Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect
Efforts to slow ageing are taking wing
Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect::undefined
Who the hell wants to do that?
In good health obviously.
Me
Me
Me
Is this the sign up? I'm in
Who thinks that is even remotely desirable?
Average life expectancy is, what, 75 years? I’m 31, so rough estimate, I have 44 years left, and that’s not nearly enough time to conquer the galaxy
Your goals are both legal to aspire to, and possible.
That's life expectancy from birth. Once you've made it to your 30s it's probably more like 85
Average life expectancy in the US is ca 80, a few years above that in most of Europe, and highest in Japan, Macau, Hong Kong, at 84-85 years (this is across everyone - typically there's a 3-4 year spread between men and women, so e.g. Hong Kong is 83.2 for men and 87.9 for women)
After seeing my parents lose mobility as they age, I don't know why I'd want to live even longer with a broken body.
I work in hospice and see a variety of conditions. Some people in their 60's with significant mobility issues that are chronically exhausted, but then there's the patients in their 90's who just recently started cutting back on social events and activities due to injury/illness.
Seeing these differences was why I started roller skating (again) at 49 and increased other activities to keep my ass moving and challenge my coordination and balance. I want to get everything I can out of this life.
You can't control how or even if you will arrive at old age but you can swing the odds dramatically in your favor by the choices you make when you are younger. Eat healthily, avoid hard drugs and tobacco, drink alcohol only in moderation and get plenty of excercise that consists of four categories: resistance (aerobic), VO2 max (anaerobic), strength and stability.
Healthy people with good genes that have relatives who are mentally fit up to thier last days. And people who think that all the money being dumpped into longevity by billionaires will increase the amount of time people in general can maintain a decent quality of life. And then me, who is curious about how the world changes over long periods of time and just wants to be there to see it. And maybe see a breakthrough that somehow keeps us alive even longer. Death is so final.
Soon it will be possible to cling to the broken shell of what you once were, a mere vessel for arthritis pain and bittersweet memories of a time when you used to be able to walk to the bathroom. Hooray!
The point isn't just extending a vegetative state but a livable state. If life expectancy expands to 85, then you live comfortably until 65 or so. That means you can more or less be physically active just fine.
Look up on Google images old grandpa bodybuilders. There are 70 year olds that are stronger than majority of young men.
If life expectancy shifts upwards to 120 presumably the age of comfort also expands to 100, or what have you. Then it's a slow deterioration until 120 where you're basically a zombie. Of course this age depends on genetic variables as well as your personal health decisions.
My great grandma died this year at 100 and she was only a zombie from like 95. Until that point she was walking by herself and giving speeches, hosting parties, etc. 96 she caught dengue fever and lived, but was weakened. Then she caught covid a year later and lived, but was further weakened.
The final nail in the coffin was her falling and breaking her hip in January of this year. She was dead about a month later.
I want to live as long as possible because I want to know what humans discover. What is the fundamental nature of reality? Will we find life in the cosmos? Will we explore other planets? What is the secret behind the brain and consciousness? What maths is left to be discovered? How will human society develop? Will we fall into authoritarian surveillance states or break free into a post-scarcity classless utopia?
So many curiosities sometimes I wish I was like a vampire, just floating around the world forever seeing what happens.
I want to live long enough to see society deteriorate into nothing more than a roaming band of cannibalistic motorcycle mutants.
Let’s see if we make life expectancy consistently go up again before we start talking about 120. I could just as easily see it fall to 60 before going up to 120.
I see the quality of life people have when they start approaching 100, and lemme tell you I wouldn't want an extra 20 years of that. Living in the US sucks for healthcare, you're gonna be miserable if you live that long.
...for the ultrarich.
Yeah the quality of my Healthcare is decreasing
But why would you want to
My dad died a few days ago. In the last months he told me more than one "I could use three lives to do all that I'm interested in".
I'm sorry for your loss
Sorry for your loss
Because a world in which people live to 80 tend to live well till 65, And a world in which people can live to 120 might open up the possibility of living well to 90.
Stretching out life expectancies tends to stretch out the length of quality time too.
Oh, I do look forward to living through the climate wars and AI ascendancy. Amazing prospect.
