The Future of Aging Just Might Be in Margaritaville
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- Saving enough money - Lack of stress - Avoidance of injury - Regular exercise
The rest seems to be tweaking. If you get the above right, then you will probably be fine. I would especially like to warn about taking on too much stress in order to get the money. There is a balance there and it's important to find out where it is for you. Don't go into stress debt! (Note: different people react to stress differently -- listen to your body)
Avoidance of injury is massive. If you get a chronic issue (like pain from joint or bad back or whatever), it can cause you to abandon exercise and when you get older it's a particularly rapid downhill journey from there. When you are younger, it seems like everything will heal. It won't. Be careful. Things come back to haunt you in the end.
Finally, no matter how unpleasant you find exercise, or how difficult it seems to be to do it -- it will be 10x or even 100x worse when you are older. Start as young as possible (i.e. today). If you have quit, then today is the day to start again. You can start again as many times as you want. If you start again every day, then you can never quit ;-) If you maintain regular exercise through your whole life, then when you get older it won't be so hard to continue. If you don't, that rapid slide into decline is almost inevitable. Especially, once you have trouble walking, it's pretty close to the end of the story as far as I can tell.
The other ingredient which I have only been recently aware of (thanks in large part to reading "Why we sleep") is getting a full night's sleep. That's hard for me, because I am naturally a "night owl" and light sleeper with kids who need to get up early, but I am aware of the need and try to get 7 or 8 hours as best I can.
Edit: One article that supports my view (I found it in my bookmarks, there might be better) https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/the-optima...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28877457
basically goal is to trigger cellular autophagy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-018-0033-y
But then again, you can't break your Appointment at Samara.
> Early to rise early to bed makes a man healthy wealthy and dead. > James Thurber
Generally the things that help you grow old also help your quality of life.
The hard part is to recognize if the reasons for the previous success still apply in the modern world. See "Chesterton's Fence".
Not at all. Traditions become traditions over long periods of time. Thus, they tend to be collections of things that haven't caused a societal failure in the last several hundred years, which is a much better record than not causing immediate failure.
(Yes, this is absurd. Yes, I've told him this is clearly a bad idea. Yes, it's actually true.)
Which is to say one should be cautious of survivorship biases and the role of context. Judging traditions as successful based on a limited context where they haven't obviously failed both ignores the situation upon which they may depend and other scenarios where precisely those might have failed. Like the other people who have tried what my friend has and been rendered into chunky salsa for it.
So yes, traditions are typically worthwhile, just not necessarily for their apparent or stated purposes.
... Jews have close to five hundred different dietary interdicts. They may seem irrational
to an observer who sees purpose in things and defines rationality in terms of what he can
explain. ...
But it remains that whatever the purpose, the Kashrut survived approximately three millennia not
because of its “rationality” but because the populations that followed it survived. It
most certainly brought cohesion: people who eat together hang together. Simply it aided
those that survived because it is a convex heuristic. Such group cohesion might be also
responsible for trust in commercial transactions with remote members of the community.
Though things that are harmful without benefit tend to die out over time.
So while tradition doesn't make something magically useful, many traditional things are useful, often in unobvious ways. Of course, many do not...
Volunteering with young people doesn't mean you have to live next door to them (and listen to their music, carousing, etc).
Anyway, these places look like a riot! It's like college life without the hassle of exams. And yes they probably even have a "hookup" culture.
These could be specialized for all types of interests. Imagine something like a "hacker house" but on a community level...spend your days coding, debating, woodworking...all with people who love it too.
55 seems too young to get into something like this, but I could definitely see 60-75. After 75, seems like you want serious peace and quiet so these places probably aren't a good fit.
I absolutely cannot wait to retire!
When I started as a developer, it was NORMAL for an employer to:
- 1:1 match 401k fully, some even offered pensions
- offer PAID vacation time, not this bullshit scam "unlimited PTO" which is really just unpaid vacation.
- offer full zero-deductible/zero-contribution health insurance
- offer real equity to rank-and-file employees
- realize you came in to work at 9 and left around 5 and weekends were yours.
Practically everything about the working world has become progressively worse and I cannot wait to be done with it. I really feel sorry for people entering the industry now, they will probably see health insurance benefits worsen or disappear, and may even see themselves paid by the hour.
Even tier-one companies offering me positions with "top of market" pay have offered me health insurance that requires a monthly contribution...with a family these contributions are often meaningful. These are a stealth pay cut. If you are being paid $200k but have to contribute $1k a month for your health insurance contribution...
Paid vacation is becoming as rare as a white rhino. Even big companies are moving to the "unlimited PTO" model because they know full well no one actually exploits the "unlimited" time off; if they do, they put their jobs at risk. Companies are increasingly out of the business of accounting for your vacation time. Amazingly, there are some rubes out there that think "unlimited PTO" is a perk. if you don't see vacation days accrued on your paystub, the IRS says you are getting none.
Once again, when I entered the industry, you didn't even have to ask about these benefits, they were assumed. Indeed, lots of companies did 2:1 matching of 401k. Try finding that now.
"Small" business (200-500 bodies) out of the DC area.
- I have matching up to 8% on 401k
- I use my unlimited PTO for two week vacations about once every two quarters when work is slower. I take random Fridays/Mondays off often.
- My insurance is free.
- No equity, I'll give you that.
- I get in whenever, leave whenever, and work remotely as I want. My manager is completely fine with this and trusts me to do my work.
It sounds like you're at the wrong company.
Responder "flerchin" below, please tell me what employer offers "unlimited PAID vacation"....do you even know what "paid" vacation is?
