Aging Now A Good Thing
Did you know that aging is a good thing now? That’s right, a new study found that 71% of American respondents are not only accepting but embracing aging, now more than ever.
And, 57% consider the pandemic a wake-up call that has turned anti-aging on its head. After all, what’s the alternative, right? Not something we can ignore as easily as we could before.
Humans have all along been notoriously good at ignoring the one thing that is certain to occur, death. Check out Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Denial of Death for how this feature of our human hardwiring has helped us to transcend what would otherwise be such crippling fear that we’d never get anything done.
But now, or at least for now, eyes wide open on how precious life really is. I just hope it lasts for the many, as it has for me.
How I Learned
In 2004, I got hit with a pretty bad infection. It was the strain of Strep A that people get in their throats. Typically they take antibiotics for Strep Throat, boom done.
Strep A in the arm is a different sort of bug event, the kind that can lead to a 99% chance of death, threat of upper right quadrant amputation, 7 weeks in the hospital, 10 trips to the OR for debriding and grafting, 4 months out of work, 6 months every day in PT…
So yeh, you bet every day is a gift and, again, I am hoping that the many will get that and keep that perspective without having to go through all that.
What Makes is So?
The other really cool finding is that, when asked if they could pick an age to be forever what would it be, it wasn’t 20 years old. The most common response was actually 36!
But wait, millennials are supposed to be so anxious and unhappy. Not according to this data, which suggests that, notwithstanding the intensity of career and family responsibilities at this age, there is a lot of joy to go around too.
And, all I can think of is: Life is what our thoughts make it. (Marcus Aurelius). So, what the hey, it’s all a story we make up in our head anyway, why not make it great at any and every age.
What do you think of that? Let us know…