Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. OR…

The original quote appears to date from 1947. Willard Motley wrote it in his novel Knock on Any Door.

For years, I subscribed to that quote. Fighter pilot, test pilot, motorcycle rider, skydiver. Life was best lived upside down at the speed of sound (or faster). 

I looked at old people and thought, “That’s not for me.” I watched my grandparents, then my parents, and uncle, fight losing battles against ugly, Alzheimer’s-related deaths. My sister and I made secret vows to not let each other go out that way. Let’s face it, for the average 100-year-old, daily life is not great. 

But what if it was?

Many authors have toyed with the idea of longer, even immortal, lifespans. Live forever in a wheelchair, unable to enjoy the world around me? Lose my short-term memory, and ramble incessantly about things that bothered me when I was twenty? Wear my pants pulled so high that my belt is just below my nipples and yell at kids to get the hell off my lawn? Get to the point where I don’t recognize my own children? This last happened to my mother. Not fun. Not pretty. Not what I want.

What if, as David Sinclair says, 80 is the new 50? What if you could live 150 years, all of them good? You could remain mobile, active, energetic, and lucid? Sign me up.

Someone told me that they wanted to live as long as they could, because, after all, once they were dead, they’d be dead forever. No matter how you slice it, “forever” is much longer than anything short of eternity. (I accept that there is lots of room for argument here – resurrection, life after death, reincarnation, spinning the karmic wheel, the Singularity, etc.) 

So far, this has been a theoretical piece. What if it weren’t? What if aging was a disease that could be cured? 

Click-bait cliffhanger here. Tune in for the next post!