Tuesday 7 December 2010

LONGER OR BETTER?


[I thought I’d continue with the aging (yes, Brits, I know I'm missing the letter e. handle it) theme this week. Seems apropos as I currently feel 100 years old]

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t read an article about scientists trying to pervert the ageing process. Okay, so it is certainly not worded in such a negative way.  On the contrary, it is usually heralded as a fantastic breakthrough in which they’ve made some poor unsuspecting mouse regenerate his liver four times over, or live until he was 50 in mouse years. Poor mice, they really pulled the short straw, didn't they?

The thing is I am not sure I would want to live longer. I suppose it would depend on if I could suspend the aging process at a certain age. Living forever at 35 would pretty damn amazing. Although, I’m afraid our scientific community has given up on stopping time, seems a bit above their pay grade. So basically we are facing the possibility – I’m thinking not in my lifetime, but perhaps in the King’s - of extending our lives by a significant amount. By how much is definitely unclear at this point. But I’m thinking that living an additional forty years will mean I’m just hideously old and I will probably have to spend thirty of those forty years carrying my stomach in a bag. I know, not pretty in the slightest. Once I reach a certain age, unless they can dramatically improve the quality of my life, I am certain I will just want a comfortable sofa to sit on, a bowl of ice cream and a pillow to fall face forward into, so that I can check out in style.

So in short, I’ve decided that I don’t want to live longer, just better. It seems like the wise and logical choice (oh, and if someone could arrange this, I'd be eternally grateful). I bet if you asked most people if they could live to about fifty, but be millionaires, they would choose that over being impoverished and living until 120 years old. Cause then you’re just old and poor. Not a good combination. You see how black and white I am. No shades of gray in this game.

Our obsession with living longer just seems a bit greedy really - not surprising for the human race. Not to mention against the natural grain. One lifetime is not enough, we want double the time on earth to screw things up and fall out with our family members. Oh god, think of the double dose of drama most people could carry out!

Don’t get me wrong, I want to live as long as possible, in a natural way. But perverting the natural scheme of things just sounds like a bad science fiction film, and an environmental nightmare. Think of all those extra bodies wandering around…old bodies needing medical attention! The ironic thing is, I think if we spent more time trying to live better and enjoy our lives more, then the notion of living longer would not be such a fixation. Seriously, how many people do you know that truly enjoy their lives to the utmost? The ones that take stock of everything they have every single day and eat that ice cream sundae despite the calories, while they phone their mother and tell her that they love her cause it might just be the last chance they do. I certainly don’t. I do my best, but I think if I spent too much time thinking this could be my last day I wouldn’t leave the house.

Then again, an ice cream sundae for breakfast may just start my day off with a nice big sugar infused how the hell are ya?! Screw it, life is short, there is a pint of ice cream in the freezer with my name on it...and mom, I love you.
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