I'd rather die before I become a decrepit old man. What you explained isn't living, it's merely existing.

Quote from KennEH!

I'd rather die before I become a decrepit old man. What you explained isn't living, it's merely existing.

hmm i agree i'd rather go out with a bang doing something i love *maybe bungee jumping 😀 * and die at like 67 than live to 97 just to sit in a house all day doing nothing.

"Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived."- Dalai lama

I think that what happens a lot of the time is that people get into a certain pattern of living, through circumstance and/or necessity, and then they forget that life can be different than it has been for the last 20 or whatever years. The longer you're in a situation, the easier it is to just accept that "this is the way things are" and the harder it is to figure out how to make a change even if you really want to do so.

I have some sympathy for that, as I have a tendency to let things keep going the way they are until something forces a change (i.e. staying in a job I hate until something forces me to leave) rather than making the change happen.

It's pretty common for people to focus so much on their kids that when their kids move out, or focus on their job so much that when they retire, they don't know what to do with themselves. They have no hobbies, and feel like they're "too old" to start something new. The kids or the job, that was their whole life, and when that's gone they're lost.

The world has changed a LOT over the last 50-60-70-80 years (hell, it's changed a lot over the last 20 years!!) and some people deal with changes better than others.

Also as people get older, their mental abilities often aren't the same, and they KNOW it and feel the loss - even if it's nothing near Alzheimer's or senility. At ~90 my grandma is very physically healthy and still totally mentally functional, but there's no way she can organize events etc. like she used to enjoy doing, and she really misses having the ability to do that kind of thing. 😔

Don't underestimate the physical challenges of growing older, either. The elderly are generally weaker, less coordinated, and have less balance, plus there are the accumulated aches & pains of however many years, plus much higher chances of getting injured than a younger person. My step-dad's father, who is in his early 90s, is still very mentally sharp but he has some physical issues & recently detached a tendon in his arm just from trying to catch a box that slipped while he was trying to move it - a younger person might have strained it or even partially torn it, but it wouldn't have detached like that. 🤢

So, yeah, there are a lot of different reasons (I've only named a few) that some old folks end up like that. 😐

"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Maybe they don't drink enough milk