Ghosts in The Attic

What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life

What is the concept of living a long life? You either do or you don’t. Sure, there are things you can do to try to live longer but it may all come to naught. There is many a grave filled with people who were young and healthy. Tomorrow I’m going with my husband to a funeral for his close friend. The gentleman was only 50 and just didn’t wake up one morning.

Last year was my mid-life crisis where I started thinking more about death and time. I was 38 and things were starting to go downhill for me health wise. I spent 20 years of my life smoking, which is considerably not ideal. I have eaten terribly. Haven’t exercised. Enjoyed plenty of drugs in my teens. If I wanted to live to be 100 I’m certainly not off to a great start.

It was last year that I looked at my life, took a big risk to go study abroad, start eating better, and exercising more. The idea of my own mortality was creeping up on me. I had an incredible time in Europe, life changing as it may have been, but for the first time I really felt that my youth had escaped me. I went with my college and 38 is certainly not a typical college study abroad age.

I spent my two months in school sessions with 19-20 yr olds, in which the teachers were my age. I felt stunted in my growth as a person but also I felt the weight of my age as I saw my peers experiencing many of the “firsts” that I had — two decades prior. I watched these kids drink and smoke for the first time, try drugs in Ibiza, explore life in another country as a true exclamation of their independence. I felt the need to be the cool aunt to them. Guiding them through experiences, talking to them about buddy systems and watching each others drinks, how not to get sick from tobacco or alcohol, how to be alert. I couldn’t dissuade them, why would I? They are young and experiencing life for the first time albeit in a much more tame environment than I did in my teens.

But I couldn’t help but feel the chasm between us. I knew the age differences would be strange, after all my kid is only a few years younger than them. But seeing the world through their eyes was fascinating and well, depressing. The sun is rising on their careers and their lives. They have so many opportunities ahead of them to make good choices that land them on the good side of financial security. I, on the other hand, am almost 40 with a teenager, and starting from scratch in a stem field with which I have no experience.

I felt the weight of the years of bad choices haunting me like a shadow cast on my every move. I felt the weight of time on my body and my bones as I was winded and sore to the point of an exhaustion that I have never experienced. There were nights where my feet were so gnarled and twisted from walking that I couldn’t lay them flat. I looked at myself in the mirror— an old haggard woman clinging to the last leaves of my tree of youth.

I am the age that I thought was old when I was a kid. I am the age of my parents and their friends, people who looked like full on middle aged adults to my young eyes. I am the age that I get called ma’am. I am the age where falling is no longer funny and causes people to rush up to you with concern and pity. Any last remnants of feeling cool was lost amongst the new wave of a younger, cooler generation.

I am forever grateful at how nice they were to me, how helpful and accommodating they were. How interested they were with my stories and my life. I had a little group that stuck with me on adventures and followed along and it meant so much to me. I was able to pass the torch to them, but also to warn them that youth is fleeting and middle age hits hard and with lightning speed. Before you know it, one year turns to five, turns to twenty.

And I think that is the pivotal change from youth, the understanding of time. Its move from infinite and bountiful to finite and sparse. You stop being bored with how slow time moves and start to dread how fast it flies. you find yourself strangely more aware and hesitant to say things like “I can’t wait for x” or “it can wait”. Concepts of “I’ve got time” seem trite and meaningless, or worse, blatantly false.

I’m not stating that at 40 you should give up on life or that death is right around the corner, but the sun has set on the concept of still being in the young adult category. I’m currently starting to experience menopause, so not only is the concept of youth not lost on me, I’m surrounded by it. My hair is falling out, what I have is greying, my skin looks like it has seen some things. I now have more doctors than I do friends, and take enough medications to warrant a pill organizer. I regularly find myself searching for my glasses to read something and kick myself when out and about having forgot them—an inconvenience I didn’t have before recently. I’m going through a realization and transition that all of us who have the luxury of getting older get to experience.

Unfortunately while I am older, I am not yet financially stable, something that seems to have plagued the millennial generation. We were blamed for killing so many industries and failing our boomer parents, yet we never seemed to make up the lost ground from the financial crisis, housing crisis, multiple recessions, and a global pandemic. Now we and our younger counterparts have to fear AI taking our jobs, bringing our industries to shambles—that’s if dear leader doesn’t get to them first. I had hopes of joining USGS or BLM when I graduated. That was my dream, to work with nature and understanding our resources and how best to allot them. As the sun has faded on my youth, so too is it setting on the hopes of making it out of this new threat to society unscathed. I don’t know if my child will even have an economy to participate in when she starts to think about college.

I saw the other day that we have roughly 48 hours to correct a mass satellite outage before one of them crashes into space debris causing a snowball effect that would effectively render all future launches impossible. As someone whose degree requires working with satellite imagery and GPS, this does not look good. It would collapse society completely and irreparably for the foreseeable future.

We are teetering on a precipice of multiple potentially cataclysmic events that would forever shape the landscape humans have built. I am not prepared for it, there are few who are. We are watching America be pulled apart at the seams in more than one fashion. And I have to ask myself, with a future this bleak, who could want to live to 100 anyway?