Here is what it is. If you accrue four weeks of vacation and leave the company, they give you a check for four weeks of pay.
When I left a job in 2009, I had six weeks accrued. I walked out with a check big enough to buy a car. They HAVE to give you the money when they are accounting for PAID time off. This is also why employers that offer PAID vacation will cap it or require that you use a certain number of days per year...they need to actually account for these as days they are obliged to pay you for - its TAX LAW. In the public sector, there have been a lucky few that have negotiated away this cap. When my father retired from the fire dept he had THREE YEARS of sick time accrued...they had to pay him for it! It wasn't 100% pay, but it was still a huge check.
"unlimited PTO" is NOT PAID vacation. It just isn't. Unlimited PTO is the company telling you it will look the other way if you decide not to come into work on a certain day if you have followed company guidelines for scheduling the day off. By accounting rules, they are actually giving you ZERO actual paid vacation days. Yes, zero. Ask your accountant. Amazingly they convinced a generation of workers that the new model was a perk.
If you do not see vacation day accrual on your paystub, you are not getting paid vacation. So says the IRS, so I don't really care if you downvote me.
PTO is accrued, is part of the compensation package, and when unused results in a check for those hours of unused PTO at the salary rate in effect when employment terminated.
The "unlimited personal time off" scam is a compensation regression from the previously standard accrued/earned PTO package.
For employees with leverage, the "unlimited time off" can turn out fine if they take advantage of it without harming their role in the company.
But, for such employees, the previous system of accrued/earned PTO is typically advantageous anyways because they will often be able to take time off or "work from home/remotely" while effectively taking time off without depleting their PTO balance, leaving it for payment when employment terminates.
In any case, for the majority of employees, "unlimited time off" is really just a loss of compensation as they don't usually have the leverage and/or diligence to take sufficient time off before termination.
<anecdata>
At a past startup, in an attempt to get better terms in an upcoming funding round, the executives got the brilliant idea of switching from a standard PTO policy to "unlimited". They sold it to the employees at an all-hands meeting as a compensation upgrade.
The sales and operations folks celebrated, while us engineers, who had largely taken zero vacation under continuous crunch since starting immediately asked what would happen to our respective unused PTO balances.
Their response? The unused PTO would be zeroed "now that it was unnecessary, since you could take unlimited vacation anyways."
It was a sleazy attempt to erase the unused PTO balance commitments to all employees from the books before raising the next round. At everyone's expense.
We engineers called the executives out on it, and threatened to quit immediately which would force them to cut PTO checks to all of us - and said we'd be in tomorrow to interview and renegotiate our positions if desired.
That forced them to instead freeze our unused PTO balances. We were unable to prevent them from pivoting to the "unlimited time off" plan however, everyone was effectively demoted that week. I did however receive my substantial unused PTO check when I eventually left that sinking ship.
</anecdata>
Hopefully that (true story) helps illustrate the difference...
Meanwhile, in the scam world of "unlimited PTO", I have found it is common for managers to ask that employees delay or reschedule vacation.
Anyway this whole subthread illustrates that many HN readers lack basic financial literacy...they don't even understand their own compensation
Unlimited PTO is just one more way the Suits outsmarted the nerds
Aging has an monstrously high economic cost, and is probably the only area of medicine in which the ratio of that cost to the amount spent on R&D to try to reduce that cost is vanishingly small.
Perhaps people should take more responsibility for their own wellbeing instead of gambling on there being some massive medical breakthrough.
Atheists have no reason to fear death, because then there is nothing.
Religious people only have to fear death if they are living in a way they know is wrong.
So, best bet is to live consistent with the majority of lasting world religions, and either there is nothing or there is blissful afterlife. Plus, the present life will be better, too. Win, win!
Well, I'm not afraid of being dead. I sure do like being alive though, and would prefer that to continue!
Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death itself.
I don’t think that’s true from a global optimization perspective. If you’re trying to maximize contented moments, it makes sense to spend time thinking about how to extend life (assuming you’re talking about the number of happy moments for people who are currently alive), even if those moments still must eventually cease. Because trillions of years of happy moments is a lot more than 80-100 years of happy moments. Only if you’re trying to minimize unhappy moments does removing fear of death become a better goal.
However, from a local optimization perspective, since there is little anyone can individually do about their medium term probability of death, I agree that figuring out how to cope with and minimize that fear is probably the best strategy.
To me - as an atheist - not believing in an afterlife makes death a lot scarier. Once you're dead it's over.
This is somewhat trite, IMHO.
I don't fear the state of being dead, I fear getting there (death is unlikely to be fun) and I deeply fear not existing any more, and my time coming to an end. I like being.
It seems effort is more efficiently spent in changing perspective in ourselves and those around us, rather than trying to fight off inevitable old age and death.
By happy I do not mean the transitory kind of happiness we get from eating ice cream or watching a good movie, though that sort of happiness is important. What I mean is the stronger and longer lasting happiness we get from the confidence of being able to work through difficult circumstances instead of casting off the difficult circumstances.
This is because difficulty is inevitable in life, and we will feel happier looking toward the future if we know we can deal with difficulty instead of needing to avoid difficulty. So, knowing we can help people dealing with a difficult affliction like dementia means we can form relationships with less concern whether it will all turn out badly. Otherwise, we will instead tend to insulate ourselves from the perceived hardship, which will cut down our ability to form strong relationships, and strong relationships appear to be essential for human happiness.
(You wouldn’t want to entirely escape it —- a little fear is good to keep you from doing stupid thing.)
Another lady of my acquaintance said "Old age is not for the timid". There's plenty to fear about getting old.
Lack of focused activities are also a factor in wasting away