5 ms·
I guess I will be the downer dude. What KK's analysis elides is the entire concept of mental and physical decline. We are working with population distribution
by downut 6y ago
I guess I will be the downer dude.
What KK's analysis elides is the entire concept of mental and physical decline. We are working with population distributions here, but generally speaking, there is a non-trivial likelihood that your 60s are going to be less productive per unit hour, than your 50s. And your 70s, vs. 60s. KK speculates what if he gets to 99! Amazing what he could accomplish. Yeah well this 59 yo can still do decent endurance feats. But I find it very hard to stay bent over a floor tiling mosaics, a very deep love of mine. And the management has to manage the bending over the plants in the garden.
Of course though, I am still as mentally sharp as I was at age 28, when the string of cool things started to happen. Or maybe not. I have an arsenal of well maintained skills to keep me productive, but not seeing much new to add to it.
- smallnamespace 6y agoDon't worry, you can still become president in your late 70s.
- skoll43 6y agocountdown to mental decline, now thats a downer haha
- melling 6y agoSometime in this century humans will likely figure out how to add a couple extra healthy decades to the average lifespan. Depends on our effort to discover it, of course. Take care of yourself now.
- ganafagol 6y agoIn the last 100 years, the average life expectancy of a 50 year old male in, say, western europe has increased by less that a decade. Several decades more? Not gonna happen.
- melling 6y ago“The life expectancy at birth for men has increased by 20.5 years, from 58.8 years in 1920–1922 to 79.3 years in 2009–2011.” Not sure what it would have been given you were 50 years old in 1920. Anyway, you seem to not believe that science over the next 60-80 years will advance much. People live to be over 100 today. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out why. Science will advance more in the next 50 years than it did in the last 100.
- ganafagol 6y agoI was talking about life expectancy for a 50 year old. Life expectancy at birth has increased significantly more because of reduced risk of death for newborns, infants and even teenagers. But once you are of a certain age, those risks are gone, and there not much has changed. No, I don't believe in scifi. Theses are all fantasies. Just as little as I believe in living on mars being a great alternative to earth. Nice scifi story, but in real life, things are different. If you just look at the spread obesity in the U.S. and its effect on life expectancy, please tell me again with a straight face that you expect "people live to be over 100" in the future. And no, they don't today. You are talking about a really really small minority, and that minority was already there 50 years ago. In 1970. Edit: Life expectancy for a 50 yeah old in 1920 in Sweden was about 9 years shorter than today.
- melling 6y agoWhy, yes people do live to be over 100 in certain groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think we’ll figure out how to extend this to more people. Sure, if you don’t take care of yourself, science can only do so much.
- markus_zhang 6y agoI think there is one implicit advantage elder people have: they are generally out of trouble of taking care of kids and retirement gives them even more free time. But again their energy level is lower so maybe those free hours don't add up.