending life indefinitely. (Invoking the statistics of "death risk plateaus")

Now, don't get me wrong.   This is not to say there aren't advantages to living longer, provided good health is part of the package. (See e.g. WSJ,  May 21, 'The Advantages and Limits Of Living To 100', p. A13).  However, one huge disadvantage is that one needs to have plenty of wealth to support those added years. 

 In previous posts to do with this topic I already noted a  $550,000 net worth is probably okay for most 65 year -olds currently to have a comfortable 20 years of retirement.  Now extend that to 95 but with 2 percent inflation (conservatively) factored in each year and you come to $770,000. Take the tally on to age 105 and you are looking at $880,000 and to 115 we get, $990,000 and to 125 you're at $1.1 million and to 135 you're at $1.21 million.  We haven't  reached 142 yet, and I've not even factored into the mix medical inflation.

The reality now? Most Americans currently at age 65 don't even half that $550k net worth amount saved up, say to last until 85.  (The amount cited from a recent MONEY magazine issue was $195k)   So how are they going to last until 100 or 120 or 142 as some cockeyed longevity research quacks have suggested?  It is pure nonsense and wishful thinking. Also believing you will be hired by some corporation at age 90 or 100 or 110.  

If you believe that codswallop you probably believe in unicorns and flying monkeys too.

So why this obsession with increasing human lifespans when the last thing we need is a burgeoning population of oldsters?  It's because a segment of our species admits to no limits - either biological (in terms of lifespan), in energy consumption, or sex or anything else.  These denizens live in a universe of their own and the only way they will be brought back to reality is when it begins to actually bite. Such as when the energy finally runs out, the sex can no longer be sustained even with 200 mg of Viagra a day, and when the runaway greenhouse hits,  turning the planet into a massive oven - to cook all species.

As a prostate cancer survivor unsure of how many years he has left, or what the disease is doing now (though the last PSA test May 14 did show the velocity slowing  from 0.21 ng/ml / mo. to 0.12 ng/ml/ mo. , i.e. over two consecutive 6 month intervals).   I am trying to take an open minded approach combined with a realistic one.  Basically this means (and my primary care doc agrees) postponing any hormone treatments until I become symptomatic.   Thus, in my frame of reference, longevity is automatically tempered, not unbounded. It's measured in increments of additional quality years, not dozens or "forever". I look at each added day of quality as a relative achievement in quality of life and less so in quantity 

This is because I value quality of life more than quantity  - as these longevity startups ought to as well. Hence, using their funds to pursue Alzheimer's research, not living forever.  For me there is no ambition to live until 100 or 120.  Only to postpone the worst effects of the cancer as long as I can., and take those quality years as they come.  If that means only to age 77 or 80, so be it. I am not greedy, and I certainly don't inhabit the unhinged fantasy island of these startup longevity folks.

  I wouldn't presume to assert my approach is right for everyone, but for me it works, and I don't need to win a Powerball of $300 million to make it so.