Need to be more serious - getting old

I am very aware that I haven't published anything very serious recently. I do think of serious items for my blog and I have lots of drafts with just titles on them - all serious but not written. So I've decided to write something almost serious!

So here is a thought for you. It is quite possible that we or our children might live a significantly longer than say our grandparents did. In the near future we might well have therapies that not only halt or slow down ageing but could possibly even reverse ageing. This together with the ability to grow body parts that have been damaged might mean that we live to ages of 150, 200 or more.

I personally do not doubt this will happen but only highlight the science as this generates some very interesting questions.

If you were told tomorrow that you might be nowhere near your deathbed and that any ageing or damage could be reversed in the next ten years what would you change in your life?

Would you start a second career?

Go to university?

Would you want to travel and see more and more of the world?
I personally couldn’t do this – my experience is that after about four weeks I’ve had enough of sightseeing, I don’t think I’m much of a spectator.

What would you want to do differently?

Even if we are not presented with these questions in our lifetime, the process of considering them I found quite enlightening. I found myself considering if I was doing with my life all that I wanted or hoped to do. Had I subconsciously planned out my life to fit into the three score and ten years that we purportedly have been allotted? Interestingly, I think I had!

I don’t want to give you the idea that these questions arose out of some middle aged fear of death – it really didn’t. I’m very happy with my life to date and have few regrets – even some of the regrets were kind of fun at the time. No, this chain of thought arose from a number of articles I’ve read recently that seem to indicate that living passed a hundred is a very serious possibility. Of course many issues are raised: over-population; economics; retirement; social effects of a youth that is a significant minority of the population; families; housing etcetera, etcetera. All are important issues but I think that would need a book ...

Well, there you have it, a sort of serious blog post that was not actually one of the titles in my draft folder. Oh well, maybe another day.