No shit. Depending on how things are going in the next 10-15, I might retire way early, do as much bucketlist type stuff as possible until the money runs out, and then check out early. I probably have enough to live for 5 or 10 years if I move somewhere with a lower cost of living, and better that than working until I'm 75 while the world burns.
Perhaps you are half joking or not, but I used to think like this in my younger years. I spent a heck of a lot of time in my 20s and 30s doing all the bucket list stuff. Bunch of sex, drugs, traveling, wild adventures, starting a company, etc. Having gone through that I can tell you that I am much happier now than I was when I thought all those bucket list items were going to make me happy. Sure, they felt good and some were amazing, but it wears off and before you know it you're chasing the next thing again.
A while ago I came across a nice, although a somewhat simplistic, equation that said that happiness equals the number of things you have divided by the number of things you want. I find that wanting less is a much easier route to increase that metric than getting more. Easier said than done though, but I found that silent meditation retreats do the trick for me.
My retirement plan is a bullet
My mantra.
Living that long would break the economy. I'm retired on a fixed income, and my planning was based on living no longer than age 90. After that, my savings will be depleted, I will live on social security alone. When I imagine young people having another 30 years to pay for social security per person, it's just broken. We would need to work until age 95 instead of 65. What would be the point?
Think we should moved towards post-scarcity first..
Man, if only we had some sort of military funding to divert to social programs...
We spend as much as the top 10 countries combined on defense.
Infrastructure - dangerously old Healthcare - non-existent Education- death spiral Social health - All measures worse every year
Don't know, we tried nothing and are out of ideas thanks to the vice grip of lobbies and bribes Eisehower himself warned about.
We would not.
The extra amount you need as life expectancy increases diminishes with each extra year. E.g. let's assume (for each of calculation only; you can just scale it up linearly) that you need 10k/year on top of social security to live off in retirement. If your savings is 100k, and you only get a 5% return every year, you'll run out after about 15 years. Hence a typical lifetime annuity bought at age 65 will be around that in the US because it matches up with current US life expectancy (it won't deviate much elsewhere).
So that's for living to roughly 80. Here's how it'll play out as you approach 120:
85: ~20% more 90: ~38% more 95: ~52% more 100: ~62% more 105: ~70% more 110: ~77% more 115: ~82% more 120: ~86% more
As you can see, the curve flattens out. It flattens out because you're getting closer and closer to have sufficient money that the returns can sustain you perpetually (at a 5% return, which is pretty conservative, at $200k, you can perpetually take out $10k, and no further increase in life expectancy will change that).
Now, that of course is not in any way an insignificant increase, but if we assume 40 working years, $100k is about $850/year additional investment + compounding investment return at 5%. $186k is around $1550/year compounding.
But here's the thing, if you work 10 years longer, you grow it disproportionately much, because you delay starting to take money out, and you need less, while you get the compounding investment return of ten more years, and that drives down the yearly savings you need to make back down to around $850/year.
So an increase of 40 years of life expectancy "just" requires 10 more years of work to fully fund it assuming the same payment in during the later years. But here's the thing: Most people have far higher salaries towards the end of their careers, even inflation-adjusted, so most people would be able to fund 40 more years with far less than 10 extra years of work.
(Note that if you already were on track for your pensions to last you to 90, if you were pre-retirement now, you'd "only" need about 35% extra savings to have enough until 120, because you'd get returns from a higher base, so the extra savings or extra years of work needed over what you managed would be even lower)
These all work on averages btw. - due to differences in health, this is where we really want insurance/state pensions rather than relying on individual contributions.
This doesn't mean there aren't problems to deal with. Especially if the life expectancy grows fast enough that it "outpaces" peoples ability to adjust. But it's thankfully not quite as bad as having to add another 30 years of work.
Most of our financial advice for retirement has a hidden assumption that there is a large number of working age people helping not just social security, but also the stock market. A standard retirement portfolio will have a mix of t-bonds, stock market holdings, and a few other sectors.
We'd be looking at a scenario where there are a lot of small investors (a few million dollars is small on this scale), but proportionately fewer workers making use of that investment.
A US Millennial working today is going to need to be a 401k millionaire to retire with something comparable to their current standard of living. Most are going to fall short of that before we even talk about adding on extra life span.
Economy is about to break soon anyway. Technology increasing to a point of killing a dangerous amount of jobs combined with a declining birth rate...
