I felt obliged to share this pearl with you folk, emailed by HH the other day:

A lot of people say, "Who wants to live to be 80?"

They keep on saying it until they are 79.

So very true; here's an example from a youngster of 22 from the past week:

But after listening to Dr Daniel Callahan, international program director of The Hastings Center (a bioethics think-tank), I for one am not convinced that money spent on longevity research couldn’t be better spent elsewhere. After all, there are very few compelling reasons for extending life spans, and a multitude of negative repercussions if we do.

...

All things considered, the prospect of extending my life an extra ten years or so isn’t really appealing - not necessarily for personal reasons, but for the impact that it would have on those around me. Who would be expected to take care of me for another decade?

Where is the foresight? Where is the planning, evident in saving for financial security in later life, yet so very absent when it comes to the security of your health? I've said it before, but I think it merits saying often:

The lifestyle choices most likely to dimish your health, shorten your life and leave you more frail and suffering in old age - not to mention poor, broken by the cost of therapies - are no big secret. ... Yet still, the majority of the population in more comfortable, wealthy locations in the world persists in indulging. Such is the power of choice, and the consequence of that primate-scale level of time preference we humans have inherited. We've all stolen quality and years of life from the person we will be in future decades - and some of us just keep on doing it right up until we're living (and dying) in the pocket we once picked.

The disconnected observer might suspect that most people are eagerly engaged in plotting the misfortune, illness and demise of their future selves. At this point, our inaction in the face of great opportunity in biotechnology research, and easy means to support meaningful longevity science, is doing far more damage than the overeating and lack of exercise.

This must change if we are not all too soon to be old and broken, looking back and cursing our younger selves for fools whilst suffering and dying from age-related degenerations of the body and mind.

Technorati tag: aging, life extension

Posted by Reason at April 5, 2007 8:38 PM | TrackBack (1)