Booze,sex,and exercise gets you there :)
Interesting info about vitamins
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/living-to-90-and-beyond-60-minutes/
Booze,sex,and exercise gets you there :)
Interesting info about vitamins
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/living-to-90-and-beyond-60-minutes/
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OTOH, I know a fair few people who are in their 90s and cruising along just fine. One of them owns a business, travels the world and is more active than most of the folks around here. In our generation (boomers), we can expect a growing percentage of us to survive and be healthy right up to 100.
Soooo - If I am 65 today, by the time I am 70 I could go back to school, get a PhD, marry a 30 year old woman and have two children. From 70 to 90, enjoy a 20 year career, raise the kids and put them into college, and at 90 retire once again to Boquete, having a full ten years to travel, enjoy the grandkids and float around the Caribbean in my new yacht with my now 60 year old wife.
So what are your plans?
Twenty or thirty years is a looong time to sit around playing golf and watching Fox News.
Not sure I`d like to live past 90....but as the old man told the newspaper reporter asking him about age...he was 98...reporter said :" I never want to become 98"...old man said :"Its because you aren't 97 yet"..living past 90, I think you`d run out of money...unless very wealthy....myself I think Il`l become 83...as its much in the genes...and taking my closest relatives ,their ages at death , adding up, dividing by their number , avg is 83...wine everyday ,yes...think it helps , so does a glass of rum.
Turns out this Roman philosopher pretty well nailed it 2000 years ago. What is really amazing is that their lives then were pretty much like ours are today.
The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long
by Maria Popova
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and thatpresence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.
Despite a steadily swelling human life expectancy, these concerns seem more urgent than ever — and yet they are hardly unique to our age. In fact, they go as far back as the record of human experience and endeavor. It is unsurprising, then, that the best treatment of the subject is also among the oldest: Roman philosopher Seneca’s spectacular 2,000-year-old treatise On the Shortness of Life (public library) — a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice.
Seneca writes:
Illustration for 'Alice in Wonderland' by Lisbeth Zwerger. Click image for more.
Millennia before the now-tired adage that “time is money,” Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it is arguably our most precious and least renewable one:
To those who so squander their time, he offers an unambiguous admonition:
Nineteen centuries later, Bertrand Russell, another of humanity’s greatest minds, lamented rhetorically, “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no... But even Seneca, writing in the first century, saw busyness — that dual demon of distraction and preoccupation — as an addiction that stands in the way of mastering the art of living:
In our habitual compulsion to ensure that the next moment contains what this one lacks, Seneca suggests, we manage to become, as another wise man put it, “accomplished fugitives from ourselves.” Seneca writes:
Seneca is particularly skeptical of the double-edged sword of achievement and ambition — something David Foster Wallace would later eloquently censure — which causes us to steep in our cesspool of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and clinging:
Illustration by Gus Gordon from 'Herman and Rosie.' Click image for more.
This, Seneca cautions, is tenfold more toxic for the soul when one is working for the man, as it were, and toiling away toward goals laid out by another:
In one particularly prescient aside, Seneca makes a remark that crystallizes what is really at stake when a person asks, not to mention demands, another’s time — an admonition that applies with poignant precision to the modern malady of incessant meeting requests and the rather violating barrage of People Wanting Things:
He suggests that protecting our time is essential self-care, and the opposite a dangerous form of self-neglect:
Illustration by Alessandro Sanna from 'The River.' Click image for more.
He captures what a perilous form of self-hypnosis our trance of busyness is:
But even “more idiotic,” to use his unambiguous language, than keeping ourselves busy is indulging the vice of procrastination — not the productivity-related kind, but the existential kind, that limiting longing for certainty and guarantees, which causes us to obsessively plan and chronically put off pursuing our greatest aspirations and living our greatest truths on the pretext that the future will somehow provide a more favorable backdrop:
Seneca reframes this with an apt metaphor:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own occupation, Seneca points to the study of philosophy as the only worthwhile occupation of the mind and spirit — an invaluable teacher that helps us learn how to inhabit our own selves fully in this “brief and transient spell” of existence and expands our short lives sideways, so that we may live wide rather than long. He writes:
One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince. Click image for more.
Perhaps most poignantly, however, Seneca suggests that philosophy offers a kind of spiritual reparenting to those of us who didn’t win the lottery of existence and didn’t benefit from the kind of nurturing, sound, fully present parenting that is so essential to the cultivation of inner wholeness:
On the Shortness of Life is a sublime read in its pithy totality. Complement it with some Montaigne’s timeless lessons on the art of living and Alan Watts on how to live with presence.
Thanks, Liz
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Could you give us the short version? I don't have time to read all that.
You're kidding, right? Like a summary of War and Peace is the same thing as reading War and Peace? If you have no interest in learning, or just don't have time to broaden your knowledge, just admit it. Don't imply that Mark did anything wrong. Geez!!
Yes, I was kidding. Geez!!
I enjoyed the edification provided by the 60 Minutes telecast; however, I'm daunted by the realization that I'm beginning to suffer from CRS syndrome.
Oh, woe,
wryawry
Thank you Nancy, the details of the study are here http://www.mind.uci.edu/research/90plus-study/