We're gonna have to do something in the next couple decades. There's really no other option unless the elites want chaos.. and they don't.
Also, the point would be that you live longer. I know a lot of people hate their jobs but not everyone does. I wouldn't mind getting another 30 years.
I think things are gonna get really ugly in the next twenty years.
We're nearing a point where artificial intelligence can replace a lot of white collar and logistical jobs, which would skyrocket unemployment rates and lead to widespread riots.
Don't get me started on what a leftist pipe dream universal basic income is. The guaranteed income UBI would give would either bankrupt our economy or be such a pittance that nobody could live off of it
I did number crunching on how much it would cost to pay every UK adult a guaranteed basic income that could theoretically pay for rent in most cities outside of London, assuming £800 pcm and 50,000,000 adults. That would cost £480,000,000,000 a year, or almost 2.5 times our entire welfare budget, of which about £100b alone goes into pensions.
And before you suggest automation and wealth taxes would pay for UBI... good luck with that. We can't even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes right at this moment.
Given how much politicians serve the rich, I think they'd sooner sic the military on protesters than actually cave in to the demands of the masses, especially when armed drones could do a lot of the gruntwork. The wealthy don't care if you're destitute, starving and living on the streets.
Things will need to change like a guaranteed basic income. We've been moving towards this eventuality for the last 5 decades or so.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don't think working till very late age is a bad thing. I don't expect to be sitting on my ass whole day long by the time I get to retirement age. What I do think is a bad thing is if by that time I am financially struggling to get by.
The problem is we're not fixing the economy at the other end. People work later because they're healthier, and that could be good.. but that means more people to do the same amount of work, increasing unemployment.
Until we stop demonising non-work and that's going to be hell for those stuck on it. Get some level of basic income so it's a valid choice. Meanwhile in the UK our govermnent is appealing to the boomers by announcing increased punishment of the unemployed.. We're a long way from fixing the issues.
Well I, for one, would like to live for as long as I want. I understand the sentiment here, though a little depressing, is against that concept. I understand people's reticence toward extending a painful life, particularly if that comes with strings attached. Life extension would need to be paired with a basic income and the rich will need to foot the bill.
I think we can all agree that George R R Martin should be put on this regimen immediately. We're going to need 16 or more years for this dude to finish the series.
I too want to see the completion of George's masterpiece,
Elden Ring.
Just because you'd live long enough, doesn't mean he would
Wild Cards?
How are we supposed to afford paying pensions that long if people retire before 70?
By properly taxing companies and rich individuals? Besides, those leaving to 120 would most likely be among the richest of us. Do they really need a pension at all?
That's just not happening.
Sorry, but if one can dream of properly taxing companies and rich individuals, there's plenty of other shit to fix with that money first.
Making living until 120 sustainable is not on the list, or very, very low on it.
Should have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.
By fully funding them. The return from a lifetime annuity bought at 65 is just marginally higher than a reasonable expected safe return from the same investment. (A lifetime annuity pays out on the basis that the provider needs to guarantee an income until you die, so if it returns so much that it eats too much into the capital, it'll be unprofitable for the provider). At the margins, the expected remaining life years of someone at 65 in a developed country is long enough that you can't safely offer that much more without eating away too much at the capital too quickly.
I'm not interested to 70 let alone 120. What a nightmare.
Aw c'mon! Just think, at ninety you could be hiking the Appalachian trail with a Camelbak tactical colostomy bag and a keen sense of wonder
Shit, I didn't want to hit 12 much less 120, and now I'm in my 40s. If some jerkass figures out life extension even for the poor, I'm gonna give that a hard pass. Just because I've chosen not to kill myself doesn't mean I have to drag it out one day longer than necessary.
God damn it LET ME LIVE FOREVER LET ME LIVE FOREVER LET ME LIVE FOREVER I'm sick of lying in bed every night scared of the nothingness of death
Immortality really just means that the odds of you dying by accident becomes 100%.
Not if I live in a geodesic dome sealed off from outside harms until the heat death of the universe, and hopefully by then we'll have warmed up the universe so I can continue with immortality
I'd say the probability approaches 1 but we can't know for sure that it actually reaches 1
I'm with you bud :/
Man imagine how fucking boring it'd be after only a few hundred years.
