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Comment on Is it really worth the BS for a couple more years?

Yeah, I keep reminding people, especially young people about this.

What’s the use of living until you’re 70 if you spend the last ten years of life living in a body that is half dead?

I know one guy who worked in heavy industry retire at 65 and decided to just smoke, drink booze and eat junk on his couch for his retirement. He loved it for about two years. Then he had heart attack, diabetes, and early signs of dementia. He lingered for 8 more years living a miserable life before he died a slow death in hospice for about a year.

One my of neighbours is 80 years old and still at home … but for the past ten years, he’s been battling cancer, heart problems and almost semi regular infections of some kind. His entire life is just pain every day. He keeps ending up in the hospital for something … only to return a week or two later after having survived. He is just miserable all the time and the only way anyone can see him coming out of all this is to die.

I have another old friend who is 70, great heart, good weight, good bodily health … but she has Alzheimers … and she’s had signs of it for the past ten years. She’ll live for a while but what kind of life is it to not have your memory for the last ten years of your life?

Take care of yourself as much as possible now while you are young. Sure some of this is just genetics or luck but I’d rather try my best to have a decent quality of life later on than do things to guarantee I’ll be miserable at the end of my life.

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KoboldCoterie@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Based on these stories, it sounds like the real gameplan is to just take up increasingly extreme sports in your 50s and hope you die in an accident so you don’t live long enough to get decrepit.

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- rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The issue with that is that an accident might leave you in a state that’s alive but wheelchair-bound, bed-bound, blind or even fully vegetable. Vegetable might not be an issue because your consciousness is probably already gone, but it’s a huge strain on your loved ones. Being disabled might mean that you have a shit quality of life and now also have a hard time finding an easy/painless way to die.
  
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  - KoboldCoterie@pawb.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Flashbacks to having to read Ethan Frome in highschool…
    
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- NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  Granpa always wants excitement
  He’ll try anything new
  So he made some homemade bungie cords
  He would’ve been eighty-two!
  
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- TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  May I recommend BASE jumping? It is considered the most extreme sport.
  
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  - SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    TIL BASE is an acronym
    
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  - tomenzgg@midwest.social ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    How’d grampa die?
    
    BASEd.
    
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  - ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    How about cave diving? Might be cool to combine the two.
    
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WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What’s the use of living to 70 in this world? I recently hit 30, and I’m just looking around…none of this world is actually for me, I can’t do anything other than work. Society automatically hates me now by default, I can no longer do things like join the army or be a firefighter, and I can’t even spend this life to make someone else’s better.

It didn’t have to be like this either, someone decided that some people should get proper schooling, healthcare, and a full life, and others should be gaslight into thinking whatever they do isn’t enough, and just exploited for labor until they die. And if they survive, society is like “congratulations! You can finally enjoy your life! Here’s all the free time you ever wanted…in your 60’s”. You get one last free trial of what a real life looks like, when you already burned out every dopamine having neuron you have, and you can’t even enjoy it anymore. THEN society decides to give you a break.

Then we get those same old people in-charge, and we wonder why they are trying to kill us all.

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realitista@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
My grandma lived to be 99. She was still coherent and out working in the garden until 95. It’s really amazing when you see this.

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- ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  My grandma on my mom’s side lived to be 85 but she had a bit of dementia at the end.
  
  My grandpa on my dad’s side lived to be 85 too and his mind was great but his body wasn’t.
  
  But every time I hear stories of people who lived long lives, you have to compare that to the number of people they outlived or those people from their generation who didn’t make it.
  
  For every 99 year old, there were hundreds or even thousands that didn’t make it to that age. It’s really a very lucky thing to live that long … and even more like winning a lottery to live that long and have a bit of health and be in your right mind.
  
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  - realitista@lemmus.org ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I think a lot of it also isn’t luck. Avoiding alchohol and tobacco, exercising every day, maintaining contact with family, etc.
    
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    ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Most definitely involves luck in many cases. My wife currently has pulmonary fibrosis, a life shortening disease that basically slowly erodes your lungs. We did our best to take care of ourselves, good food, not too much, not too little, vitamins, health conscience, exercise, keeping active, healthy mind, staying active, staying connected … and neither being too excessive or obsessive of taking care of ourselves either.
    
    We have a doctor friend of ours who told us … it was just luck … we caught a bad flu a few years ago, just before the pandemic. I got over it, she never did and still hasn’t. She is healthy as anything otherwise but her lungs will give out in a year maybe two, possibly three but the end is coming and its horrible to think about.
    
    We did everything right, we just didn’t get lucky.
    
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