Everything ends, and if it didn't the thing in question would lose all value.
You sit awake scared of the nothingness of death, do you ever contemplate the nothingness before life? You are what the universe is doing in the here and now, like the crest of a wave in the ocean. The oceans waves, while the universe 'peoples'.
I will never get this attitude. If you were born in the 1800s would you call today boring? There is just so much to experience and we always have new things being invented. If I had infinite time I would still never run out of things I want to do.
That talk that "death is what makes life worth living" feels like a coping mechanism people invented to make peace with mortality. Everything that makes life worth living only happens while we are alive. The only thing that makes long lives so tragic is death itself.
Have a look at the seventh jhana. Maybe it'll help.
seventh Jhāna, defined as infinite nothingness
😨😨😨😨
Just in time for the world to suck
Even longer time to make the rich richer woohoooo!!!!!
Yeah, do we really want Trump to make it to 80, let alone 120?
I'm not thrilled with him making it to tomorrow
Getting Altered Carbon vibes here
*If you're rich
I think all the proposed medication to slow aging is cheap. Although I can unfortunately imagine some horrible world where the prices go up just because people want it and the patent stops other companies making it. (Can we just like not have patents last longer than 5 years)
No thanks. There better be a global acceptance of physician assisted suicide simultaneously.
Maybe in some ultra rich country, certainly not in the declining West though.
Its a subscription service
Shoot me.😑
More bad news
Meanwhile retirement funding is smaller and smaller. Imagine being retired longer than not
Funding getting smaller, retirement age getting higher. Governments want to milk every working year out of its citizens. Longer, healthier life should benefit the people, not the governments.
I think that is capitalism. Capitalism has been trying to shut down government as they would be the facility to have the power to tax the rich. Now if only it could be used appropriately what with all the legal system strangling everything all to reward the rich.
So you're saying to dine on billionaires before that happens? 😏
By then it'll be quintiillionaires and everyone will be a billionaire
I think the term is deathist, people believing that death is inevitable so they come up with lots of clever schemes to justify not wanting to live longer.
Ageing is just the body wearing down over time, with regular maintenance we can be healthy for however long we like to. Or until that proverbial piano drops on us.
I think it's fantastic, ageing is the biggest risk in Alzheimer's, in Cancer, in Dementia, Cardiovascular and lots of others... and who doesn't want to have a youthful healthy body?
Check out sens.org if you're interested in where science is today and what should be done tomorrow, but the first real treatments are probably around the corner already (like senolytics) so it's quite exciting too IMO!
You're making it seem like everybody wants to get that old, and it's a no brainer. Well, it isn't. I don't want to live forever. Life is perfectly fine the way it is, and maybe you're just making things worse with your fear of nature.
Must be nice to be rich.
I gave up on it when it turned out one of the figureheads of anti-aging researched ended up being a huge creep and everyone involved rushed to defend them. 💀 It's like, nah if these are the kinds of people who are going to be prevalent in a post-death world, i'd rather die.
That's not even accounting for those doing eugenics pseudoscience injecting baby penises into their faces thinking it will make them live forever. No thank you. It's a good thing that shit has a zero% chance of working and has a not-zero% chance of doing the opposite.
Imaginable as possible? Ok, maybe.
Imaginable as tolerable? Please God no.
You're assuming humanity is going to survive the next 30-50 years. Unless we do some major course corrections right the fuck now (and that's not looking likely at all because most of it has to do with the rich and powerful who will never change), climate change and/or our own hatred of each other is going to make us extinct or at least endangered and very unhealthy.
Man, the replies here really prove how much of a cult deathism really is.
I've seen both of my grandfathers become shadows of who they were due to alzheimers and I really hope I don't live long enough for that to happen to me. Fate worse than death, I think that's reasonable
Living to 120 would be great if that comes from getting four more decades of what my patents and grandparents were in their 60s and 70s: fine day-to-day, but maybe they needed a scooter to do a full day at Disney closer to the end. Not as young as they used to be, but still basically able to do everything they used to, just maybe a bit slower.
Living to 120 would be terrible if you get an extra 40 years in a memory care unit.
Well they are lead to believe that a life of eating Big Macs is a normal diet and dying with diabetes at 70 is absolutely the normal human condition.
Pro tip: whole food plant based diet.